May 23

Today was a travel day.  The original plan was to meet up with Uncle Wes and Jackie in High Wycombe for the evening before their wedding.  Even though Uncle Wes still didn't have his marriage visa, we still had our hotel booked in High Wycombe so we decided to go and be with the lonely bride.  We left at a decent hour in the morning and figured we would make it to High Wycombe at a decent hour.  What we didn't plan on was terrible traffic.  It took us more than twice as long to get there as we planned.

We had planned on stopping by Kettering on the way to see where Mom's maternal grandfather came from.

 It wasn't exactly on the way, but not too far out of the way.  We had been there once before about 24 or 25 years ago but didn't know where to find his home.  This time, I was able to turn on my laptop and open up a document I had saved to the hard drive showing the 1901 Kettering census.

 From there we could see that the Gibbs family lived at 217 Havelock street.  The handwriting was hard to read, but we were able to figure out the first several letters and that was enough for the GPS to figure out the rest!  So we put in the address and started the drive to his home.

He lived on a humble street of row houses.

 We found it easily and even found a convenient place to park.  From there we walked down to number 217.

 It was like all the other houses: quite small.

After looking around at the area we got back on the road to High Wycombe.  Once we finally arrived, we found our hotel, "The Abbey."

 From there we were able to look up Jackie's phone number and give her a call.  Then we made our way to her house where a friend of hers from South Sudan and her sister were already there.  They hadn't had supper yet so we were able to eat with them.

 While we were there, Uncle Wes called and we were able to talk to him back in the U.S.

After a nice evening,

we went back to our hotel for the night.