No matter what their age, daughters will always be their father’s little girls – thus the title The Innocents Abroad.
However, when you consider one of them wants to run around the Highlands with a kilt like a Scotsman or a Scotswoman of old, straight out of a Sir Walter Scott novel (like Waverly), and the other one wants to drink tea with Jane Austen in Cotswolds (and discuss all six novels at LENGTH) perhaps I’m not too far from the mark.
I will soon be taking my two little darlings to Europe! England first—the Cotswolds—to drink tea with Jane Austen. Emma will probably be the major topic of conversation with whom my older daughter most identifies with (and remarkably looks like in the modern take of Clueless).
Later, we will move to the Highlands, in Scotland, where my mother was born. There, we will spend time living in castles and running around the Highlands (literally, since my other daughter is one of these extreme sports enthusiasts who runs and bicycles these 100-mile marathon meets).
This will be followed by a ten-day stay in Paris (where I had a one-man art show long ago). I plan to show them all around Paris—particularly the Paris of the 20s and 30s, where Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, and all the rest of the “Lost Generation” hung out and wrote stories like The Sun Also Rises and Tender Is the Night and painted pictures like Guernica. You know the story—but maybe they don’t—which is where I come in.