It was my pleasure this summer to continue to meet people as the "traveling vegetarian". I was in NC for just four or five days in June. While U-Hauling things I had in storage in Connecticut, I introduced my friend helping me to some of the excellent vegetarian resources in Washington, D.C., including a fantastic all-vegetarian South Indian restaurant, Indian Delight, that makes the best dhosas (crepe-like and optionally filled with a spiced vegetable mix)! A day after that, I flew to San Francisco, met a vegetarian email friend, and dined twice at a magnificent gourmet vegan restaurant, Millenium, written up in that month's Vegetarian Times. I returned around 1 A.M. on a Friday and Saturday I was enroute to England!

I biked in the idyllic English countryside of Suffolk County. We were on tiny roads with almost no motorized traffic, and would cycle past huge fields of yellow and purple flowers (rapeseed and linseed), as well as red poppies. Every few miles we would come to another thousand- year-old village with a beautiful stone church and the uncanny silence of practically nobody around.

I had the pleasure to join the Ipswich Animal Rights group at one of their meetings, and was delighted to learn how much further vegetarianism and animal rights have made inroads in the U.K. compared to the U.S. As opposed to our 0.5% to 1%, Britain has a population that is about 3% vegetarian (having grown from about 150,000 at the end of World War II). Even in the countryside, people were familiar with the word "vegan". In smaller pubs, one can always find a vegetarian dish, though it may include a sauce or huge side of cheese.

London is a great city to visit, as I discovered during my last few days of the vacation. I don't recommend pizza (what I had was quite unremarkable), but, of course, London has a wealth of commonwealth cuisines, particularly Indian. It has an easy and seemingly safe subway system that encompasses quite a large area. (England in general has excellent public transportation.) One can often get air fares of around $500-600 RT to England, and I encourage people to visit. Though I found standard English fare at pubs to be very cheese-and-bread ("Ploughman's") oriented, a vegetarian will not have problems in England, and will be able to easily feast in London. I even saw signs for (but, regretfully, missed out on) an Ayurvedic Indian vegetarian restaurant!