Flying Down to Rio. Nearly.

Another week, another conference. Having been in the past month to the International Palaeontological Congress in London, and Euro Evo Devo in Paris, I’m off – in a couple of hours – to the International  Congress of Vertebrate Morphology in Punta Del Este, Uruguay, whose pleasing logo is an armadillo.

 I believe the weather will be chilly – South America is experiencing its coldest winter in ages, a matter that’s exercising the climate-change denializers, so I shall pack a sweater. My journey will be somewhat convoluted: I shall start from my local halt, Roughton Road station (shown here at its rush-hour peak – it’s normally a lot quieter than this) and travel via Norwich, London, Sao Paulo and Montivideo. It’s one of those journeys for which a direct through train would have been nice, but simply to have no maintenance works or (reported) hold-ups on the London-Norwich stretch on a Sunday is something for which one should be grateful. And I can go one better than Phileas Fogg. He didn’t have an iPad.