Living In London Suddenly

Royce: How did we come to be living in London so suddenly?

Over the years we have kept in contact with people we used to work with at NEPCO. NEPCO was the company that we both went to work for right out of college and they were responsible for our residing in several southern US states. During the Enron bankruptcy, NEPCO was sold by Enron to SNC-Lavalin (there is no connection besides coincidence that I worked for SNC - Sierra Nevada Construction - in Reno, NV), a huge Canadian engineering and construction firm. The NEPCO division was renamed SNCL Thermal and continues to be involved with the development, design, finance, procurement, construction, and operation of power plant projects worldwide.

During the final stages of getting ready to depart on this trip I was contacted by SNCL Thermal to see if I was interested in returning to work for them. I let them know I was interested in overseas work and asked that they contact me if there was a good slot open. As we were leaving Scandinavia in early August they contacted me again with a potential opportunity in London that would last 2 months. I again told them that I was interested and to contact me when they had something firm. A few weeks passed and we were getting geared up for 3 weeks of backpacking trips in the Alps when they contacted me with the firm offer. I quickly accepted and we headed for Paris to do some shopping for work clothes. Cancelling the backpacking was probably a good thing because the whole region was devastated by flooding caused by the heaviest rain in 100 years.

We are now living in southern London in a suburb called Croydon. Croydon is really not all that interesting itself, but it is in London and it gives good access to plenty of things to do. It easy to connect to all points in Europe fairly cheap and we plan on not only seeing England as much as possible, but maybe going to Chamonix, France and Iceland.

The project I am working on is the development of a proposal for a 1000 Megawatt gas turbine power plant located in Plymouth, England, about 4 hours SW of London. The project developer has requested proposals from design/construction firms to provide them with a turnkey power plant on their site. My job, as the only team member in England, is to liase with consultants and contractors to develop a group of qualified subcontractors who will, in turn, provide us with proposals to complete the various "packages" of contruction. My other duties involve some company marketing, identifying cultural issues, and providing in country coordination between our design group in Seattle and the contractors that I have identified. It is interesting to be involved with a project of this size at such an early stage. My actual office is borrowed space in a SNC Lavalin office that specializes in the design of off-shore oil and gas facilities.

The company has been kind enough to put us in a good apartment in downtown Croydon. It is a quick walk to work, shopping and the train station. We make good use of the train system and rarely use taxis to get around. The ride into downtown London takes about 15 minutes and is quite painless. Once in downtown, we have access to the whole city on the double decker buses and the London Underground system. Our only car trip was when I needed to go to Plymouth to do a jobsite investigation. Driving in Plymouth is one thing - with all the narrow roads and on the left side, but London is terrible. The signage is confusing and the streets are next to impossible to figure out.

April is not currently working, but she is keeping very busy taking care of loose ends for the trip, catalouging our pictures, working on this blog, making my going back to work painless in terms of food and clothing, and running errands to try and catch us up before we leave again. She has also taken up knitting again and is learning Italian. I suppose she may be more busy than me.

From here we intend to go to the Egypt, Jordan and Israel for 3-4 weeks before meeting Tyler and Nicki and Ben in Milan, Italy for Thanksgiving and a tour of Northern Italy and Southern France. After that is still very much up in the air. Our original plan was to get an apartment in Chamonix, France for the ski season, but now SNC Lavalin is considering sending us to Konin, Poland on the construction of a power plant. Could be interesting too. Living in London has been a great experience, but we are really both looking forward to moving on to other places where the "travel" is a little bit more challeging. I expect we will be here until the end of October.


Bomb bus passing by my office. I'm on the second floor from the top, 3 windows to the right