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The Story of England
2006-10-08 - 9:57 p.m.
September 19: We had breakfast at Starbucks then walked down to the bus stop and took the bus to the airport. We flew Air Canada, which is completely at the opposite end of the airport from the bus stop, but we had plenty of time. We flew from Seattle to Vancouver where we had to go through customs and security again. Our gate wasn't listed on our boarding pass so we followed signs for "international flights" in terminal D. We made it through security there and found a monitor displaying the fact that our flight was leaving from D43...except there was no such gate. We asked an employee for directions and he told us that gate D43 is actually in the C terminal (makes sense, right?)...which we couldn't get to without going through security again. Apparently our gate was in a little area quarantined for flights to England. Security for getting into the England section of the airport was much more stringent--I was thoroughly patted down before being allowed through. We had plenty of time while waiting for our flight here to have lunch in the terminal. September 20: The flight itself was uneventful and 9 or so hours later we touched down at Heathrow. We made it through customs and caught the Heathrow Express to Paddington Station where we transferred to another train that took us to Bath. At the train station in Bath we bought a map of the city and made our way on foot with our luggage to our B&B, Elgin Villa, on Marlborough Lane. The hostess, Anna, showed us to our room. We were exhausted by this time, but it was only late afternoon so we felt it was too early to go to bed just yet. Instead we took our map and wandered around the city for a few hours. We saw the Royal Crescent, a 30-home building built in the 1700's in the shape of a crescent overlooking the Royal Victoria Park, walked a little way down the River Avon, crossed the Pulteney Bridge, played a bit in a stone-path-in-the-grass maze in the Beazer Gardens, and then made our way back through the city to our B&B, stopping to eat dinner at an Indian Restaurant along the way.
The Royal Crescent
September 21: We woke up fairly early this morning and went downstairs to have breakfast. At the table this morning was another couple from Oakland, CA. They gave us pointers on how to drive in England. Besides the obvious, driving on the left side of the road with the steering wheel on the right side of the car, there are other hazards. For starters, the line that divides your lane from the lane of oncoming traffic is not yellow, it's white just like all the other lines. It can make it a little difficult at first to tell which lanes are ok for you to drive in. Plus, lanes are often very narrow and there are often vehicles parked in them requiring you to drive in the lane of the oncoming traffic (and them to drive in yours) making things even more confusing! So pointer number one from the Californians: drive carefully. After breakfast we walked a couple of miles over to the rental car place to pick up our car. We expected something tiny and funny-looking, but instead we somehow got a free upgrade and ended up in a black convertible Saab. Nice! We took off on our way out of the city and Lolo did a great job driving. A few bumps into the curb on the left, but overall not bad. I quickly discovered, though, that navigating in England isn't as easy at it seems either. For starters: street signs--where are they? Never actually on a sign post where you can see them. Sometimes they are plastered on the walls of buildings on street corners and often they aren't there at all. And secondly: maps! The maps I was working from enjoyed listing the names of streets I wanted to be on but not labeling streets I didn't want to be on, so if I missed a street I was looking for (which probably didn't have a street sign anyway) I would never be able to find myself on the map again. And finally, the average length of a street before it changes names: two blocks. Thankfully, Lolo was very patient with me.
We took off with the top down towards Avebury and the stone circles there. This is similar to Stonehenge but the boulders are much less uniform and much more spread out. That's as far as we ever drove with the top down on our convertible. After that the weather never really cooperated enough that we wanted to put it down, plus the wind just put dirt in my eyes anyway. We stopped in the town of Marlborough for a lunch of sandwiches at the Armadillo Cafe. The girl behind the counter there was from Alabama and she said it was nice to hear a familiar accent. Next we went to Salisbury to see the Salisbury Cathedral. This cathedral, built around 800 years ago has the tallest spire in Britain. It's a very beautiful cathedral where we also saw an original copy of the Magna Carta. We drove by Stonehenge on the way back to Bath but the gates were already closed for the night. It's very close to the road, though, so we pulled over on a little side street and took pictures of Stonehenge over the chainlink fence. It was too late for restaurants to be open by the time we got back to Bath so we stopped by a Sainsbury's supermarket to pick up a few things to munch on back in our room. We learned that you can't buy a big bag of chips in England. No, you buy a big bag that has a bunch of little bags inside--packets of crisps. I also bought a bottle of "squash," thinking after reading the label that it was just fruit juice. After tasting it prompted me to read the label more carefully, I discovered that squash is actually fruit juice concentrate that must be diluted four to one!
Stones of Avebury
The west end of the Salisbury Cathedral
Taking pictures of Stonehenge over the fence
September 22: Today we had breakfast with a couple from Kent, WA, then got in the car and drove to Portsmouth. There's an historic dockyard in Portsmouth where they have several old ships on display. One of them is the first metal-hulled ship in history, the HMS Warrior. And another--our purpose for visiting Portsmouth--is the HMS Victory, the ship captained by Lord Horatio Nelson during the Battle of Trafalgar. We bought tickets to go on a tour of the Victory, but it happened to be a big field trip day and we had to wait several hours until our tour time. So we went to a restaurant and were introduced to English "traditional" fish and chips. They like to deep fry the whole fish--skin, bones, and all. I wasn't impressed. I was also introduced to "brown sauce" here. We saw it all over England but never quite figured out what we were meant to put it on. It consisted of vinegar, molasses, dates, and some other stuff...and I have to say it didn't do much for me either. By the time we finished lunch it was fairly well pouring outside. We browsed through some gift shops until it was time for our tour. The tour of the Victory was led by a man from India who joined the Royal Naval when he was 13. The ship itself is no longer seaworthy and a lot of the insides were just plastic props (although they looked real) but it was still very interesting. The tourguide told lots of interesting stories and told us a lot of interesting facts. We also got to see the place where Lord Nelson actually died. After the tour the rain had stopped. We got in the car and drove to Corfe Castle. Unfortunately, traffic on the M4 caused us to get there after the gates were closed for the night, but this still may have been my favorite part of the trip. The town of Corfe Castle is tiny and just about the cutest thing ever. The castle itself is in ruins, blown up several hundred years ago. There's a big hill near the castle that we climbed to the top of so we could look down over the town and the castle and the surrounding country side. The sun was setting and the sky was still heavy with tired out rain clouds. It was absolutely gorgeous. Having learned our lesson from the night before about getting to Bath after all the restaurants had closed, we decided to have dinner right there in Corfe Castle. We went to a pub called The Greyhound ("the most photographed pub in England"). I had a steak baguette with chili jam. I quite enjoyed that chili jam. We drove back to Bath that night through dark, windy, narrow roads, completely exhausted by the time we got there.
The HMS Victory
Corfe Castle
September 23: Today we slept in and caught the late breakfast. We ate with a couple from Cambridge, the girl was originally from South Africa. Our hostess caught Lolo eyeing the Marmite (yeast extract you spread on toast), so we resolved to give it a try the next day. At 10am we caught the free 2-hour walking tour of Bath. Our group contained tourists from England, Canada, France, and Germany--very diverse. The tour started at the Bath Abbey, continued to the guild hall, up the Grand Parade to the Pulteney Bridge, across town to the Royal Crescent, back to the Circus, and ended at the Roman Baths. A very interesting tour. We had lunch at Sally Lunn's ("the oldest house in Bath!") where they serve Sally Lunn Buns (same recipe for 400 years), which we had been told earlier by a coworker that we just had to try. We also had to try the clotted cream. So we ordered Sally Lunn buns with strawberry jam, cinnamon, and clotted cream plus a pot of English tea. Clotted cream, it turns out, is just sweat butter. Everything here was good, but nothing spectacular. After lunch we headed back to the Roman Baths for the audio tour there. It was much longer than I expected, involving a fairly nice museum inside. After the baths we went for a short walk down Great Pulteney Street then back to our room briefly and then out to dinner at a Nepalese restaurant on the Pulteney Bridge. When we got there, we were told we needed reservations, so we ended up having dinner at an Italian restaurant istead. Good food, bad service.
Jane Austen enthusiasts in costume outside Bath Abbey
The Roman Baths in Bath
September 24: Nature day. First, though, breakfast. All by ourselves in the dining room this morning, we braved the Marmite spread on a piece of toast. Edible, but why? I'll stick to jam, thanks. Next we drove out to the Cheddar Gorge. Pretty, and probably impressive by English standards, but not overly impressive as gorges go. We didn't stop in the town of Cheddar because we had other things we wanted to see. We headed down the M5 to Dartmoor National Park. In the northern part of the park are a lot of fields and the roads are very narrow and lined with hedgerows. So narrow that often the branches from the hedges were scraping our car on both sides. The roads were small and often unmarked and my map wasn't very detailed so we may have gotten a little lost a few times. We found the trailhead to the Fingle Bridge and hiked along the River Teign for a little way, but we never came to the bridge. Not knowing how far away it actually was and the rain starting to come down fairly heavily we turned around before we got there. We looked for a castle and another stone circle, but after driving down tiny little roads between tall hedgerows and not being able to see out, we gave up on those and headed for the open moors, which, of course, were beautiful. We saw lots of free range cattle and sheep and stopped in the middle of a herd of wild ponies. We saw an ancient clapper bridge and drove across a bridge only slightly more than 7 feet wide. We stopped in a village called Widecombe-in-the-Moore where, at 5:45, there wasn't a single restaurant, pub, or cafe open to serve dinner (and wouldn't be until 7) but they had a beautiful church and graveyard there where we took pictures. Last thing we stopped on the moors to see was Hound Tor, a fairly large rock formation. We climbed to the top for a view all over Dartmoor. For dinner we went to a nearby town called Bovey-Tracey to a place called The Thatched Roof Inn where I had my first jacket potato. Turns out it's just a baked potato with stuff on it, but this one was pretty good.
Road through the hedgerows in Dartmoor
Hound Tor
September 25: The last morning in Bath we had breakfast with another American couple and then drove the car back to the rental place, and walked to the train station, stopping by the post office to mail postcards on the way. We rode the train from Bath to Paddingto Station in London where we bought our 7-day tube passes, called Oyster Cards, and took the tube to our hotel, which was handily only a block from the tube station. We checked in to our hotel, where I was referred to for the first time as "the ma'am." We got to our room and rested a while, then looked through the yellow pages for a launderette to do our laundry. We had to find one listed in the yellow pages that happened to be on a street that was also listed on our map so that we could find it. We finally managed to find one, took the tube and spent some time in the launderette reading our books and doing our laundry with the help of a very friendly launderette attendant. We dropped our clean clothes back at our room and then went out to dinner at an Indian restaurant on Tottenham Court Road, which was probably the best meal I had in England.
Paddington Station
September 26: This was our first full day in London and our most packed sight-seeing day. We had breakfast at Starbucks (just to see if they are the same in London as they are in Seattle--they are, other than slightly different pastry selections and the fact that we were the only customers there not in suits) and then took the tube down to the Jubilee Gardens and the London Eye. The London Eye is a giant ferris wheel, or viewing wheel, on the bank of the Thames, which is the largest viewing wheel in the world at the moment (although it won't have that honor for too much longer) and makes one revolution every 30 minutes. We walked up the Thames to the Westminster Bridge and crossed to the other side to see Big Ben and the outside of the Parliament Building. We crossed the street and went inside Westminster Abbey and took an audio tour. It was pretty amazing--totally packed with tombs and statues and memorials. I expected the tombs of the kings and queens and other royal people, but there were lots of other people there too. Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton are buried there, for example. And I didn't know about Poets' Corner, where famous authors (Shakespeare, Dickens, Kipling...), actors, (Olivier...) and composers (Handel...) are buried. This is also the place where coronations are performed. We saw the coronation throne and I was impressed by its unimpressiveness. It's just a big wooden arm chair, made in about 1300, and covered in carved graffiti from choir boys who were allowed to play in it during the 18th and 19th centuries. We had lunch in a nearby pub and then walked through St. James Park to Buckingham Palace and the Queens Gardens and the Victoria Memorial. We took lots of pictures here and then walked up the Mall past the Duke of York's Column, through the Horse Guards Parade, and into Trafalgar Square. I enjoyed Trafalgar square, busy but pretty. We went into the National Gallery, a free art museum, for the one remaining hour that it was open that evening. Wouldn't it be awesome to have a museum like that near home! By this time the sun was beginning to set and we thought it would be the perfect time to ride the London Eye. We walked back across the Golden Jubilee Bridge and joined the long, long queue to buy tickets to ride the Eye. By the time we made it through the queue, the sun had set. It was still a beautiful ride, but we couldn't take any pictures in the low light in a moving carriage, although we sure tried. We ate a picnic dinner on a park bench on the bank of the Thames then walked back to Trafalgar Square to see it at night before catching the tube back to our hotel.
The London Eye in front of the Parliament Building and Big Ben
St. James Park Lake and Buckingham Palace
Trafalgar Square
September 27: The next morning we got up and took the tube to Victoria Station where we got a takeaway breakfast and caught a train to the seaside city of Eastbourne. Unfortunately, at Victoria Station we had our misadventure. There was an incident involving an ATM machine that was out of cash, and Lolo's credit card was lost. By the way, does anybody know the British term for "lost and found?" I asked the man at the information desk where the lost and found was and he had no idea what I was talking about. Do they not use the term in England? Is there no such thing in England? Or was it just my heavy American accent that made me unintelligible? I don't know, but we never found the lost and found and Lolo's credit card was definitely lost. We took the train to Eastbourne where we spent our first bit of time there trying to cancel the credit card. But making international calls on a pay phone to a company that makes you listen to long menus and puts you on hold quickly depleted our supply of coins and we ended up leaving the task until later. We walked through the town to the pebbly Eastbourne beaches and put our hands in the surprisingly warm water of the English Channel. We walked west along the seafront until we got to the South Downs Way, a trail that led us through the grassy hills to Beachy Head. Beachy Head was amazing. Huge white cliffs and a little lighthouse that were absolutely gorgeous. Well worth the hike. We walked back into town where we had sandwiches at the first shop we came to, then back along the seafront to the train station and back to London. At Victoria Station we bought a takeaway dinner and took it on the tube to Hyde Park where we picnicked by the Serpentine Lake. It was starting to get late and we were tired from the day's hike, so we decided to just see one thing in Hyde Park before heading back to our hotel. I wanted to see Speaker's Corner, which I had often read about, but nothing was happening there and there was nothing to see. We went back to our hotel room and Lolo successfully cancelled his credit card--misadventure over.
Beachy Head
September 28: We decided to go see the Changing of the Guard ceremony at Buckingham Palace. We wanted to get a good view so we got a takeaway breakfast from a place called Pret a Manger and took it on the tube over to the steps of the Victoria Memorial as our guidebook suggested. This was a great spot for watching the guards and bands march in and out, but we couldn't see much of anything that happened inside the gates. My recommendation, if you're going to watch the changing of the guard and you're going to get there early, is get yourself a spot right along the fence on the left side of the gate. It seems like the most action was there. The Changing of the Guard ceremony as I understand it is as follow: The barracks are down the street to the south of the palace so first the fresh guard comes marching in from the left accompanied by their band. The guards are actually guarding St. James Palace which is off to the north so next the weary guard comes marching in from the right accompanied by their band. They meet up inside the palace gates of Buckingham Palace and do a lot of yelling and waving their guns about. Then the fresh guard marches out to get on with the guarding at St. James Palace. Meanwhile the weary guard and the spectators are serenaded by a few choice selections from the weary guards' band. That done, the weary guard and their band march out to the left, followed by the fresh guard's band that marches out to the right. Phew! (Ok, the band played four songs in the middle of this whole procedure. Bonus points if you can guess what they are. Think real hard...it's in a British palace, very ceremonial and dignified... Give up? The answers: "Dance with Me" by Orleans, "Fernando" by ABBA, "Jesus Christ, Superstar," and "Don't Cry for Me Argentina.") After the ceremony, we walked down the Mall to Leicester Square where I bought tickets at the TKTS half-price tickets booth to that night's performance of Les Mis�rables. Then we caught the tube over to the Tower of London where we were taken on a tour by one of the Yeoman Warders. Coming from a place where things 150 years old are ancient history, it's pretty amazing to go through a place that has nearly 1000 years of history and legend. After going on the tour we were free to explore as we pleased. The White Tower now houses a museum with an interesting display of armory. Also in the Tower of London is the Jewel House where the Crown Jewels are currently being held. We got to see those and I was more impressed by those than I thought I'd be. We grabbed sandwiches from a nearby shop and ate dinner in a little city park before heading back to our hotel room to change clothes. We went and saw Les Mis�rables at the Queen's Theatre on Shaftbury Avenue in the West End. I enjoyed this more than I expected to. I was especially impressed by the guy who played Jean Valjean, John Owen-Jones, and especially by his rendition of "Bring Him Home," during which his character prays to God on the eve of battle to let his adopted daughter's love survive the battle. (I discovered a recording of him singing this song is available here.)
Changing of the Guard
The White Tower in the Tower of London
September 29: We had breakfast this morning at an Italian coffee shop called Caf� Nero and then walked to the British Museum, a free museum of history. Again--to have a museum like this near my home! Much to be impressed by in the British Museum, but my favorite parts were the Great Court with its interesting architecture and totally cool ceiling, the Egypt Room filled with artifacts from Ancient Egypt--thousands of years old and not behind glass but right there for you to touch if you dare to reach out your hand--and finally, the Reading Room. Ever since watching Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" as a kid and seeing the Beast's magnificent library, I've dreamed of having a library like that. The British Museum's Reading Room is like the Beast's library. Of the parts of the museum we saw, these were my favorites, but we by far didn't see the entire museum. We left and ate lunch at a restaurant called Eat. I tried the hot minty lamb pie, which actually wasn't too bad. We took the tube over to St. Paul's Cathedral, which is where Prince Charles and Princess Di were married, where the song "Feed the Birds" takes place in Mary Poppins, and where Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson was buried. We climbed the stairs to the Whispering Gallery at the base of the inner dome with a view inside the cathedral, then to the Stone Gallery at the base of the outer dome with a view overlooking the city, and finally up to the Golden Gallery outside on the top of the outer dome where we stayed until rain drove us in. We spent a little time in Paternoster Square and then took the tube to Leicester Square where, in another study of comparative culture, we bought tickets to see the movie "Children of Men" at the Odeon theater there. There were still about 45 minutes until showtime, though, so we went bookshopping at some used book shops on Charing Cross Road (because I had read 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff and wanted to see the shop), where I bought a copy of Victor Hugo's Les Mis�rables, which I haven't quite finsihed--I still have about 1150 pages to go. Back to the theater, it only had one very large screen but you could choose to buy tickets in any of three differently priced areas. There was assigned seating in leopard-print seats. The movie was set partially in London and it was interesting to see things in the movie that we had just seen in real life. By the way, the movie is nothing like the book. The names are the same, but the story is completely different. Anyway, after the movie we had dinner at a restaurant on Charing Cross Road called Garfunkel's and then headed back to our hotel.
The amazing Reading Room in the British Museum
West entrance of St. Paul's Cathedral
September 30: We got up early, checked out of our hotel and took the tube to Paddington Station. Last ride on the tube, we certainly got our money's worth out of those Oyster Cards. At Paddington Station we caught the Heathrow Express to Heathrow. We ate breakfast in the terminal then spent our remaining pounds at the Borders book store there. The plane took us to Vancouver where it took us quite some time to get through customs--at least it felt that way since we were tired, and then we caught one more plane to Seattle, the bus to downtown, a walk home, and bed.
One Good Thing: I finished typing up this story!
Song of the Day: Bring Him Home - John Owen-Jones
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