Not to Crowle yet

We set out this morning to go to Crowle. We are fated not to go to Crowle as yet.
Both of us woke up early - around six - and we finished up getting up not much later. It takes virtually three hours to get ourselves sorted out in the morning when we’re tenting. Three different locations in two tents in four days. Certainly the new tent allowed us to stand upright - a great joy for homo erectus - and after we’d had tea, we sat inside and read - or blogged, as in my case.
The site was quieter than the one the night before, but there was still an ongoing motor cavalcade hum going on in our left ears.
Anyway, we began heading towards Crowle, and found that the Sat Nav seemed to be taking us in a rather long way round route, which required us to go towards Birmingham, virtually, before we went south again. The day wasn’t that exciting in terms of the weather, and we read on one of the electronic road signs that there was some blockage with long queues on the road we were about to take, and I was feeling too tired to cope with dragging through snail-pace traffic - and I think Celia was too.
In the end, since we were heading towards Lichfield (where we were booked in for tonight and tomorrow in a hotel) anyway, we decided to have a day that didn’t consist of driving. Instead we went straight onto Lichfield, found a parking building, and wandered around the town.
The weather gradually improved, and we checked out the usual places: charity shops, secondhand bookshops, and so on, and visited the Samuel Johnson museum. Had a pub lunch, and headed on towards the Cathedral. (Which had its spire toppled by the Roundheads).
The Cathedral entrance is just extraordinary: dozens of statues of saints and kings, many of them lifesize, fitted into the face of the building. And there are dozens more inside. At first the place struck me as being overly militaristic in its trappings, with a lot of memorials dedicated to people who died in various wars, but it improved as we went on. And we discovered that Bishop Selwyn has his resting place there. He has a great deal to do with New Zealand, so that was a bonus. As was meeting a New Zealander at the door - he was welcoming people as they came in. Both Celia and I felt we knew him, once he started talking about himself a bit, but he didn’t seem to know us. I knew his mother, however: she’s the Anglican minister in Stewart Island.
(It’s been a strange thing that we haven’t met anyone we know from New Zealand since we’ve been here: usually NZeders are thick on the ground.)
The stained-glass window around the main altar is dazzling, full of wonderful colours. Much of it was rescued from a convent on the Continent, bought for £200 and sold to the cathedral for the same amount. The glass was then restored into its new location.
Finally we found our hotel where I’m blogging and Celia’s snoozing. She was tired.