Sailing away

We went for a boat ride on the Lake of Thun today. We thought we’d have to pay part of the cost, but for some reason which we didn’t quite understand, the trip was free today only, via our Eurail pass. The boat took us to Interlaken, which I’d heard about from some source - can’t remember which - as being a special place, but it struck me as Switzerland’s equivalent of Queenstown, that is, all tourist shops, and lots of things to do if you’re an outdoors person. (There were several people paragliding when we arrived, for instance.) The buildings are a delight, however, and speak of a time when people paid big money to build in Interlaken.
In spite of my misgivings about Interlaken, the trip itself was lovely, the lake calm, the mountains a little misty but still reasonably well-defined, and the air warm. We sat outside on the boat for most of the trip. At the end of it, the ferry navigates its way down a narrow channel, with only a few metres to spare on either side.
Though we could have gone back on the boat, we decided to have a look around Interlaken for an hour or so, and get the train back to Spiez, and then the bus to Einigen. The train, of course, was covered by our Eurail pass anyway, so the trip only cost us the bus fare. (Though no one actually came to check our pass on the quarter hour trip from Interlaken to Spiez, so some people might well have got on for free!)
I didn’t mention yesterday that we had a mini crisis. By mistake I put my debit card (Eftpos, in other words) into a ticket machine at Spiez railway station, thinking it was a money machine. I tried to cancel the operation but no card appeared. Nothing worked, and suddenly we began to think we’d have to face the next week or two unable to get money. (We have quite a bit of cash with us, but we hadn’t got any Swiss francs before we arrived in Switzerland.)
In the end I went up to the ticket office, and explained the situation to the man behind the counter - who fortunately spoke good English. (The Swiss don’t seem to be quite as strong on the English as the Germans are, and some of them don't care!) He came down with a tool, opened the machine, pulled out the part that had the card in it, dug around at it, pried at it, worked on it - all to no avail. We stood there chatting, trying to feel confident that he was going to achieve something! Finally he went back upstairs, called the office in Bern, and they told him on the phone what to do. Voila! one returned debit card - and considerable relief.

Heidelberg

Heidelberg was lovely. Wonderful old houses and streets echoing with voices; huge churches in the middle of the residential area; bars and restaurants galore; wonderful wide river that turns out to be the Neckar and not the Rhein, as I’d thought! We must have given the Rhein the slip at some point in our trip south.
We were in the Aldstadt, or Old Town, and it’s obviously the tourist area. We walked right to the end of the Haupstrasse last night, and came to Bismarckplatz, a platz we’d remembered from our rather hectic bus ride a couple of days or so ago. It leads into the new town, but it was all rather dark, so we didn’t venture much further.
Tried out the strange taste of a Heidelberg schneeball (snowball) yesterday; it’s hard to describe exactly what it is: something between a sweet biscuit and a pastry coated with different flavours. A bit too sweet for our taste, but memorable (even more as we asked to sit down in the place where they were selling them - and have been making them for generations - and it cost us extra to do so!)
We didn’t stay up for last evening’s World Cup game. Couldn’t take any more disappointments on that front.
Missed out on our breakfast of one hot drink and one croissant this morning, because the place that provided it doesn’t open till eight, and we had to be away before that to catch the train. We tried to get the proprietor to give us the drink and croissant last night by way of recompense, but he wasn’t having it on. Not the most PR minded, this particular lot!
Anyway, today we’ve travelled from Heidelberg to Stuttgart in one 45 minute stretch, hung around at Stuttgart station for just under an hour and got on a train to Zurich, (another three hours) and then less than ten minutes after we got to Zurich we headed for Spiez, (another hour and a half) which is just near where we’re staying with one of the people (Darren Hight) who used to be at DCBC, our home church. He married a Swiss girl about 18 months ago, and now they’ve just had a baby daughter - she’s two weeks old. They’re living in a community that offers hospitality to different groups, Christian and non-Christian, and also has a small farm. We’re in the first floor of a chalet (some three hundred years old, but renovated) and have a view overlooking the Lake of Thun - with the Alps in the background. Celia said, If she’d known she was coming to Queenstown she wouldn’t have bothered, but she was kidding! The place is absolutely beautiful. Certainly it’s reminiscent of Queenstown, though the Alps are probably bigger still than the mountains there, but it’s also reminiscent of Dunedin and its harbour.
Since we’re catering for ourselves here, we walked down to the dairy/grocers - the only one in Einigen, the local village - and back again. Going down was fine, but the walk back was a bit of a mission: all uphill.
The photo is of the oldest church in Einigen; in fact, one of the oldest in Switzerland.

We watch the World Cup

Last night we had a donor kebap at a narrow shop around the corner from our hostel; the proprietor’s daughter (about five or six, maybe) was playing with her ‘pinguin’, after she‘d had a go at cracking some nuts by bashing them on the marble counter top.
We strolled down the Hauptstrasse, looking at the shops - it seems that German shops must stay open till all sorts of hours as a matter of course, but they’re closed on Sundays - and were just checking something out when Celia said, with some excitement, They’re playing the NZ national anthem. And they were. An ‘Irish’ pub had just begun showing the NZ v France quarter-final game on a huge screen. We bundled ourselves into the pub, found some space near the back with three friendly young Americans, and made ourselves at home. A female bartender kept coming around to get drinks for people, so that everyone could stay in place and not have to lose their spot.
The Americans had never seen rugby before and were surprised at the energy and brutality. Even the way one of the players is hoisted up in the air during a line-out gave them a thrill. It was a great game which NZ should have won: a couple of moments undermined their chances. One, when there was an ongoing ruck towards the try line by the NZeders, they lost the ball at the very last moment. And Dan Carter’s replacement missed a goal kick. Either of those would have kept them in the game.
Back at the hotel, the bed turned out to be fairly hard, but not impossible. (It still doesn’t beat our hardest hotel bed ever which was in Roxburgh.) Celia still has a cold, and needs to rest a lot, so we didn‘t get up till fairly late. Even then we were up long before the place downstairs where we were supposed to get our hot drink and croissant (the ‘breakfast’ part of our hotel bill). They finally opened about 11.00, so we had the coffee and croissant as a morning tea instead, having made ourselves breakfast in the hotel room.

Bits and pieces

We took the scenic route from Köln to Heidelberg, which meant we were travelling alongside the Rhein for a good deal of the time. And built along the Rhein are dozens of small towns, villages, and a few cities. Nearly every place had its own castle up on the hill above the town. Some of the them were more like fortresses, some had those delightful turrets that look as though they should belong in a fairytale illustration.
The more you travel around the more you wonder about all the people who live in these places, and what they do and how they all make a living. It’s strange how communities thrive in one place and not in another, how cities come into being in one place when another place never seems to grow. Just seeing the neverending crowds in the streets here is mindboggling. Where do they all come from? Do they all have homes somewhere? How did they come to be in this place at this time?
And as you travel along in the train you seen the endless building work that’s gone on: houses, factories, skyscrapers, railway lines by the million, train stations galore - and all the paraphernalia that goes with the presence of humans. We certainly make our mark on the earth.
And then there are the beggars. It’s very difficult to discern whether some of them are just conmen/women, or whether they have a real need. I determined not to pass another beggar by when we were in England, even if it was only to hand over a pound or two, but it’s become an impossible task here in Europe, where begging is a full-time profession for many. And as Celia says, some of them are so well-dressed. What are they doing begging?
How do you reconcile what Jesus says about caring for the poor when you’re overwhelmed by beggars on every hand? Do you have a right to give to one and not another? How much should you keep for yourself? The questions go on and on, and I don’t find the answers coming very easily.

Never mind the quality....

The room we had in Köln was lovely: light and airy, with those European windows that open by leaning into the room to let in some air, or which can be opened fully as NZ windows are with a switch of the handle. Plus there was a desk, a chair, two bedside tables, bedside lamps, curtains, a rubbish bin, and a wardrobe. It had a toilet and shower en suite. Note these things.
Even better, breakfast was a buffet, with a wide range of Continental and English options. Note this too.
For this hotel we paid 130 euros for two nights. That’s on the cheaper to middle range for b&bs.
Today we arrived in Heidelberg and found our hotel. Except it wasn’t our hotel. We’re being billeted in another building five minutes walk away. We’re on the second floor, and we’re paying exactly the same amount of money as we paid in Heidelberg. The only difference is that this is classed as a hostel, not a hotel.
The only difference in terms of nomenclature, that is. The difference in quality is astonishing. Our bedroom has no curtains, no desk, no chair, no rubbish bin, no lamps, no bedside tables, no wardrobe. It does have a hat stand. And nine power points. And a slightly sloping floor. For breakfast we will receive one hot drink and a croissant. Whoopee. The toilet is shared with three other rooms on this floor, as is the bathroom - which admittedly has a bath as well as a shower, and is very large. There is also a towel in there, the only one provided on the whole floor.
Celia isn’t feeling well, having got a cold overnight, so she isn’t terribly excited about this place. Certainly it’s in the middle of the Altstadt - the Old Town - the area Heidelberg is probably most famous for, but that doesn’t quite compensate for the minimalist approach to hotel rooms.
On top of that we had a bit of fun with the train this morning. We’d booked from Köln to Heidelberg, which should have taken about three hours. The train was a bit late - an unusual occurrence in Germany, I gather - and it somehow got later as it went along. In the end, as we were heading toward Mannheim, (known only to me because of Mozart’s links with it) an announcement was made in German telling us that the train wouldn’t be stopping at Heidelberg, because it was running late!
Fortunately, the German lady in our compartment picked this up on our behalf and went in search of the guard. He told her we needed to get off at Mannheim and take the train back to Heidelberg. Seems that Heidelberg would be sidestepped completely. So we got off the train at Mannheim, found platform neun and hopped on the Heidelberg train, which was a local one with not much room and a short fat girl going round asking anyone who was eating anything if they would give it to her. Still, our faithful Eurail Pass was perfectly acceptable to the guard and we arrived at Heidelberg a bit late, but none the worse for wear.
From there we had to get a number 33 bus to the Platz just down from where the hotel was (or was supposed to be). The driver must have forgotten to take his happy pills this morning, as he seemed to be all over the show, and since both of us had our backpacks on we were struggling to keep upright.
But here we are, Celia’s asleep, I’ve walked across one bridge over the Rhein and back across another, the day is lovely, the mobile connect is working perfectly and things could be far worse!


In the photo you can see one of the bridges I walked across - and in the background is Heidelberg's castle.

Nature calls...rather too often!

Second day in Köln and the weather was a bit cooler. Unfortunately I’d got it into my head that summer had returned and went out in short sleeves again without taking a jacket or jersey. Froze. We decided not to get one of the tour buses around the city because a number of the places were within walking distance anyway. Headed for the river - the mighty Rhein - and because I had a bit of an upset stomach, I needed to find a loo quickly. No such luck. There were three portaloos along the bank of the river, but each one of them had a hefty padlock on the door. The last public WC we’d seen (and used) had been quite a way back.

Things haven’t changed by the way, in terms of needing loos. When Celia and I were on our honeymoon in Rome some 33 years ago, searching for public toilets was an issue even then.
Anyway, there were a number of large river boats alongside the bank, and in the end, in desperation, we paid to go on a trip up the river so that I could be sure of finding a loo in a great hurry. Most expensive loo we’ve had to pay for yet!

Anyway the river trip was pleasant, and worth relaxing for an hour or so on.

We’ve both been very tired today. Came back home after the river trip and slept - again. Think it’s probably all the sights and sounds and noise and travel. Whether we’ll get any better at it or not remains to be seen. How these old people who go on fourteen days on the continent type tours cope, I have no idea. Up at the crack of dawn, five hours in a bus, tramping round a city for another couple of hours, off again and then finally kipping down in a strange bed for the night. We like to take our trips a bit more easy.

Onto Köln

We went on our first train trip today, from Hamburg to Köln. We had seats in first class, in a carriage that was virtually empty - it was the first carriage behind the driver. There was only one other person in our compartment (six to a compartment), so we had plenty of room. The second class part of the train was much fuller, as I found when I went for a walk from one end of the train to the other. At the back of the train was half a carriage reserved for large luggage and bikes - there was none of either - and a few let-down seats. So I sat in the space for a while and watched the world go by.
The trip took four hours, but it didn’t seem long. Apparently this was the ‘slow’ train, if you can call anything that goes at a normal speed of 163 kph, slow.
It was just beginning to rain when we left Hamburg (after a beautiful day yesterday) and it had obviously been raining over most of the country we passed through. However, by the time we got to Köln the sun had come out and it was hot enough to change back into short sleeves and my faithful sandals - which I’ve worn most of the time we’ve been away. The pair of waterproof shoes I bought in Oswestry a couple of weeks ago are great, and have been useful during the rainy days we’ve had recently.
Which reminds me: we’re back in the land of toilets you have to pay for. England has pretty much got rid of this archaic notion - Oswestry was the only place in England where we had to pay - but Germany still regards it as the norm. At the railway station yesterday I went down into the gents and Celia went down into the ladies opposite. I put my money in the machine, went through the turnstyle, and then heard her speaking in the ladies, which was open to the men’s! Weird.
Our hotel in Köln is near the Cathedral, and the railway station. Which is convenient, except that the railway line runs along the back of the building, and the rumble of the trains is fairly loud. But the Cathedral (or Dom, as they call it here) is superb. How it survived the bombing in the War God alone knows: the surrounding area was mostly destroyed.
Furthermore, the Dom is free: you don’t have to pay to go inside. And it was packed with visitors, of course. It’s awe-inspiring: the vaulting soars forever above your head, the stained-glass varies from detailed 19th century pictorial to wonderfully mosaic-like modern. And it’s just vast. You could walk around in it for days, so it feels. We might go back tomorrow!
Just around the corner from the Cathedral is a street that leads into the shopping area, which goes off in several directions and was also packed with people. I don’t know whether it’s a late shopping night or what, but the people were out in droves, even though it was getting on for 5.30 by the time we went looking. We bought a few odds and ends for tea (we’d had a very late Thai lunch) and a new flask, since the one Celia bought only a month or so ago has gone kaput. And we were both struggling yesterday in not having a cup of tea/coffee handy. I had to go and borrow an electric kettle for our hotel room otherwise Celia would have gone home, I think. Fortunately they were happy to lend us one.
The holiday Germany was celebrating yesterday, I found out, was Reunification Day.

A few notes

When we were flying into Germany we could see several wind farms. From the air they looked like crosses in a military cemetery.
I forgot to mention yesterday that Johannes Brahms, the composer, has great links with Hamburg. He’s one of Hamburg’s beloved sons. And alongside the dedication to him in St Michael’s Church is one to Teleman and another to Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, both of whom were Music Directors there.
Tagging - the art of painting on walls alongside railway lines, must be an international thing: there was mile after mile of tagging between Hamburg and Köln, today.
And tv advertising in Germany is just as silly as it is in England - or NZ.

First day in Hamburg

....and exhausted. We came home about 4.30 and slept.
Most of the day we’d spent in doing the hop on hop off thing on one of the double-decker buses that tour around Hamburg city. They take about an hour and a half to do this, and we got off twice. The bus we’d started out on was the 100, but the one we went back onto was the 200, and it takes a somewhat different route - in fact we wound up going over much of the route we’d already taken but approaching it from the opposite direction. Finally, somewhat desperate that we were never going to get back to point A, we got off in Rathaus Square (Rathaus is just the Town Hall - I suppose the ‘rat’ part has some links with ratification), and walked back along Monckebergerstrasse to the Hauptbahnhof - the main railway station - which is just near the hotel.
Doesn’t sound like an exhausting day, you say?
Well, our first hop off was at St Michael’s Church, and instead of going into the church proper, as we’d thought, we found ourselves climbing up the tower. At least 25 flights of stairs, if not more. By the time we’d got to the point where we’d both have preferred to have given up, we thought we might as well carry on. Certainly the view from the tower was amazing, but it took a while to get the breath back. We got the lift back down (yup, this is a church with a lift to the tower), and none of the passengers had quite figured out, when we got to the bottom, how to get the door to open. So we all went up to the top of the tower again, before coming down.
After this we finally got into the church itself, and it’s an amazing building. Wonderful curves everywhere to offset the usual straight lines of the architecture. It’s been thoroughly restored, so all the golds and whites are as they would have been. It just glistens. And because it’s Harvest Festival (here as in England) the church was full of decorations related to food: wreaths made of vegetables and stalks hanging from the balcony; breads in all sorts of shapes (such as a mouse and a snake); an enormous canopy affair hanging in the sanctuary made out of corn sheaves, and various statements such as Our Father (in German, of course) made out of bread on a baked backing.
Hamburg is an extensive city, with a large port and waterfront. We went past areas with houses that are worth several million euros - wonderful places on the street that’s closest to the large lake that’s within the city. There are embassies everywhere, and of course these are all large and imposing - and no doubt costing their home country a large amount of money. The buildings vary in their materials, but there are many that are made out of bricks, vast structures rising way above the street. The whole place has a very permanent air about it, an air of having survived a cluttered history. It’s going full steam ahead at present: there are acres of building going on, both office space and apartments, down by the water.
It was a holiday today (not sure what holiday) and the crowds were out in full force, but most of the shops were shut. Restaurants were doing an enormous trade. We went into the railway station first thing this morning to get our Eurail pass sorted out. We were hoping that they actually knew what it was all about, and of course they did. We’ve booked ourselves a couple of seats to Cologne for tomorrow - booked seats because of the holiday today, which apparently might affect tomorrow‘s travellers.
The railway station is large, as you’d expect, full of shops. There’s one area that’s given over to food shops, all within a kind of mall. You just wander from one food group to another. And there are plenty of other shops - including the ubiquitous McDonald’s where we went and had a milkshake (again) tonight, and watched while a couple of teenagers spent almost all the time we were there in a long, long kiss. A long kiss.
There was also a kind of large mini-market (if that makes sense) and Celia was in her element. I’ve come to the conclusion that English or Continental supermarkets are a kind of art gallery or museum to her. When I proposed this new theory, she smiled enigmatically.

We DON'T have senior moments

Before we left yesterday we had one of those senior moment crises. My sister-in-law was going to sort out the car registration, which is due while we were away, and she asked if we could leave the certificate of insurance to take.
Insurance? Surely we had insured the car, hadn’t we? We remembered doing a lot of investigating and sorting out before we came and thought we’d done more when we got here and had then gone ahead, but where was the information? Where was the insurance policy? Absolutely no idea.
I checked through my emails, and checked through the laptop files, and checked the online bank statements. Nothing.
And yet we were certain we wouldn’t have forgotten to insure the car after all the fuss we’d been through.
I rang the insurance company and found myself talking to a girl in NZ - at least I think she was in NZ; she had a NZ accent and said there were two New Zealand girls in the office and one English girl….
She found the policy details without any difficulty - so she must have been in NZ; if she’d been in England, such speed of finding the info would have been impossible! - and said she’d send a copy out.
And then, of course, I realised where all the stuff probably was. I knew we’d taken it on the tenting holiday with us, but I’d thought it would have been in the computer bag with all the other papers. Nope. It was in the suitcase we’d carried the bedding in, sitting there waiting for me. Wondering where I‘d been.

Wir sind in Hamburg

Today was a day of chunks of travel. Two hours from Attleborough to Stansted Airport, by bus, with the weather becoming increasingly overcast (and the toilet on the bus, which we’d chosen to sit beside, giving off incredibly unpleasant whiffs every so often). The obligatory two hours at Stansted waiting for the flight to take off (decreased somewhat by the fact that we were late getting there, and there were queues for everything (but for some reason we were given priority tickets so that helped to get us on board a bit faster). They took my laptop off in the security area, and gave it a looking-over. Poor Alphonse! - the laptop - he was appalled to be considered a security risk. But at least we didn’t have to take off our shoes. Not sure what they’re expecting to find in shoes.
An hour and a half on the plane (virtually) with the usual Ryanair minimalist approach to service - not enough coin change when you bought something, no sick bags, no string bags on the backs of the seats to put your magazine in, no room to spread out in any direction.
And then an hour and a quarter or so from Lubeck airport into Hamburg city, again by bus - a very quiet bus, it must be said, so quiet that you weren‘t really aware of the speed you were doing.
And into Hamburg BusPort. Which is only a little way from our hotel. We had to go to the Hotel Keiler Hof to pick up our key from a very grumpy receptionist. She was friendly really, just liked to do the grumpy thing. The reception desk was on the first floor - I have no idea what was on the ground floor, but it wasn’t part of the hotel. And then we had to take our three keys to the building next door, Luebecker Hof, use the large key to open the building door, go up to the first floor again, use the blue key to open the door to that floor, and then use the third key for our room. I thought our room number was 213 until I realised that the label actually read Zi3 - or zimmer 3. (Zimmer being ‘room’.)
The room is quite large, with a private shower. The shower isn’t exactly en suite, as it’s in the room itself, next to the wardrobe. The toilet is across the hall, and serves all the people staying in rooms 2-6. (Room 1 seems to have vanished). We’re going to have our breakfasts in the Keiler Hof. On the first floor. This idea of having hotels on the first floors and upwards seems to be a European thing. It was the same in both the hotels I stayed in, in Rome. The ground floor is usually occupied by some other business altogether.
After settling ourselves in we went out again to get something to eat - it now being around 9 pm. Found a kebap place around the corner (yup, kebap), and had a very nice meal in the open air. It's been a very warm day in general. The area we're in seems a bit less than salubrious - ladies of the night are very visible, as is the sex sho (not sure whether it's meant to be shop or show) just around the corner.

Lack of fitness

Since we went on our road trip, tenting every night, I’ve found I’m suffering from a real lack of fitness. Before we came to England, we were going aqua-jogging a good deal, and I normally walked to work. But since we’ve been here we’ve done less and less exercise. There have been occasional patches when we’ve got up and going, like when we stayed with my sister-in-law and her husband. She’s a fitness fanatic, and enjoys taking a bus to the next village and then walking back. This can mean a walk of several miles. Naturally while we were with her, we got up and moving again.

But the long hours of driving while we were moving from place to place over the last month hasn’t been good for me at all. I don’t enjoy the bucket seats that most cars have (our van at home has straight up and down seating – much better for the back), and I find when I get out of the car at the moment that I feel as though I’ve got to unfold. Very unpleasant.

Twice in the last month or so my back has given one of those nasty clicks and I’ve felt very uncomfortable for days afterwards. At present I find getting something up off the floor makes my back cringe, and even sitting for too long at a table becomes uncomfortable. Don’t mention sitting in the average lounge suite. They’re killers on sore backs.

So, the last couple of mornings I’ve gone for a decent walk before everyone else got up (yesterday I walked for an hour). This hasn’t made my back less achy yet, but it will in due course. My legs are complaining that they’re on holiday and shouldn’t be made to work, but I tell them that if they don’t work they won’t work soon, and they grudgingly accept this.

Different links

We went to the local Attleborough Anglican church this morning. Think I’ve mentioned visiting it before, though I can’t find the post at the moment. (It has the grand title of The Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by the way, but I think is called St Mary's, locally.)

It’s full of history, as so many Norfolk churches are, and there is evidence everywhere of the many Christians who’ve gone before, from the faded paintings on the reredos to the almost as faded paintings high up on the wall above the altar; from the stones showing where people are buried beneath the stone floor to the extraordinary design of the ‘other’ pulpit (the one that was nicked from another local church, if I remember rightly).

There’s something about worshipping in a place that’s been inhabited by Christian brethren for centuries.

The other good thing about the Norfolk churches is that all seem to be open all the time; further north we found churches were more likely to be closed to the general public.

And, while I think about it, there’s the way England and NZ are so inextricably linked: everywhere you go you find someone who’s got a relative in NZ (think I’ve mentioned this before too). We were at the 30^th birthday party of our niece last night, and Celia spoke to at least three people who had relatives in NZ. This morning, after the service, we had coffee with a couple who’d travelled throughout NZ, and then met another group who all had connections, including one couple who’s son had studied at the Otago Medical School.

Quieter interlude

Last few days have been a bit quiet, but yesterday we took another trip back to Sheringham, Celia’s childhood home.

We typed Sheringham into the Sat Nav, and for some reason she took us all round the back roads. Fortunately, because it was a pleasant day, this wasn’t a big issue – just a surprise. In fact, we when we turned off to chase up a notice that said antiques at one point, we wound up going past the rest home where Celia’s former English teacher now lives. So we popped in to see him. And then a couple of miles down the road we came across one of roadside vans that sell food, so we stopped and had some lunch. (These vans are all over the place: they get towed to the site in the morning and the guy running it makes sandwiches and hot potatoes and buns and provides coffees and so on. Often they’re in the lay-bys on the motorways.)

It was exceedingly bracing at Sheringham Beach, but we survived. Though the streets weren’t as crowded as they’d been last time we were there, there were still a lot of people around.

Celia wanted to go up to Sheringham Woods as well; just as we set out it started to pour, but then it decided that we didn’t need any more rain, and by the time we’d had a cup of coffee in the woods entrance, it had cleared up again. So we had the pleasure of a glistening wet woods with the sun shining through the branches. Celia wanted to find some chestnuts, but they weren’t ready yet, even though she insisted on crushing a good number of them in the process in order to discover this fact. Chestnuts, in their little spiky shells look like baby hedgehogs might look; seeing Celia stomping on these was not for the fainthearted.

Today we’ve been trying to get our teeth into planning this train trip in Europe. It’s proving more complex than we imagined, even given the combined forces of the Internet, the various books we’ve got of timetables and ways to get around and the maps. Just when you think you’ve got it sussed you find you can’t get a hotel at a reasonable enough price, or that the train doesn’t go where you’d like it to go.

However, we think we’ve got the first leg of it sorted.

Just resting

The last couple of days have been rest days – mostly. Both of us were zonked when we got back from our tenting trip, more tired than we’d been for weeks. The tiredness had kind of crept up on us both, and we were both irritable, and just plain weary of traveling and erecting and de-erecting tents.

It’s nice to be back to a bit of normality at our ‘base camp’ and to have some people to talk to. In the campsites it’s been amazing how few people there have been who’ve stopped and talked, or showed any interest in us. Which means we’ve been thrown back on each other for all our resource: we both need other company as well as each other.

We’re now going to plan our train trip in the five European countries in more detail than we originally intended, because part of the problem with the tenting holiday was just not knowing where we might end up, and whether we’d have somewhere to stay. It meant that a certain side of the trip was unrelaxing, and almost unenjoyable.

Home from the Holiday

Well, home in English terms. We’re back to base after our tenting/travelling trip. Both exhausted, perhaps because we travelled too much and didn’t rest enough. We’ll try not to make the same mistake when we go to Europe next month.

Our trip today was from Kidderminster to Attleborough, some three and a half hours drive if we’d done it all in one go. We didn’t, as both of us were very tired from last night, and anyway, driving that far in one go just isn’t the sort of thing we do very often.

We were tired because we had the heaviest rainfall last night that we’ve experienced while tenting. It poured, and poured – and did I mention? It poured.

But not only that. Sometime between three and four, the wind came up out of nowhere, with huge force, and we were startled to find the tent rocking back and forth, as though it was planning to take off into outer space. We thought it was going to do itself some damage, but nothing got broken, and the worst that happened was that some plastic plates and stuff on one of the tables inside the tent got thrown around, and wound up on the floor. Celia got up and rescued the laptop, which was in its bag in the front section of the tent – the part that doesn’t have an inner skin. Where we were, things were perfectly dry, amazingly enough, but the front section does tend to get a bit of water inside.

I got quite agitated about the tent doing its crazy house thing; started praying loudly, rather like the disciples on the boat when the storm blew up on the Sea of Galilee. Of course Jesus told them to cool it – after he’d dispensed with the activity of the storm. Celia did much the same, finding my agitation somewhat amusing.

It turned out that various mini-cyclones (that’s what the radio was calling them) flickered throughout the country last night: we may have got the tail-end of one.

Wrapped everything up this morning. It had stopped raining by then, but because the tent was so wet outside and the grass too, we stayed in our pyjamas until we’d got everything sorted out, and then went and had a hot shower. I cleaned my teeth, and went to put my dental plate in. For some reason it seemed to catch on one of my other teeth, and next moment there was a nasty little crack as I shifted it in my mouth. The front false tooth had snapped clean off the plate. Great.

We went into Kidderminster and found a denture specialist, but he couldn’t do anything till four in the afternoon. Decided that it wasn’t the end of the world and that it would be easier to get it done back in Norfolk, so I walked around today with a gap in the front of my teeth.

Got ourselves some breakfast – on a takeaway plate (Celia had seen the place advertised at the camp, and it was just across the road from the denture place), and bought some lunch for later too.

Photo on the right is from a site called Dental Distortions. The teeth bear no resemblance to mine.

Sleeping Policemen

Keep meaning to mention Sleeping Policemen. We just call them something subtle like judder bars at home, but in England this phrase is a reference to those annoying humps in suburban roads which are meant to stop people hooning down the street.

Mamble and Crowl, Worcs

Finally got to Mamble, which was a bit of a disappointment, to say the least. A little place with its most open area on a downward piece of the hill, a pub and a church and almost nothing else. Plainly we’ll have to rewrite the song:
Now we’ve been to Mamble
That lies above the Teme,
And there’s no one much in Mamble,
At least as we have seen.
No doubt they breed and brew there,
Still lazy as the claim,
But I doubt that any song there
Sets the local pub aflame.
However, we also went to the other Crowle, in Worcestshire. This has a totally different atmosphere to the Crowle up north, which seemed run down and devitalised. Crowle, Worcs, is probably a dormitory suburb, but the houses are both old thatched roof style and modern, the church has a sense of quiet about it, and there’s a modern parish hall at one end of the village. No sign of any Crowls in the church graveyard, so maybe we’re a hardy lot!
This morning, however, we went to church at the local place just down the road, in the village of Wolverley. This was a fairly High Anglican place, seemingly occupied by widows (only a couple of blokes that I could see) and not very many of them. There was a choir, however, all in heavenly-blue robes, and there were a couple of guys in amongst them too, so that supplemented the numbers on both sides.
The minister was a woman, but she isn’t the vicar, apparently. He was away doing a service elsewhere. She spoke well in her short sermon, and made a good point about reaching out to others in her comments on John’s Gospel.
At the end we took a brief look around the place, and there was a list of former vicars, going way back to the 13th century. One John Crowle stood out among them. He was vicar around 1545, and had an alias: Yewes. Not sure what that had to do with anything!
Of course he may have no connection with my part of the family, but it’s good to see someone in the wider clan doing a good job all that time ago.
Anyway, both the Wolverley church and the Crowle church are named after St John the Baptist. The Wolverley one, which is in the picture, is built on a hill. This is probably a good thing, apart from its biblical significance, because in June this year, Wolverley's lower reaches were flooded twice. We saw a man digging out the stream that runs past his house, and replacing the rocks that had been shifted from his garden wall. He's planning on building a much higher wall around that side of the house, even though the stream is at present more than a metre below the foundations.

Camp sites

The variation in camps is enormous. I still haven’t quite figured out the difference between the official Camp and Caravanning Association sites, where we get a little booklet stamped (ten stamps and a free night!) and where we get senior citizen discounts (even Celia) and where it costs virtually nothing for being here, and the sites where we pay twice the price, and where there are signs saying CACA people welcome and where the friendliness is far less. Oh, well, we’ll only be camping a few more days, and so the problem won’t bother me after that.
Some camps you have to pay for showers, some require a key to get into the toilets (!), some have laundry facilities, some have virtually no facilities - like the one the night before last near Chester, where there was one urinal and one WC for the men, one shower and one hand basin. Two WCs for the women, a shower and a hand basin. No hot water for washing up dishes. And other places, like the one here in Kidderminster, has so many showers and toilets and urinals and basins that you have to stop and choose which to use. It’s a bigger site, certainly, but not that much bigger.
And then there’s electric power. Most people can plug into a socket in the middle of the field and get their power from it. There may be a dozen of these units, with four sockets each, scattered around. Here at Kidderminster, we can’t get at one, unfortunately, so this may be the last message you get for a while…
But there is a ping-pong table here, so if you don’t hear from us, that’s probably what we’re doing. And resting.

One of those days

Saturday. Left Chester around lunchtime, visited Oswestry (which may be pronounced Ostry, but don‘t bank on it) and arrived in Kidderminster. Didn’t really explore Chester’s Cathedral or City Walls, or Oswestry‘s more interesting haunts. Did explore op shops and supermarkets. Bought a pair of waterproof boots for £7.99 in one of the op shops, as my other pair of shoes are letting the water through. Arrived in camp near Kidderminster, exhausted. All this setting up house, cooking meals over a gas stove, getting up in the morning, cooking meals over a gas stove, taking house down again, packing car so that everything gets fitted in, and driving somewhere, and then starting the whole process over has worn us out.

What is Mamble?

Mamble is the name of a fairly small place on the map, near Worcester. Our interest in it stems back a long way. I used to play for a singing farmer - he sometimes bought us large amounts of beef as a gift - and the song we remember him singing was:
I’ve never been to Mamble,
That lies above the Teme,
And I wonder who’s in Mamble
And whether people seem
Dum dum dee dumty dum dum
As lazy as the name,
And whether any song there
Sets alehouse wits aflame.
As you can see, there’s a line neither Celia or I can remember. I've just found the original on the Net, so you can read it as it was writ, and not as we remembered it.
Anyway, the name Mamble so struck us that we gave the name to a kitten we got not long after. Mamble was a family animal for at least a decade afterwards, until she vanished one day.

Chester

Overnight it poured, so by this morning the tent was soaked - only on the outside, thank goodness. But that was enough to make it something of a task trying to get it down and shaken off without covering the inside of the car with water. As it was, I donned my swim shorts to go to the loo: it was easier than getting my pyjamas wet.
Anyway, we left the campsite by the river Ouse where we’ve been for a couple of days and decided to head for Worcester, once again to try and get to see Crowle (and Mamble). Before we left York we stopped off at a café for some breakfast, as neither of us had managed to have more than some muesli, with all the dampness around. We were sitting there waiting for our order, sorting out the most recent lot of photos we’ve taken, when my son Ben rang! And then we realised we’d forgotten it was his birthday, although that wasn’t why he was ringing. Celia explained to the young lady who was witnessing that we were talking to one of our children in NZ, but she looked as though she had no idea where NZ was and if she did, hadn’t a clue how we could be talking to anyone anywhere else.
After breakfast we headed off for Manchester, as a first port of call, and though we thought we’d put the city centre in, found ourselves outside somewhere in a suburb called Heywood. There was an indoor market there, and so we went in and had some lunch: it wasn’t very busy inside, probably because it was still raining a good deal, and the young feller behind the counter was interested in our being from NZ, wanting to check whether it was as dry as Australia. We assured him it wasn’t. It’s constantly interesting how many people have relatives in either Australia or NZ, or who have a desire to go and visit one or both of the countries. There are still many links between the places, even though the European Union is such a dominant force now in this part of the world. I don’t think most English people really think they’re part of the EU, and they wonder at all the Europeans coming over to find work, especially the Poles.
There was a long slow patch on the motorway heading south, so on a whim we decided to head for Chester, as the road was clear. Chester is near the border of Wales, and at one point, while we’d taken a wrong turn in looking for a campsite, we found ourselves crossing the border - while I was typing an email, as it happened.
We’re camping in Chester - the rain has stopped for the most part, although it was extremely heavy in places on the way - and we’ll see whether we spend any time here tomorrow or not.

Bridlington and Scarborough

Today we got off to a bit of a late start: Celia wasn’t feeling 100%, so I drove into York to meet my nephew, who was up on business, and had offered to take some of our excess baggage home. Thought I wasn’t going to find the place we’d designated as a meeting point, but suddenly at the last minute it was there.
In the early afternoon we drove to Bridlington, a seaside town, because we’d been feeling landlocked and were missing the sea. The place was still fairly busy, although it’s well past the holiday season. On the spur of the moment we decided to move onto Scarborough, and that was more impressive altogether. A really pleasant looking town, probably about the same size as Dunedin, from what we could gauge while standing inside the old castle up at the top of the city. Like Dunedin it has great stretches of beach and sea extending away from it in both directions, plus plenty of fishing boats, and all the usual conglomerate of British seaside towns. But it has more style than many of those, and has obviously been a prosperous place in its time - maybe it still is.
There has been some sort of lookout on the site of the castle since long before the Romans came; they were merely one of many to make use of it. Now all that’s left is a long wall, and the ruins of the keep. The Chapel has long gone (it was almost on the cliff edge) and the only ‘modern’ building is the master gunner’s house (now the tea rooms).
The Roundheads destroyed a lot of the old castle - they seem, like Mao Tse Tung’s Red Army, to have had little inclination to do anything else but destroy. Their legacy of destruction is everywhere throughout the land.
The thing that remains is the sense of space, and the wonderful vista in every direction. I don’t know how high the castle area is, but certainly ít seems far above Scarborough’s town and above the ocean.

Beningbrough

Because we were staying in York yesterday we went to another National Trust place, a few miles out of the city. This was Beningbrough, a place built in the Georgian period. It now acts as home to a large number of portraits, in conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery. It’s a rather unusual place, as the portraits are what dominate it: there’s much less furniture and fittings than in many of the NT houses, although there are a couple of very grand beds with their original furnishings. We listened to a lot of info on the audio phone-thingees, which made it more interesting. It’s not a very appealing house, in a way: the grand hall that you first walk into, is three storeys high, and very white and cold. It doesn’t have much of a sense of ever having been lived in, although it passed from one family to another from the time it was built - but it was different families, rather than successive generations, and that may have made a difference.

York, Day Two

We spent a second night at the camp site near Acaster Malbis last night and a nasty cold night it was too. With rain.
(Before I forget I came across two more peculiar village names today, both within spitting distance of York and of each other: Askham Bryan, and Askham Richard. I kid you not!)
Fortunately the pub is only a few yards down the road, so we stayed there both last night and the night before until about 9.30. It was warmer than inside the tent.
Both of us had a dose of homesickness last night, and debated whether we should change our air tickets and fly home on the next available plane. Hang the expense, we said.
Came to our senses, but it took a bit of time.
This morning we were going to head south again, still trying to get to the elusive other village of Crowle (and Mamble) but two or three cellphone calls to places south didn’t encourage us much (one was actually closed, in spite of being listed as open all year around), and Celia’s tooth was playing up again, and she finally got an appointment for 4.30 this afternoon, so that kind of put the kibosh on going anywhere today.
Plus our nephew rang and said he was coming to York tomorrow, and would we like him to take anything excess back home with him? Would we! It’ll be nice to meet a familiar face: think that’s part of our homesickness. I keep saying to Celia that I want to meet somebody, anybody that I know from home. But we haven’t so far, which I’ve found disappointing. It’s not as though such a thing is an impossibility: last time I was in England, on the second day, I met someone I knew, in London. And when Celia was over here, twenty-plus years ago, with our daughter, there was a similar occurrence, one that was even more amazing. My daughter went out with some of her English relatives, to Milton Keynes, and they met my cousin from New Zealand…

York, day one

Spent most of today in York, which turns out to be a pleasant city, with no apparent excess of traffic. Celia had to visit the dentist first thing, and got an appointment for 11.40 am. She’s had a painful toothache on and off for about a week, and it was time to deal with it. Fortunately the dentist diagnosed it as a problem of the gum receding and exposing too much of the tooth. Some particular dental gel sorted it out, and the problem was resolved with a small fee - smaller than we expected.
It’s always complicated having to go to the doctor or dentist or whatever while on holiday - especially in another country. So we were relieved that this particular issue was dealt with relatively easily.
The inner city of York still has its old city wall mostly intact (or well restored) and you can walk for more than three kilometres along it. The pathway is quite narrow, and now has a metal fence alongside to stop you falling off, but it can’t have been much fun in the past if people started rushing along it in a crisis - knocking somebody from your own side off the wall would have been a common hazard, I’d suspect.
On our initial sortie into the city this morning, we found that the first street we entered inside the wall had no less than six op shops almost in a row, plus the SPCK bookshop (a Christian bookshop for those who don’t know the magic letters SPCK), and a National Trust shop. Too many riches!
We did a quick tour round York Minster and then had to go back to the car and find the dentist again. After that we came back into town, found Sainsbury’s supermarket by accident, bought some lunch, ate it in the carpark, and then went for our second trip inside the wall.
Now we had more time to explore. After dealing to the op shops, and the SPCK, and the National Trust (where we found that the toilets were very convenient), we went on and checked out The Treasurer’s House. This is a place near York Minster which was restored (rather oddly) by a former City Treasurer. He seldom lived there, apparently, but used it to house his collection of paintings and treasures. It didn’t strike either of us as very inspiring. Many of the paintings looked rather like copies by lesser hands than paintings by original masters, and the antiques and such weren’t up to much compared to the usual NT standards. Or maybe we’ve just had enough of those sorts of places for the moment.
Anyway, on to York Minster, that extraordinary cathedral in the centre of the city. It’s large - very large - and yet, when I walked around inside it didn’t somehow appeal. Maybe it’s overwhelming, and doesn’t inspire much reverence. Having to pay to get inside it, and having guides all over the place telling people at the top of their voices what this was and what that was, and having crowds everywhere, rather took away from the sense that this is really a church. It seems very much geared towards making money. Though admittedly the money is being put to good use in the sense that there’s been an enormous amount of restoration done. And things look very good inside. Maybe the grand scale doesn’t appeal so much to me. We went inside a much smaller church just down the road (York, like Norwich, has a church on every corner) and you felt that God probably did visit the place more than once in a blue moon.

Towards York

We had another look at Crowle this morning before we left the area, but couldn’t get into the Library because it didn’t open till 2 pm, and couldn’t get into the church because there was no local vicar any more. Did get into the Regen shop (a kind of charity shop, though I’m not clear what group it was supporting). Picked up another couple of pair of cufflinks to add to the dozen or more I’ve bought since I came here. One of these was of Big Ben (though it took the shopkeeper and me a while to work it out).
Thought we’d take a look at Scunthorpe, which is close by. It’s been highly redeveloped in the Centre, with new shops and pedestrian malls everywhere. We thought that was all there was, but some of the older buildings remain. Plenty of op shops, of course, but not a lot else that was exciting.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned a chain of shops over here called Poundland. We first came across one of these in Kentish Town, (in London) and they have a remarkable variety of goods, many of them top quality. How they manage to get to sell them at a pound a piece is something they know and I don’t, but they’re obviously very successful. They’re nothing like the $2 shops in NZ, which mostly seem to sell el cheapo stuff.
Anyway, after an all-you-can-eat lunch for £4.95 each in a Chinese restaurant, we moved on towards York. We haven’t quite got to York yet, because by the time we got here it was getting late enough, and we wanted to get our tent up somewhere. The place we went to first said it was booked out, although there was little evidence of it at that point; they helpfully sent us next door (there were at least three camping grounds in a row) and the man there led us on his bicycle to our pitch which is next to the river that flows through the strangely-named village (another dormitory one, I‘d guess) of Acaster Malbis - sounds like some sort of odd wine, doesn‘t it? Seems as though the Acaster part relates to the word, Castra, which means a Roman camp. Those Romans must have been everywhere...!
Before we’d got the tent up completely we were visited by a duck and her family of eight ducklings - nearly full grown. They even made their way into the tent checking out whether we had any food hanging around. Bloomin’ cheek.
Celia has had a toothache for the last few days, and we’re definitely going to have to find a dentist tomorrow: she won’t be able to carry on treating it with Panadol.

Other bits of the day

Forgot to mention that the day began a little inauspiciously. One of our sets of car keys had been left in the ignition over night, turned partly on. Which meant that the battery was flat this morning when we left the hotel. No one in the large breakfast room of guests had jumper leads on them, which seemed rather remarkable, and neither did some other people who came into the car park while we were standing there wondering what to do.
Finally I went over to the McDonald’s next door, and saw a young couple sitting finishing their breakfast. Asked them if by any remote chance they had jumper leads. Yes, says the girl, who obviously owned the car they were driving (this McDonald’s, like the hotel, is out of the way), but she had no idea how to use them. I told her that was no problem - we knew how to use them - and so as soon as they finished their drinks, they came round and Celia joined up the leads and we were off running. Phew! Seek and ye shall find, though sometimes the seeking takes a bit of doing.
While we were in Derby we went to the Denby Pottery Factory. Celia’s always had a great liking for Denbyware, and so we checked out the ‘home shop’ (where the prices were top of the line) and the Factory shop, where there were lots of seconds and ends of runs, and trial pieces. The prices were marginally cheaper, but not much. We bought two large breakfast bowls, and that was enough. Popped into the museum for a few minutes and discovered that the two lots of Denbyware we’ve had or still have, are on display as museum pieces. Oh, dear.
The thing about Denbyware is that while you may like the style of one part of a set, the other items don’t necessarily grab you. I liked some things in a range called Oyster, like the jugs and some of the bowls, but the plates left me cold. It was the same with most sets.

Owl or Crow?

Mike standing in the Market Square at Crowle, under a specially provided cover. Note that the toilets are to hand, as is a telephone box. Full marks for the people of Crowle.

We finally made it to Crowle today - or Kroll, as the locals pronounce it. Seemingly even the locals have a bit of difficulty deciding which way to go on the pronunciation side of things: we spoke to two or three people and got mixed responses.
Anyway, this isn’t the Crowle we originally aimed for a few days ago - that one was in ,. This one is up north, closer to Scunthorpe. We’re camped at the only Crowle site listed in our book, although in fact, the site is three or four miles away from the village of Crowle.
Crowle is not a small village, but I’d suspect it’s a dormitory suburb for some larger town - the aforementioned Scunthorpe, for instance - rather than a town that survives by itself. At first sight, it’s not that appealing: there are quite a lot of run-down buildings in the centre of the village, and there’s a kind of uninspiring look to the buildings that aren’t run down. None of the charm of some of the country villages we’ve come across, not helped by the colour of the bricks they use here.
It didn’t help either, perhaps, that it’s Sunday, and so most things were closed and most people weren‘t out and about. We’ll go in again tomorrow, and check it when there’s a bit more life on the streets.
The most lively thing were the hoons: motorbikes roaring through the main street (so narrow at one point it has to have lights so traffic going one way doesn’t bang into traffic going the other), or youths on three-wheeler motor bikes doing wheelies, or open-top cars trying to do full speed in a 30 mph area. Or the boys playing football in a car park with a huge sign: No Ball Games.
There’s a canal going past Crowle, and a large water area surrounded by caravans and permanent holiday homes. Again there wasn’t much life there, but it is well after the summer holidays, so no doubt in season, the place is humming.
We stopped off at Derby on our way here. It's quite a large place, at least the size of Dunedin, I'd think. The service at the Cathedral was just ending as we arrived outside the door, and so we went in, to see what the building looked like. And joined in the queue for a cup of coffee. One woman asked Celia whether she'd enjoyed the service, and Celia had to say, Yes, she had.
The Cathedral isn't one of the old 12th or 13th century places that abound in England. It's obviously been rebuilt at some point; the style is 18th century perhaps for the most part, although the front of the building appears to date from a lot earlier. Consequently it's a very light building inside, clean and with bright colouring. The congregation appeared to be a good mix of ages, and there was a good sense of fellowship going on.
We walked further into the town, and came across the Australian bar, but the young man putting signs out didn't seem quite to appreciate me asking him if you had to be an Australian to work there.

Hay fever

For the first time in over thirty-three years, we used a laundrette today. A more pleasant experience than it used to be, I must say. While we were doing this a window-cleaner was cleaning a shop window nearby. I went over and asked if it would be possible to borrow his squeegee for a moment to clean my car windscreen; it had got covered in some gritty stuff yesterday, and smeared when Celia used the wipers this morning.
‘I’ll come over and do it, mate,’ says the window-cleaner, and he did, far better than I would have done.
Later in the morning we went to the craft centre, just a couple of miles out of town, where we were going to the course in enamelling we booked some time ago. I’ve written about it in more detail on another blog.
And tomorrow we head off - somewhere else. We’ve yet to decide where.
For the last few days I’ve had some kind of hay fever, the first time I’ve had it for quite a few years. Nothing I’ve taken seems to be shifting it very well, and I spent much of this afternoon at the enamelling blowing my nose. Very annoying.

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.

Wimpole Hall

While travelling down to London on Tuesday, we went into Royston, and discovered that Wimpole Hall was just along the road. This is another of the seemingly endless National Trust places, and has a working farm attached. In fact, people have been farming on this spot since before the Domesday Book was written, which makes our individual lives seem rather insignificant. Wimpole also has a large walled garden, with a great variety of dahlias in particular, along with the usual vegetables, and scarecrows - one is a Humpty Dumpty not yet fallen off the wall. And it has very extensive walks.
We got to the House after we’d been to the farm and through the gardens, so we’d already done quite a bit of walking. The sight that greeted us on arriving at the house, however, was something the National Trust presumably hadn’t provided: hundreds of swallows flittering and scattering around the façade, in preparation for doing their major trip overseas. They were swooping and diving and clinging to the front of the building and in general making a wonderful spectacle.
The House itself is yet another example of the wonders of a past age, and how money was spent wisely on all manner of beautiful things. But perhaps what was most impressive to us in this House was the servants’ level. Down in the basement, of course, but not without windows looking onto the grounds. In fact, one of the bedrooms down there would have made a great room for any guest, with its lovely views across the grounds. There was a steward’s room, with a writing desk and table for the other male servants to press their clothes, and there was the housekeeper’s room, with a small piano which she no doubt could use to while away her (very) few idle hours.
While I don’t remember a lot about the other floors of the house - unfortunately after a while all these great houses tend to blur into one big amalgam - I do remember that there was one long room that had originally been three smaller ones. It had become a room for walking in on wet days, or for putting on concerts, or playing the piano in. Another large room had been, for a time, converted into three small rooms by one of the more impoverished ladies of the house. Doors in this room were covered over, the wonderful plaster ceiling was obscured and in general there had been a lack of concern for the look of the place. Yet another room now houses all the odd sketches and paintings and drawings: pictures of servants’ livery, of various carriages, dozens of extravagant cartoons by some forgotten political satirist, pictures of horses.
Rudyard Kipling’s daughter married into the family that owned the house, early in the 20th century, and she was the final owner. There are a number of books and papers by Kipling on display.

Yes, I know this is a long post

On Monday we spent the night in a tent at a camp site called Quiet Waters. On Tuesday we were in London, so slept in beds again, but last night we tented in a place that was anything but quiet. To say that having Niagara Falls nearby would have been peaceful by comparison would be an understatement. The camp site was fine, (though we were almost as far away from the toilet block as it was possible to be), but it was within the flight path of some local airport, and jets went over with great regularity. That would have been okay, but the M25 was just up the road as well, and there was a constant noise with no obvious cessation. It was there when we went to sleep, and there when we woke. We had to drive on it briefly this morning, and there were trucks by the thousand.
The name of the place we stayed at last night has gone from my mind at the moment, but it was in the very north of London - and rabbits seemed to be allowed to run wild. Though not in the camping area, thank goodness. The woman who ran the place gave us a brochure for the Camping and Caravanning Association (I think that’s the order it goes in) and after looking through it we thought it would be worth joining. It gave us a much wider range of camp sites, and as members we’d get in considerably cheaper. In fact, when we did sign up, the woman gave us back the five pounds we’d paid as non-members, and then gave us a discount on the price as well!
I forgot to mention that we had lunch yesterday with another old friend whom we hadn’t seen since I was last here: an Irish Catholic nun who was on the course at Stephenson Hall where Celia and I met. This sister now lives with three others in a large house in Mottingham which shouldn’t have been too long a trip from where we were staying on Tuesday night, but in fact it took twice as long as we’d planned, due to the usual London traffic. She has had gum cancer in the last year, and has had a terrible time with it, not to mention operations not working as well as they should. While we were there she got yet another call from the consultant, telling her when she could go back to another go at the problem, one that she hopes will bring the whole thing to an end.
Today has been a long haul from that London camping site to one in a place called Corley, which is just out of Coventry. We weren’t supposed to be anywhere near Coventry, but something went wrong with our calculations.
Our intention for today had been to visit a little town in Worcester called Crowle. Once we’d been there we would go onto a camp site near Worcester city itself. However, we first got sidetracked by discovering Waddesdon Manor in the village of Waddesdon. Waddesdon Manor? Doesn’t sound anything special. Well, that’s what we might have thought until we discovered it was actually built only around 150 years ago by one of the Rothschilds, who wanted it as a place to have dinner parties and such during the week. So he built it along the lines of a French Chateau, on an enormous scale, with huge gardens and parks, and then began collecting umpteen wondrous articles from around the world. It has paintings by every painter you could name, especially Gainsborough; it has wonderful porcelain by the mile; it has statues and bric-a-brac, and endless decoration. It’s quite overwhelming, and there’s no way I could do it justice. In fact, we’d have had to stay there all day to even take in half of it. As it was we were a little hurried, and Waddesdon didn’t get its due.
After this Celia wanted to see if we could pick up a slightly larger tent - the one we’ve borrowed requires us to wander around on our knees, and since that isn’t quite our normal mode of movement, it’s a little difficult. It’s been adequate and kept us dry and reasonably warm, but Celia being Celia wanted to ‘explore the possibility’ of larger accommodation. That was where the day went slightly out of kilter. We looked up on the Net to find a camping place that sold tents, and decided on somewhere near Stratford upon Avon. However it happened, I don’t know, but our Sat Nav took us off up past where we thought we ought to be going, and next thing we knew we saw a sign: Welcome to Coventry. We didn’t actually believe it until some time later when we checked it with someone in a shop!
Anyway, the first place we looked for proved extremely difficult to find, and several wrong starts and wrong turns made us a little fretful. Quite fretful, in fact. Eventually we found the place only to discover that caravans were their big thing and tents were not. In fact, the bloke in there was so offhand and casual about us as customers, and kept saying to his offsider (I don’t know anything about tents) that I said to the woman who finally did offer some help: is he always like this?
She redirected us to a much better and bigger place - a huge place, in fact - where they not only knew how to treat customers but had everything you could wish for. And now I’m typing this in a tent that is stand-uppable in. Which is good.
But the day wasn’t finished. Since it was late we decided to find somewhere near Coventry to stay in our new tent. The first on the list was so difficult to find that I spent a quarter of an hour in a pub with the publican and his two barmaids trying to figure out where the heck it was. We eventually found it and apart from being almost non-sign-posted, there was little sign of any amenities, any life, anyone else staying there - anything except a bunch of rough looking caravans that had seen better days. I refused to give it any more time in the day, and we headed for another one, that is vastly superior. Where it took us three-quarters of an hour to put up the new tent. We’ll improve, no doubt!

God is Good!

Yesterday we travelled down from Cambridgeshire to London. We made a long stop on the way at a National Trust house, which I’ll write about in another post.
Our trip into London was both what we expected and more than we expected. We haven’t really driven in the capital much, apart from our trip to Rochester, and this time we were actually having to go through areas that were very built-up and traffic-heavy. So it was stop-start, brake-accelerate, in and out of first and second gear (we could well do with an automatic) and in general rather stressful (though to give me a modicum of credit, I kept my cool - and I wasn’t even driving!)
The trip took far longer than our poor little Sat Nav had estimated at the beginning, because there were so many blockages and hold-ups (a normal London day, it seems). In the end, we were about five to ten minutes from our destination when Celia suddenly yelled that the brake had given up the ghost (well, she communicated that without words almost), grabbed the handbrake and we swerved to the side of the road. Fortunately we weren’t going fast, so it wasn’t a completely awful moment. We held fire for about ten minutes, while I suggested that perhaps with all the braking we’d been doing the brakes had overheated and given up temporarily. Celia gave things another go, tentatively, when we thought it might be safe, but they were still kaput.
Frazzlement.
We looked up the number of the AA on the Net: our little mobile connect friend was working wonderfully at full speed, as has done so everywhere in London. There was a number to ring for mobile phones, so we tried that. After some discussion as to who we were and why we should be ringing them, we were informed that there was no reciprocal agreement between the UK and NZ, as we’d been informed, and that just to get someone to come out would cost us £99! To join, according to the friendly lady, would cost even more. Meanwhile Celia was looking at the AA page on the Net where there was no indication that the price was anything like that. In the end we said we’d think about it.
By this time I was needing to go to the loo rather desperately (it’s one of the hazards of travelling) and because I’d seen a boy talking to the a man in the house we were parked outside, and because the bloke had seemed friendly enough, I thought I’d try and see if he’d let me use his toilet.
He was extremely friendly, and when I’d done my bit, he asked what the problem was with our car. I explained. He said, just give me a minute to get the kids in bed, and I’ll come and see if I can do anything. While we waited he must talked to his wife because she appeared and suggested we come in and have a cup of tea and that she was just ringing her Bank who covered her family for roadside mishaps to see if they would help us.
Amazingly that was fine: as long as she was with us when the RAC driver arrived, we’d be covered. Isn’t that extraordinary? We sat in the couple’s front room and talked about who they were and who we were (he’s a publisher of little children’s books - Little Tiger Press) and apart from the fact that we were still feeling rather frazzled by the incident, it couldn’t have been a more pleasant experience. (We’d called to the place we were going to, to tell them we might be running late - and they rang back suggesting a similar approach to the problem!)
But the two virtual strangers were like a couple of angels sent from heaven. Bless ‘em, as they say a lot over here.
Anyway the RAC man arrived, and of course the brakes were fine. No oil on the road, no obvious problems except that the brake fluid was hot. He recommended we get the car to a garage in the morning and have the fluid flushed and changed. And then followed us all the way to where we were staying for the night to make sure we got there safely. And we got there at the time we were supposed to!
This morning we went to the garage our overnight hosts recommended and they did the job within an hour! We thought we might be looking at a matter of days. Since then, we’ve driven twice through London traffic with the same stop-start issues, and the brakes have held.
Good old God.

On the road again

After a couple of days recovering from the Luxembourg leg of our trip, as it were, we’ve now begun the next stage: tenting our way around England for about three weeks. The idea of tenting rather than going to places where we have a proper roof over our head has been debated for a few weeks; Celia wants to save money and certainly this approach will help. But I’m not the world’s most enthusiastic tent person. Especially when it means we have to set up every night in a new place and take down every morning.
Well, tonight’s the first night, and we managed to get into a caravan/holiday home place by a river in a village called Huntingford Abbots. (Yes, I know.) The village is full of old thatched roof houses, and some more modern ones that fit into the scheme of things, and it’s very quiet. It’s near the town of Huntingdon.
We came here via Newmarket, a place that was a bit of a disappointment. Probably not Newmarket’s fault at all, but having read so many Dick Francis books in which it appears, and listening at the moment on a cassette in the car to yet another of Francis’ Syd Halley stories, perhaps my expectations were too high. I didn’t think there was much atmosphere in Newmarket, and I only saw one jockey the whole time we were there. Perhaps we should have gone there to see the races, as I’d suggested a while ago.
We were going to check in at a camping site nearer to Newmarket, but we noticed in the book as we were heading there that we couldn’t park our car beside our tent. Which would have been painful when it came to hoisting all the gear out of the car and into the tent, or when we were cooking and so on. As it is we seem to have taken over the place.
Anyway, tomorrow night we have to be in London (New Malden, to be precise, which is more like Kent than London proper) and we’ll be sleeping in a real bed there. So we’ll hardly have got used to tenting than we’ll be back to ‘normality.