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.

Gadding about

I don’t think I’ve travelled so much in a car since I was with the Opera Quartet in New Zealand back in the 60s. Because everything you want to go to is somewhere else, as it were, and by somewhere else I mean not within walkable distance or hop in the car distance, we seem to spend a lot of time driving. Trips that in NZ would have been considered major are here just part of the day. Driving to Norwich regularly is a good twenty-five-minute trip, or driving to Birmingham yesterday was like driving from Dunedin to Timaru, except that we had to drive on three lane highways regularly at speeds of up to 120 kph. You kind of get used to it, but it isn’t my idea of fun. Fortunately we’ve bought lots of audio books at various op shops and have been listening to them to pass the time on the long hauls. I’ve even driven to Norwich and back twice by myself. Now for someone who wasn’t keen on driving in England at all when we came, that’s pretty good going.
I spent much of yesterday (Saturday) at the PodCamp in Birmingham. I’ll be writing about it in due course on another blog or two, but suffice to say for the moment it was a stimulating and unusual experience. Celia went wandering in Birmingham itself, wore herself out, joined me at the PodCamp and listened in on a conversation between a dozen or more highly articulate podcasters, and then we drove home via Coventry Cathedral. (Which was terrific, but very focused on the sombre.) Then we had to sort out stuff for coming to Luxembourg, and this morning I was up just after six, because we had to leave fairly early to get to Stansted Airport for our flight. My brother-in-law drove us to the airport, we had to wait around for something like two and a half hours, often in queues, get onto a cramped plane, fly for an hour, meet up with Stephen C, whom I haven’t seen for around 35 years, and be driven by him from Frankfurt Hahn airport to his home in Luxembourg. And then of course it was catch-up time for Stephen and his wife, and Celia and me. Celia has retired exhausted to bed at an hour almost unheard of for her (8.30 English time, 9.30 Luxembourg time) and I’m sitting in a half-darkened room trying to get down some notes about what’s been happening.

Heading for Birmingham and the PodCamp

We drove to Birmingham today, after having spent most of the morning cleaning up the house we’ve been staying in for a month. Celia doesn’t do a cleaning-up job by halves, so the place is probably better off than it’s been in months! (Nah, my niece is a pretty thorough cleaner too…)
The trip to Birmingham was supposed to take two and a half hours, and would have done if we hadn’t got slowed down in a couple of place. All in all it was a pretty straightforward trip, even if our Sat Nav did seem to be taking us an awful long way south before she sent us west. But we had a couple of mishaps with reading what she said, and had one detour while on the M1, and then another couple when we got to Birmingham city itself. We didn’t either of us see much of the city because we were so focused on Malvina that we had little time to notice anything else.
Anyway, we’re ensconced in a hotel out in the suburb of Edgbaston, which seems to be on one edge of the city (there’s a Welcome to Birmingham sign just along the road). Edgbaston has seen better days, I think, and a major rebuilding program must be due to go on. More than a dozen grand old three-storey houses on the other side of the main road are due for demolition, and the hotel we’re in has seen better days by far. It’s a bit of a rabbit warren. After we’d parked the car round the side of the building, we went in the front and were then taken by the proprietor along two or three corridors and through the dining room (one table and four chairs, tv, fridge, two microwaves), through another corridor and found that our room was right beside where we’d parked the car.
Later on we went out and found a Chinese (sorry, Cantonese) restaurant, and ordered takeaways. While we were waiting we were asked to sit in an area lower than the main restaurant. It smelt dank and musty, and there was no carpet on the floor. Turned out that with all the rain this summer, the place has been flooded out, and they’ve had a real job drying it.
I’m in Birmingham to go to the Pod Camp - not sure what it’ll be like, and whether I’ll enjoy it at all (I’ve lost some of my initial enthusiasm for the idea), and I’ll probably be the oldest there. Time will tell. Celia is going to check Birmingham out on her own tomorrow, which will probably mean we’ll go home with a good deal more than we came with. As it was we loaded up the car when we left the place we’d been staying in for a month.