travel

Blackberries and the Internet, Devon, 9/25/05

We had a nice Sunday here in Devon. I read parts of the paper until everybody else was up, and we had a nice long breakfast of bread-- Chris’ bread and bread from a local bakery-- butter, margarine, honey, Chris’ jam, Marmite, melon, grapes, and dried apricots. We studied the train schedules and figured out which of our plans are possible and which are not. We wrote some emails, looked at photos of various small towns in northern Italy where it might be nice to go for Gemma’s birthday, read news (go White Sox!), looked around on Hospitality Club, looked at ferry schedules, and all sorts of other web nonsense that distracted us from the gorgeous sunny day outside.

Tom showed me a guide book for Greece. We’re thinking now that November might be largely devoted to Croatia, Greece, and Turkey. If Janusz gets back to us about the place in Krakow, then we might not have any time for Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia, which would be very sad. Berlin has also been squeezed out, although I’m still hoping we’ll get there at least for a weekend from Krakow. It looks like we’ll be in St. Petersburg for New Year’s Eve, and for a few days afterward, and then we’ll have 3 weeks to explore Mongolia and China. Sigh... the world is so big, and we’re not even east of where we started yet. It was definitely worth waiting around in the UK for Tom and Chris to get back from their vacation, though. We’ve had a great time everywhere we’ve been, except for that second Megabus.

Tom and Chris went out in the afternoon to look at some green house. Gemma and I edited photos, wrote more emails, and changed our itinerary some. I found a little Italian language instruction book, and Gemma found some French lessons on the web, and we started trying to remember what we’d learned years ago. I think I’ve started to separate Italian from Spanish some by now, but I have almost no vocabulary. I still remember all the flavors of ice cream, though.

After a while, we decided to make ourselves useful by going to pick blackberries. Some of the hedges that separate Tom & Chris’ land from their neighbors’ are blackberry bushes, and we had eaten blackberries and yogurt and blackberry and apple pie. They seemed to find blackberry picking somewhat tedious, and said that any day now some guy would show up and clip back their hedges, and that would be it for blackberries this year. The ram lambs all came up to us curiously, wondering what we had brought them, when we crossed their land. They wouldn’t let Gemma pet them, though, and eventually went away. We picked a pint or more blackberries, and watched a fox move stealthily across the cattle’s field.

The Coastline Trail, Devon, 9/24/05

On our second day in Devon, Chris was giving weaving lessons and Tom had to visit with an official from his mother’s nursing home about some misbehavior in the night. He offered to drive us to a town near his destination, where we could hike along the coast on a trail that he enjoys. The plan was to meet up with him in Lyme Regis, further down the coast in and hour and a half.

The Bakeries, Bute, 9/19/05

At the end of our last night in Bute, we got the chance to visit two bakeries. We’d been at Fiona’s and Thomas’ house, where Fiona made delicious macaroni and cheese, we sorted out various logistical things on the internet, talked about music and racing, listened to music and watched old grunge rock music videos, and got steaming with the help of Frosty Jack, which has got to be the nastiest stuff I’ve ever had to drink.

York, 9/20/05 to 9/22/05

We got to York late, after missing our ferry and thus or bus. We travelled 11 hours or so, from Bute to Glasgow to Leeds to York, and arrived very tired. Our hosts, Emily and Joss, are graduate students in sustainable business and computer science, respectively. They live in a colorful and clean apartment just outside the city walls. Emily took us for a walk around the city en route to a grocery store. We were nearly trampled more than once by Ghost Walks, where tourists of all shapes and sizes gather in massive groups and run around the city looking for one of the city’s numerous and well-advertised ghosts. York apparently has more ghosts than any other city, although several other cities also claim this.

The Abandoned Church, Bute, 9/19/05

Going back in time...

On our last day in Bute, which I guess was three days ago now, we got up early, intending to go out with Tommy and Fiona and the dog and walk for several miles. Instead, we woke up to find pouring rain and howling wind. Tommy and Fiona came over and we went for a drive instead. We went to the abandoned church that we had seen from a distant road the day before. It stood in the middle of an old graveyard, full of weathered headstones tilted by the years. The roof was gone entirely, and only a few fragments of glass clung to the windows. The wind was blowing hard and cold rain whipped against our faces as we climbed through the rubble and looked around inside. Our photos unfortunately failed to capture the dramatic weather, and I have resolved to learn how to use the camera better. The lesson this time I think was that even a dark sky still has enough ambient light to flush out a photo taken with a long shutter speed. That sounds like a lesson that I should have learned taking film photos, but for some reason I didn’t.

Greatly Anticipated Sheep Pictures, Devon, 9/23/05

I’ll skip past five or six entries that are ready to go up, about Bute and York, abandoned churches, ghosts, and ciders that smell like cat urine, in favor of the sheep pictures from Devon. Eventually, everything will be posted, I promise. I've heard in Mongolia, you can't even spit without hitting a wireless hub.

We are staying with Tom and Chris, old friends of my (John’s) parents. I haven’t seen them since I was 2 years old, or something like that. They live on a farm in Devon, in the southwest corner of England, in an area of rolling hills and patchwork fields separated by hedges and narrow lanes. They live in a beautiful old house with a fearsome cat who takes down rabbits and rats and then retires to the armchair or in the front of the stove for a nap. The land is called Little Pirzwell, and the nearby lands are called things like Upper Pirzwell and Pirzwell St. John, since they all used to belong to the same estate.

The Isle of Bute

We're in York now, but we'll have several posts on Bute soon. We made some fantastic new 'mates,' explored some 'dodgy' abandoned buildings, and 'got steamin' once or twice. Our bodies are grateful that we've left Scotland, where we drank too much and never layed eyes on a vegetable, but we are still sad to be gone.

London to Glasgow

9/16/05

Tonight we’re in Glasgow, in a beautiful bed and breakfast that we payed too much for because, mysteriously, all the hostels were full. The small portion of Glasgow that we’ve seen is a dramatic gothic area, with towering dark spires, old stone and wrought iron, cobblestone and dark wood, and statues of saints carrying the devices that tortured and killed them.

Back in London

9/15/05 (continued)

Yesterday, we set out around 10:30 to meet a Hospitality Club guy named Ian. He lives in Cardiff, but wanders around the UK a lot, and arranged to meet us and show us around a bit. We met in the city and headed off to see the sights. Ian’s favorite pass times seem to be wandering around the UK, making snide comments about Americans, and checking out girls. In spite of his professed distaste for Americans, he graciously spent the afternoon and evening wandering around various sights with us and sharing his knowledge of London’s history. We saw the Tower Bridge (popularly and incorrectly known as the London Bridge, which is in fact, an entirely different bridge), the Tower of London, Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace, Tony Blair’s house (10 Downing Street), assorted other churches and monuments, and a lot of police with shotguns for a nation that doesn’t arm their police.

. . . and a few from Glasgow

The bridge near Kelvingrove Park, right by our hotel.