This blog is the diary of the two-week trip to England and Scotland (plus 20 minutes in Wales) taken by Sue Anne, Bruce, Aimée, and Steve in October 2008. We spent the first week traveling around southern Scotland and northern England, and then we set ourselves up for the second week in a 400 year old cottage in Ledbury in the west of England and took day trips from there. It was Aimée and Steve’s first time in the UK, so they ducked out for a couple of days to go see London, while Sue Anne and Bruce stayed back in the West Country where we had lived for three years back in the early 1980s.
We wrote this a day at a time, typically in the evening after a day’s adventure (though we didn’t get around to documenting the last few days till after we had returned home). We often didn’t have good access to the Internet or found ourselves otherwise occupied, so we were pretty much limited to posting just text on our blog. But now that we’ve returned home we’ve had the time to include lots of pictures, explanatory links, and a series of pen and ink sketches and water colors that Sue Anne created along the way.
The daily blog was a great way of letting the folks back home know where we were and what we were doing, and it captured our impressions as they existed at the moment. But since the format of blogs tends to be oriented toward current information, it’s now a bit awkward to follow our trip in the normal chronological order. So here are a couple of ways you can navigate the trip in the order in which we took it:
Click here to go back to February, when we first started to plan the trip.
or if you want to get right into it:
Click here to go straight to October 4th when we got on the plane.
At the bottom of each page thereafter, you’ll see links for Newer Post and Older Post. Keep clicking Newer Post and you’ll work your way day by day through the whole trip and a loooong post-trip summary of our impressions, and finally you’ll end up back here. Or you could do it backwards by just continuing down from where you are now.
The Links section off to the right will take you to a map of our entire itinerary and a few other sites that might be of interest.
You can click any of our pictures to see a full-sized version in a new window. If some of the pictures in the blog look dark, it’s because of the way they were compressed to fit. The detail will show through if you look at them full-sized. The pictures with the controls at the bottom are videos. Click the Triangle icon to play them. They probably require a recent version of Flash to work correctly. And make sure your speakers are turned on.
We hope you enjoyed traveling with us. We’re not sure where or when the next trip will be, but you can be sure that we’ll be blogging it. Stay tuned!
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Impressions
This is the third time we’ve blogged from a foreign trip: 2006 in China, 2007 in Italy, and now in the UK. Fourth if you count the diary of our 2000 trip to Germany back before the word ‘blog’ was invented, but that was all published after the fact rather than day by day. All these trips were in October, a great month for travel!
It was fun recording our immediate experiences and impressions every day, and we still look back at these and relive those adventures as we experienced them. But we found when we came home after each trip that there were things we had taken from the experience that weren’t tied to the specific chronology of events but developed over time, from reflection, or from further research. So we found ourselves creating a summary of our impressions after each of those trips. The Germany one was pretty short, the China one went on forever since it was all so new and exotic, and the Italy one was in between. Here are the major impressions we took from this trip. This one got to be pretty long, because we saw so many things from so many perspectives.
This was Aimée and Steve’s first time in the UK, so they were taking it all in and comparing against mental images, travel books, TV programs and movies, and other sources of expectation. There was new stuff for Sue Anne and Bruce to learn and see as well, but with our history of having lived for three years in Cheltenham 25 years ago, and traveling around the country a few times since, our impressions were strongly aimed at understanding what had changed and what was still as we remembered. You can see that slant in a lot of our writing.
So here, in no particular order, are some of the impressions we all brought back with us. And some of the lessons that we learned. And a few hints that you might not find in the travel guides.
Friendliness
Wow! Not a surprise, but it was wonderful to have all our memories and expectations so well reinforced. We described a lot of these occasions earlier in the blog, and there are so many others: the people at the harvest service and luncheon in Ledbury, the woman who ran out to our car in Northleach to tell us that we had left our postcards behind in the shop, all the hotel and B&B operators, various people in pubs, shops, museums, and tourist offices, the weaver at the Paisley Museum, the printer and the gift shop keeper at Beckford Silk and the proprietor who offered us a tour at a time when they weren’t offering tours, so many people who wanted to talk about the one or two pieces of America that they were familiar with, and of course our wonderful friends of many years whom we were so happy to be reunited with and introduce to Aimée and Steve.
Hotels and B&Bs
We mentioned this earlier in the blog, but it’s worth repeating. B&Bs and the smaller hotels often tend to be sideline activities, run by people who have other things going on in their lives. They might not even live on the premises or staff them full time. So they like to have a rough idea of when you expect to arrive, and they’re especially appreciative if you can give them a heads up if you’re going to be delayed. Arrive after hours and it’s likely that you’ll find a note saying that you can pick up the key at the pub across the street. Many are locked at night, so be sure you’ve got the door key when venturing out for dinner or an evening stroll. Be aware that hauling your own luggage up many flights of circular stairs can be part of the picture.
Many places will volunteer to provide the newspaper of your choice for you at breakfast, but don’t expect it to be free. Similarly, don’t pick up a paper that happens to be sitting at the reception desk on your way in to breakfast without inquiring, as it might have been reserved by somebody else. It’s not USA Today!
Guide Books
We were all helped by the suggestions provided by Rick Steves, both in his books and in his TV series. He had lots of good insights into places to go and into trip planning in general. Though he didn’t have anything to say about Ledbury! It was our own undiscovered gem.
Back in one of our early blog posts, we mentioned UNESCO World Heritage as a great source of information for travel planning. You can be sure that any place listed there is great!
Driving
We signed up both Sue Anne and Bruce as authorized drivers of our rental car, but Bruce ended up doing all of it. It wasn’t that expensive to add a driver, and it was good insurance. Aimée and Steve, on their first trip to the ‘drive on the left’ part of the world, were happy to be observers and map readers. It’s hard to believe given the relatively small size of the place, but we managed to travel over 1500 miles in the course of our two weeks.
We were very happy with the Vauxhall Zafira minivan that we had been upgraded to. We did manage to squeeze all our luggage into the rear cargo area and under the sliding cover there, though it became ever more a challenge as the trip progressed and suitcases expanded, whether from purchases or from increasingly inefficient packing. The seating area was quite roomy for all.
As mentioned earlier in the blog, the width and position of the A-pillar (the framework at the edge of the ‘windscreen’) was quite distressing, as it was perfectly positioned to interfere with the view of oncoming vehicles at the thousands of roundabouts we encountered during the course of our trip. They do love their roundabouts! And the windshield wipers and directionals (‘indicators’) seemed to have a mind of their own, under the control of a computer which thought itself smarter than the driver.
With his experience of three years’ residence and numerous business trips, Bruce re-adapted quickly to British driving. Sit on the right, drive on the left, shift with the left hand, do the correct things at the roundabouts, come out of U-turns on the proper side of the street—all these skills came back quickly, though the last one was always the scariest and still is. (A friend of ours once drove into a head-on when coming out of a U-turn on the wrong side, shortly after returning to the US from England. Fortunately all survived unscathed.)
Even more important, as we had learned in the past, the instinctive actions all worked out well—things like which direction you have to pay the most attention to when making certain kinds of moves. Those are the ones that can get you, because they’re the ones you often perform without consciously thinking about. We know! The one accident we had during the time we lived in Cheltenham was the result of doing something American—making a right turn without giving proper attention to oncoming traffic. Ironically, we found on this trip that the location of that accident had been turned into a mini-roundabout, which would have given us the right of way had it been like that 25 years ago.
Sue Anne and Bruce followed our long-established protocol that the driver would ask and the associate driver would respond (or interject) in a fashion that NO! (or a similarly emphatic negative response) would mean “Don’t do something,” and a positive response would mean that it was something safe to do. For example, "Is anybody coming the other way?" would not be an acceptable form of question. The term ‘Big Truck!’ was also an acceptable negative interjection back at the time when we were driving our left-hand drive American car and needed to pass (‘overtake’) on a narrow road, where you almost had to commit yourself before the left-seated driver could get a good enough view of the oncoming traffic. Another part of the protocol: the word ‘right’ is never used to mean ‘correct.’ It always means the opposite of ‘left.’
GPS was invaluable in getting us into and out of cities, and it was generally pretty useful in longer range navigation, though maps, signs, and map readers could have handled that just as well. Road signs were generally quite clear and complete. GPS did present us with that peculiar two mile routing down the narrow farm track in Scotland, but we trusted it and indeed it did take us to our destination, after we managed to pass the big tractor coming in the other direction. Call it an adventure!
There was one time when Bruce reacted too quickly to a misunderstood voice command. We were all appreciative of the correcting maneuver made by the big lumber truck that was behind us at the time. Very appreciative. And there’s always that danger of not working hard enough to remember a route that you navigate with GPS, and then finding yourself clueless on a subsequent trip down the same road without it. It’s kind of like not knowing somebody’s phone number because all you can remember is where they are on speed dial. The moral of all of this is that there’s no substitute for understanding the big picture.
Speed limits on the motorways and A-route divided highways (‘dual carriageways’) were up around 70 or 80 MPH. (Yes, speed limits are still in MPH and distances in miles, though it’s illegal to sell in ounces, pounds, or gallons. And you buy 2x4s by the meter. Pints of ale are still very much OK, however!) Most everybody stayed pretty close to the speed limits, one way or another, and GPS gave out an annoying sound whenever it found us going too fast.
There were signs everywhere warning of speed cameras, but we were never sure how many of them were actually lurking out there. The only apparent ones were in the construction zones on the motorways, where they enforced a 40 MPH average speed. Picture going in, picture going out, computer analyzes your license plate, rate = distance over time! There were no surprises in the final reconciliation of our rental car bill, so we apparently never got our picture taken while in a compromising position.
Another thing we had learned from before is the necessity of consciously snapping back into our normal driving pattern after leaving the UK. This lesson occurred on the first morning of a trip to France from the UK, over 25 years ago. Why was that crazy French guy driving toward us on the wrong side of the road? Oops! Well, Bruce did OK in that department when we got home this time, except for an occasional left handed grope for the gearshift. Nothing too dangerous about that.
Toilet Paper
Yes, this is worth writing about! It was once an important part of every American tourist’s European experience. It was the currency of conversation among first time travelers and a frequent souvenir to bring home and show around. There used to be two varieties: shiny waxed paper, and gray with the texture of coarse sandpaper. During Bruce’s liaison assignment at a British government organization in the early 80s, the official toilet paper there was of the waxed variety, each sheet inscribed in blue ink with the legend ‘H. M. Government Property’ or words to that effect. He managed to sneak into the Director’s private loo along with a few other naughty people when at work one weekend, and we found that even that was equipped with the waxed stuff.
We Americans there all had our own private rolls of the soft variety that we procured at the nearby US Air Force base, which we carried with us on our trips down the hallway. Some of our British colleagues and friends, having no real appreciation of cost differences between the two countries, were amused by their belief that soft toilet paper was the only reason we shopped at the base.
Toilet paper experiences are all in the past! Soft paper is everywhere! There’s none of the nasty stuff any more. Some of the dispensers were a challenge, but it was worth the effort. Hot air hand dryers were most everywhere as well, and usually pretty powerful. Not the wimpy ones we remembered from the past.
Finance
Forget about travelers checks, money changing, and all that nostalgic stuff. ATMs and credit cards are everywhere. There are only a few minor cautions to be aware of:
Twenty-five years ago, sidewalks in England were simply filthy, especially in proximity to fish and chip shops (‘chippies’) or in dog walking territory. There’s been a revolution since then. Enough said.
Opening Hours
Opening hours for stores, restaurants, and especially pubs used to be very tightly controlled, by law, custom, or both. Among the most valuable information passed around among newly arrived members of our American community in Cheltenham, still living in hotels while awaiting the arrival of their household goods, was the discovery of restaurants that were open on Sunday. Indian and Chinese tended to be prevalent on this list.
Especially irksome was the inability to drop in at a favorite pub late on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon after a pleasant trip out in the countryside. That’s all changed now. ‘Licensing hours’ for pubs were progressively liberalized and ultimately abolished by 2005. It did take the publicans a while to decide how they were going to react to this newfound freedom, but by now things seem to have stabilized. Free enterprise!
We were surprised to find the grocery stores in Ledbury open as late as they were. It was convenient indeed—that’s how we got the strawberries for our celebration meal—but it did take a bit away from the evening charm of the place.
Britishisms
“Two countries divided by a common language,” wrote George Bernard Shaw! We tried to illustrate these differences throughout the blog as we came across them. There were none so striking that they interfered with communication, as has occasionally happened throughout history; it was just interesting to take them in and appreciate them as a part of the environment.
We talk that way among ourselves from time to time, just because it’s fun. Our favorite, an expression of thanks regularly used by a shopkeeper in Cheltenham, is “Thank you, thank you, thank you very much indeed, ta!” And it didn’t take a very large purchase at all to elicit this response from him. (‘Ta’ is said to be an abbreviation for ‘Thanks awfully (much).’ It’s more prevalent in certain strata of the class structure than in others. Makes it all the more fun to say. And it’s quick and easy. Ta!)
Politeness in general is a well known Britishism. A number of stores there have recently stopped accepting checks (‘cheques’), and it generally took them many words on an entire sheet of paper to announce this policy, acknowledge the consequent inconvenience, express their full regret for this action and their gratitude for your continued business (‘custom’), and explain all the reasons why they had to do it. Back in the US we’d accomplish this all in just two words, “No Checks!”
We wouldn’t call it impoliteness, but the British are very frank in their use of a number of terms that might be considered offensive in the US. ‘Spastic’ is one that quickly comes to mind, though its use is now on the downturn. ‘OAPs’ (Old Aged Pensioners, i.e. anybody of our age or greater) feature frequently in the news stories. We did often qualify for ‘concession’ prices (and never got carded), the best of which was Aimée and Steve’s 50% discount at a London theater on the best show in town. And we chuckled when we often came across this rather frank sign, which is also now the object of controversy (‘con traw’ ver see’).
Brits also have their own pronunciation for French words or even those that just sound French. Perhaps there’s a bit of spite going on here. For example, ‘chalet’ = ‘shally,’ ‘ballet’ sometimes = ‘bally,’ ‘brochures’ = ‘broshers,’ and the Belgian town Ypres of WW I fame is typically pronounced ‘Wipers!’
We very much enjoyed the book Brit-Think, Ameri-Think: A Transatlantic Survival Guide by Jane Walmsley. The author is an American married to a Brit, who has lived there for quite a while and come to see and appreciate many of the differences and the similarities. It’s a good mix of humor and sociology that can be appreciated and enjoyed on many levels, by the seasoned traveler or the aspiring one. Yes, it got a few low reviews at amazon.com (outdated, xenophobic, racist, brash defamatory lies!), but lots more reviewers thought highly of it and it averaged four out of five stars. We bought the first edition, and we’d surely give it five stars! It was reissued in a revised edition in 2003. You can get it used at Amazon for as little as $1.75 plus S&H.
Tea, Cress, and Pudding
About cress.... delicious sprouts of mustard cress were strewn about the food and plates in a lavish and joyful fashion when we lived in the UK in the 1980s. Now there is nary a sight of it. I guess it was just a fad. But it was so wonderful. I have sprouted it myself at home, and it is fun and worth the few days’ wait.
Tea...this was such a short but confusing word to me when we moved to England. Are we talking dried leaves to put into a pot? Or evening meal for the family? Or something else? I used to hear our neighbors calling their children in for ‘tea,’ meaning that their supper was ready. I learned that occasionally the word supper is used, but mainly in the north. Well, I was born in northern New England, so maybe it makes sense somehow. We never did get used to hearing people speak of ‘eating their tea.’
Then there is the term ‘nursery tea’ which means stodgy sugary foods given to pre-schoolers. Such as jam sandwiches, crisps, and squash (orange kool-ade). Note that the word ‘jam’ in Britain includes what we would call either jam or jelly. ‘Jelly’ in Britain is Jello! We still remember the lightbulb moment when we discussed this with an English friend. Her eyes lit up and she said, “Ah, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches! Now I understand.” To them it would be peanut butter and jam sandwiches, and the alternative—with Jello—was simply unimaginable.
Moving up the ladder of tea-ness is a nice cuppa. This is most likely grabbed in a cafe or teashop while out shopping. It is not expensive and there’s lots of cookie-like sweet treats to go with it. Bar cookies are called slices. If someone invites you over for a proper chat, odds are you will get a nice cuppa and a bickie (biscuit or cookie). Or possibly some very bad instant coffee. A cream tea is just a nice cuppa with a scone, jam, and some very thick clotted cream, maybe from Devon if you are close enough.
Now we get on to afternoon tea. This is usually served in hotels and costs a bunch of money. Pots of fancy tea, savory sandwiches including some kind of fish and meat, and several small cakes. I don’t much care for afternoon tea, because of the cost, and I dislike all that much sugar at one time. Now for the controversy. I was told that the way that Americans call afternoon tea ‘high tea’ is incorrect, the term meaning just family evening meal. Afternoon tea...fancy, high tea.....beans on toast. Americans refuse to believe this. But, I believe the term ‘high tea’ can be found on some signs in the UK. It is still unclear to me if this term is used authentically in the UK, or they are just luring in American tourists. But where did the term ‘high tea’ come from? I believe that if you were well off, this afternoon thing was just to tide you over until 8 PM when you could dine big time. If you were poor, ‘high tea’ or tea was all you got before you fell into bed.
Another befuddling term: pudding. It usually means simply dessert. It doesn’t appear to ever mean stuff like chocolate pudding. There is blanc mange (pronounced ‘bluh monge’), a French phrase for what North Americans would call pudding. You can buy it in a can, with the label Mont Blanc. Delicious. They do tend to use a bit of French in terms associated with food. It’s ‘serviette,’ never ‘napkin.’
Back to ‘pudding’. In Britain, three things are important: crunchiness, gooeyness, and booziness. The best and most popular puddings combine all three, such as trifle. ‘Trifle’ is such a glorious example of British understatement. It is large, showy, upon a pedestaled bowl, with about ten ingredients. I once remarked that, had Americans (known for hyperbole) invented it, a trifle would be called a humongous. The sherry is the booze. The almonds on the top are the crunch. And most importantly, the sherry soaked cake, the custard, the jam, the cream and the jello supply the FIVE kinds of gooeyness.
I had a very good boozy berries in Ledbury, and that was the exact name on the menu. And all those Pavlova type things that combine the crunch of meringue, usually store bought, with more whipped cream, and fruit. It all looks wonderful on a plate, and makes a huge mess as soon as you try to break into the meringue. It is not a combination I would have thought of. Speaking of cream, usually cream is not whipped, but poured from a pitcher unto a dessert that is already rich and creamy. Summer pudding is just gooey, no crunches, but very good. Runny custard (pouring) is added on top of basically every pudding for extra gooeyness. It is warm, and usually comes from an instant mix called Bird’s. A set custard, as is more common in North America, is a flan.
Black pudding is a sausage made from blood. You either find that intriguing or gross.
Yorkshire pudding
This is neither pudding nor dessert! This is why travel is so much fun, once you get used to being confused. Yorkshire pudding is traditionally an egg mixture which is cooked in the fat drippings of roast beef. If done well, it resembles a pop over, done poorly it looks and tastes like very greasy scrambled eggs. It is an old housewife’s trick to dampen down the guests’ appetites just before serving the meat course. I noticed on this visit to the UK that a new sort of Yorkshire pudding seems to have been invented....something from the freezer case that looks and tastes like puff pastry. It was less greasy. So on the whole, I’d say it is an improvement at the carvery line.
One other item on the buffet line at the carvery which I thought horrid was this: rock hard, grease-brown balls about an inch in diameter. For all the world, they looked like ammunition for some ancient firearm.
Upon inquiry, it was revealed to me by the carver that they were sage stuffing! They were over cooked, dry, tasteless, and so far removed from stuffing as to be silly. I myself now cook stuffing in a separate pan from the meat, so technically speaking it should not be called stuffing. Maybe it is time to call it dressing, as some do. But, it tastes of onion, sage, poultry seasoning, and bread and has a proper gooey-crunchy ratio. Oh well.
And while on the subject, carveries were much more prevalent at the pubs than they used to be. At some places it’s ‘all you can eat,’ but at others it’s only one time through. Pubs are definitely upscaling themselves.
Mince Pies
The above talk of ratios reminded me how much I like British mince (meat) pies. Originally, mince meat pies were a mixture of meat and spices. Now they are usually just the spice mixture with some cooked fruit like chopped apple and raisins. The filling is quite sweet and cloying. In the US, too much filling and not enough pastry crust to balance out the tastes. The pies I have had in England are small, about 2 to 3 inches in diameter. Better ratio. Delicious.
BUT, ‘mince’ in Britain usually means ground meat. Such as you would find in a meat spaghetti sauce. (Sometimes accompanied by peas—in the sauce!) Still confused? I tried.
Green Grocers
These are corner shops that just sell vegetables. Are there any left? I didn’t see any. I remember the lines (‘queues’) at Vick’s in Cheltenham. Down the block. And huge bags of Brussels sprouts (simply ‘sprouts’ in British), golf ball or greater sized, hanging out along the brick facade.
Post Offices
These are also declining in number, so I’m told. Consolidation and modernization. We had one in our neighborhood which was in the back third of a candy store, or in British parlance, a sweet shop. They also sold cards and small toys. People would line up along the barrels of sweets to get to the Post office staff behind the wire grills. And not just for stamps, or to mail a package. Folks were there to receive in hand their government payment for various things I didn’t understand. One was for assistance with underage children. The street windows of the sweet shop were taped all up with notices and help wanted signs. This is where we found the man who came to pull weeds in our garden during the intervals when it wasn’t raining.
Our neighborhood is now missing its green grocer and its post office. Wow. The pharmacy is still there, where we bought a lot of cough drops, fluoride tablets for the kids’ teeth, and wart removal supplies for first daughter’s foot. The chippie (fish and chip shop) was still there, as well as the local (pub). On the whole, it looked prosperous and welcoming.
Marks and Spencers
This is a well known chain found in every sizable town in Britain. In the 1980s, the clothes were durable, well made, good price, and drab. And British-made. Greys, browns, and lots of pleated skirts and sensible shoes. Many sizes actually, but few patterns. And a fair selection of old lady rain hats. And plenty of grey clothing for school uniforms—no private schools included, as each of those had a custom pattern but the state schools (‘public’ in US terminology) were all rather generic.
But the food selection was fantastic in the sense of fresh ingredients, quality ingredients, and pristinely washed and chopped vegetables. Their food always looked like paintings of food to me. It was the total opposite of shopping at the food stall markets, both indoors and out. In the latter, you could get the full range of quality, including plenty of rotting apples. Cleverly rotting from the inside out, so you couldn’t detect it until you got home.
We had read that during the 1990s and 2000s the fortune of Marks and Spencers was falling, and the brand was searching to redefine itself. On the first day on our trip this year, 2008, we took our traveling companions into a Marks and Spencers in Halifax. (Really, our first shopping of the day was in a 99 p shop. Like a Dollar Store. We wanted to give them the whole British shopping experience.) Well, were we surprised. The clothes were stylish. Not one pleated skirt. A huge selection, and that was even before we got to the knickers department. Yikes, good bye granny pants! The food hall was just as I remembered it, maybe even larger.
Shelves and shelves held out a huge selection of Christmas cakes. We don’t have this tradition. And to see them in the shops in October! Of course the explanation is that they are filled with alcohol, like rum or brandy, which improves the flavor with aging. Another ‘pudding’ that satisfyingly mixes crunch (the rock hard icing), booze, and gooeyness.
Sandwiches
The land that invented sandwiches. I could live, happily, off of sandwiches in Britain. Before I salivate over varieties, let me say that partially I love them because they are so readily available. A list of just some of the places where I have bought and eaten fabulous sandwiches: Prêt À Manger, Boots the Chemists (pharmacy!), grocery stores, department stores, bakeries, and motorway newspaper/snack shops. You can’t go wrong.
Types of sandwiches I love: prawn salad, egg salad, smoked trout, cheese and pickle (chutney), savoury cheese. The last was bought at a bakery in York, and was shredded cheese mixed with mayo and a sort of Russian dressing. So, the fillings are good and the breads are first rate too, with plenty of whole grain with chewy bits like oats and wheat berries. I bought the last prawn sandwich from an open fridge at a motorway rest stop. (My brother-in-law said “are you crazy?”) It was delicious and I couldn’t have made a better one. One more observation: wrap sandwiches have arrived! We got some great ones in St. Andrews.
Bakeries
Bakeries are great in Britain. They too can produce baffling moments. Most of the confusion comes from the large number of names for the loaves which look pretty much the same to me. I thought it was tricky in France (bagette, bâtard, and ficelle...that’s about all I learned from a year living in France); you’d think it would be easier in an English speaking country. I still can’t tell a bloomer from a farmer’s arse. So I just point at the one I want. And don’t wait until the end of the day; they plan to run out, and it’s your responsibility to apologize if you come in late and ask for something they can’t deliver. After all, you’ve embarrassed them. But this means that their products are fresh and not filled with preservatives. And when they say CREAM they mean just that, not CREME. Just avoid lardy cakes. That is, hard to believe, sweet pastry with some sort of meat fat drippings poured all over it. I bought one by mistake, and thought there had been some sort of terrible kitchen accident, involving missed footing and grease flying through the air and landing on the product.
Snack Food
Yummy, yummy, yummy!
Ribena blackcurrent juice. Maltesers malted milk balls. Smarties, like M&Ms. And especially Jaffa Cakes, a layer of orange jam on a cookie, covered with chocolate!
A happy accumulation of our favorite British snacks
Salads
Excuse me if I generalize but, when I lived in the UK, in the 80s, ‘salad’ meant a lonely lettuce leaf, sitting forlornly next to a precooked piece of meat. Picture it: a lovely pub, with a family space where we could be with our children, ordering chicken salad. Cold wrinkled drumstick arrives, snubbing one solitary green leaf. Same with ham salad. But now, we seem to have an international definition of salad....fresh vegetables and greens mixed with a suitable dressing, artfully arranged. Yea! By the way, what ever happen to Ploughmans? (Cheese, bread, and chutney plate.)
Presentation
We were so pleased see greater attention to presentation of food in the pubs. There’s been a definite upscaling all around—quality, creativity, presentation. It’s great!
Cell phones
We had mixed experiences with our cell phones. Aimée and Steve’s phone from Telestial had worked fine for them on their trip to Germany and Austria last year. They did have to have a friendly chat with customer service before this trip to add funds and keep their existing funds intact, but that appeared to have worked out OK. They got satisfactory calls from back home when we were within range of appropriate local carriers, but their phone refused to call out for the first week of our trip. It took another long chat with customer service from a street corner phone booth (‘phone box’) in Ledbury to finally get things sorted out completely. Proof of success occurred when Aimée and Steve talked to each other, one on the cell phone and the other on the pay phone, both squeezed cozily into the same phone box.
Sue Anne and Bruce’s phone, an unlocked GSM ‘world phone’ (actually two of them), had no problem detecting the local networks but wouldn’t register with any of them. After we got home we determined that our SIM card had apparently gotten swapped with another one when the phone was in for maintenance. A quick test with a new card from Mobal seems to show that things are working OK now, but we won’t know for sure till the next trip.
We’d probably also invest in a card from Virgin Mobile or another British carrier on a subsequent visit to the UK (available ahead of time on eBay so you can tell your friends what your number will be), as their pricing structure is much better oriented toward reasonable rates within the country and overseas.
That’s a nice thing about GSM phones—you can change their personality with a different SIM card, as long as they’re not locked to a specific carrier. Just be sure that your phone covers the European bands (actually the bands everywhere but in North America). The phone could be described as ‘World Phone,’ ‘tri-band,’ or ‘quad-band,’ or it could be one that only works overseas such as the one offered by Telestial. If your US cell phone is of the GSM variety (T-Mobile or AT&T), and meets one of the three descriptions above it should work in Europe, but be prepared for hefty roaming charges. If it’s unlocked then you could get much cheaper service by using a local SIM card in it.
Internet
Internet was available at most of the hotels and B&Bs where we stayed during our first week, but we didn’t encounter too many Internet cafés or shops in the various towns and cities. Our 400 year old cottage in Ledbury wasn’t on-line, and there were very few wireless signals floating around the area, mostly all encrypted or very weak. There was one shop in Ledbury and the ’net was also available at the library, both during their rather limited operating hours which didn’t mesh too well with ours. So somehow our schedule on this trip just didn’t allow as much opportunity to select and upload pictures as we had been able to do on previous trips.
We’re sorry if we disappointed our faithful readers with this lack of real time visual reporting of our activities, and we hope we’ve made up for it with the pictures, videos, and drawings that we’ve been able to put in there now and the various interpretive links that we’ve added in to the original text.
We did take advantage of a good Internet connection in Edinburgh for a video chat with Karin (and Edgar the dog) using the free service ooVoo. It worked great!
Fiftieth Anniversaries
Our two weeks in the UK coincided with a number of interesting 50th anniversary observances that were noted in the British press: Paddington Bear, Blue Peter, and the first scheduled transatlantic passenger jet flight.
Everybody knows Paddington. Aimée and Steve’s train trip to London took them to Paddington Station, which was right in the center of the celebration of the lovable little guy.
Blue Peter is an absolutely wonderful children’s show on BBC TV. Our kids both enjoyed watching it. It’s a whole mix of interesting and educational things. No two programs are the same. They are constantly conducting mail-in competitions on one subject or another, the winners of which receive a coveted plastic button (‘badge’ in British). We really mean coveted. People keep these with their treasures forever. Karin won one when she was seven! And the Queen has a gold one.
The British deHavilland Comet operated by BOAC, the predecessor to the overseas part of British Airways, was the first jet to fly passengers across the Atlantic in scheduled service. It beat by three weeks the Boeing 707 operated by arch-rival Pan American. Airline travel has changed so much since then!
That’s all for now, but we may be back!
It was fun recording our immediate experiences and impressions every day, and we still look back at these and relive those adventures as we experienced them. But we found when we came home after each trip that there were things we had taken from the experience that weren’t tied to the specific chronology of events but developed over time, from reflection, or from further research. So we found ourselves creating a summary of our impressions after each of those trips. The Germany one was pretty short, the China one went on forever since it was all so new and exotic, and the Italy one was in between. Here are the major impressions we took from this trip. This one got to be pretty long, because we saw so many things from so many perspectives.
This was Aimée and Steve’s first time in the UK, so they were taking it all in and comparing against mental images, travel books, TV programs and movies, and other sources of expectation. There was new stuff for Sue Anne and Bruce to learn and see as well, but with our history of having lived for three years in Cheltenham 25 years ago, and traveling around the country a few times since, our impressions were strongly aimed at understanding what had changed and what was still as we remembered. You can see that slant in a lot of our writing.
So here, in no particular order, are some of the impressions we all brought back with us. And some of the lessons that we learned. And a few hints that you might not find in the travel guides.
Impressions
Sue Anne captured many impressions of our trip in a series of pen and ink sketches and watercolors that we’ve included throughout the blog. The entire set of them is also available in an album on the Web.Artwork
Friendliness
Wow! Not a surprise, but it was wonderful to have all our memories and expectations so well reinforced. We described a lot of these occasions earlier in the blog, and there are so many others: the people at the harvest service and luncheon in Ledbury, the woman who ran out to our car in Northleach to tell us that we had left our postcards behind in the shop, all the hotel and B&B operators, various people in pubs, shops, museums, and tourist offices, the weaver at the Paisley Museum, the printer and the gift shop keeper at Beckford Silk and the proprietor who offered us a tour at a time when they weren’t offering tours, so many people who wanted to talk about the one or two pieces of America that they were familiar with, and of course our wonderful friends of many years whom we were so happy to be reunited with and introduce to Aimée and Steve.
Hotels and B&Bs
We mentioned this earlier in the blog, but it’s worth repeating. B&Bs and the smaller hotels often tend to be sideline activities, run by people who have other things going on in their lives. They might not even live on the premises or staff them full time. So they like to have a rough idea of when you expect to arrive, and they’re especially appreciative if you can give them a heads up if you’re going to be delayed. Arrive after hours and it’s likely that you’ll find a note saying that you can pick up the key at the pub across the street. Many are locked at night, so be sure you’ve got the door key when venturing out for dinner or an evening stroll. Be aware that hauling your own luggage up many flights of circular stairs can be part of the picture.
Many places will volunteer to provide the newspaper of your choice for you at breakfast, but don’t expect it to be free. Similarly, don’t pick up a paper that happens to be sitting at the reception desk on your way in to breakfast without inquiring, as it might have been reserved by somebody else. It’s not USA Today!
Guide Books
We were all helped by the suggestions provided by Rick Steves, both in his books and in his TV series. He had lots of good insights into places to go and into trip planning in general. Though he didn’t have anything to say about Ledbury! It was our own undiscovered gem.
Back in one of our early blog posts, we mentioned UNESCO World Heritage as a great source of information for travel planning. You can be sure that any place listed there is great!
Driving
We signed up both Sue Anne and Bruce as authorized drivers of our rental car, but Bruce ended up doing all of it. It wasn’t that expensive to add a driver, and it was good insurance. Aimée and Steve, on their first trip to the ‘drive on the left’ part of the world, were happy to be observers and map readers. It’s hard to believe given the relatively small size of the place, but we managed to travel over 1500 miles in the course of our two weeks.
We were very happy with the Vauxhall Zafira minivan that we had been upgraded to. We did manage to squeeze all our luggage into the rear cargo area and under the sliding cover there, though it became ever more a challenge as the trip progressed and suitcases expanded, whether from purchases or from increasingly inefficient packing. The seating area was quite roomy for all.
As mentioned earlier in the blog, the width and position of the A-pillar (the framework at the edge of the ‘windscreen’) was quite distressing, as it was perfectly positioned to interfere with the view of oncoming vehicles at the thousands of roundabouts we encountered during the course of our trip. They do love their roundabouts! And the windshield wipers and directionals (‘indicators’) seemed to have a mind of their own, under the control of a computer which thought itself smarter than the driver.
With his experience of three years’ residence and numerous business trips, Bruce re-adapted quickly to British driving. Sit on the right, drive on the left, shift with the left hand, do the correct things at the roundabouts, come out of U-turns on the proper side of the street—all these skills came back quickly, though the last one was always the scariest and still is. (A friend of ours once drove into a head-on when coming out of a U-turn on the wrong side, shortly after returning to the US from England. Fortunately all survived unscathed.)
Even more important, as we had learned in the past, the instinctive actions all worked out well—things like which direction you have to pay the most attention to when making certain kinds of moves. Those are the ones that can get you, because they’re the ones you often perform without consciously thinking about. We know! The one accident we had during the time we lived in Cheltenham was the result of doing something American—making a right turn without giving proper attention to oncoming traffic. Ironically, we found on this trip that the location of that accident had been turned into a mini-roundabout, which would have given us the right of way had it been like that 25 years ago.
Sue Anne and Bruce followed our long-established protocol that the driver would ask and the associate driver would respond (or interject) in a fashion that NO! (or a similarly emphatic negative response) would mean “Don’t do something,” and a positive response would mean that it was something safe to do. For example, "Is anybody coming the other way?" would not be an acceptable form of question. The term ‘Big Truck!’ was also an acceptable negative interjection back at the time when we were driving our left-hand drive American car and needed to pass (‘overtake’) on a narrow road, where you almost had to commit yourself before the left-seated driver could get a good enough view of the oncoming traffic. Another part of the protocol: the word ‘right’ is never used to mean ‘correct.’ It always means the opposite of ‘left.’
GPS was invaluable in getting us into and out of cities, and it was generally pretty useful in longer range navigation, though maps, signs, and map readers could have handled that just as well. Road signs were generally quite clear and complete. GPS did present us with that peculiar two mile routing down the narrow farm track in Scotland, but we trusted it and indeed it did take us to our destination, after we managed to pass the big tractor coming in the other direction. Call it an adventure!
There was one time when Bruce reacted too quickly to a misunderstood voice command. We were all appreciative of the correcting maneuver made by the big lumber truck that was behind us at the time. Very appreciative. And there’s always that danger of not working hard enough to remember a route that you navigate with GPS, and then finding yourself clueless on a subsequent trip down the same road without it. It’s kind of like not knowing somebody’s phone number because all you can remember is where they are on speed dial. The moral of all of this is that there’s no substitute for understanding the big picture.
Speed limits on the motorways and A-route divided highways (‘dual carriageways’) were up around 70 or 80 MPH. (Yes, speed limits are still in MPH and distances in miles, though it’s illegal to sell in ounces, pounds, or gallons. And you buy 2x4s by the meter. Pints of ale are still very much OK, however!) Most everybody stayed pretty close to the speed limits, one way or another, and GPS gave out an annoying sound whenever it found us going too fast.
There were signs everywhere warning of speed cameras, but we were never sure how many of them were actually lurking out there. The only apparent ones were in the construction zones on the motorways, where they enforced a 40 MPH average speed. Picture going in, picture going out, computer analyzes your license plate, rate = distance over time! There were no surprises in the final reconciliation of our rental car bill, so we apparently never got our picture taken while in a compromising position.
Another thing we had learned from before is the necessity of consciously snapping back into our normal driving pattern after leaving the UK. This lesson occurred on the first morning of a trip to France from the UK, over 25 years ago. Why was that crazy French guy driving toward us on the wrong side of the road? Oops! Well, Bruce did OK in that department when we got home this time, except for an occasional left handed grope for the gearshift. Nothing too dangerous about that.
Toilet Paper
Yes, this is worth writing about! It was once an important part of every American tourist’s European experience. It was the currency of conversation among first time travelers and a frequent souvenir to bring home and show around. There used to be two varieties: shiny waxed paper, and gray with the texture of coarse sandpaper. During Bruce’s liaison assignment at a British government organization in the early 80s, the official toilet paper there was of the waxed variety, each sheet inscribed in blue ink with the legend ‘H. M. Government Property’ or words to that effect. He managed to sneak into the Director’s private loo along with a few other naughty people when at work one weekend, and we found that even that was equipped with the waxed stuff.
We Americans there all had our own private rolls of the soft variety that we procured at the nearby US Air Force base, which we carried with us on our trips down the hallway. Some of our British colleagues and friends, having no real appreciation of cost differences between the two countries, were amused by their belief that soft toilet paper was the only reason we shopped at the base.
Toilet paper experiences are all in the past! Soft paper is everywhere! There’s none of the nasty stuff any more. Some of the dispensers were a challenge, but it was worth the effort. Hot air hand dryers were most everywhere as well, and usually pretty powerful. Not the wimpy ones we remembered from the past.
Finance
Forget about travelers checks, money changing, and all that nostalgic stuff. ATMs and credit cards are everywhere. There are only a few minor cautions to be aware of:
- Notify banks and credit card companies that you’ll be out of the country. The people who recently set the round-the-world helicopter record forgot to do this and found that they suddenly had a hard time buying gas.
- If possible, carry more than one of the same type of card. This precaution saved us on last year’s trip to Italy, when one of our banks suddenly decided (and only once) not to accept our ATM card, but another bank where we had an account was quite happy to take its own card at the same ATM. It’s also wise to keep these cards in separate places in case of loss.
- British credit cards are now becoming ‘smart’ ones. They have memory inside and gold contacts that allow the memory to be read and written to. A very few places were equipped only with readers for this sort of card, though the vast majority still worked fine with normal magnetic stripes.
- Dispose of accumulated coins as quickly as possible. They’re heavy, they dig holes in pockets, and their value can mount up pretty quickly considering that the one and two pound currencies are now coin, not paper.
- Paper currency and some coins were replaced with a new series a few years ago. The old ones can be redeemed at banks but are not accepted in trade.
- Scotland issues its own paper currency. It’s legal in England, but sometimes it takes a bit of work to convince people to accept it, especially the farther south you go.
- Be prepared for sticker shock. Although the official exchange rate is currently about $1.50 per pound, the price of many common items in pounds is often close to or even more than the number you would see in dollars back home in the US. For example, we saw a 500 ml package of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream in Ledbury priced at £4.49, while a similar pint package at our local supermarket in the US would go for $3.49. Do the math and you’ll see that there’s a premium of about 80 per cent on the unit cost!
Twenty-five years ago, sidewalks in England were simply filthy, especially in proximity to fish and chip shops (‘chippies’) or in dog walking territory. There’s been a revolution since then. Enough said.
Opening Hours
Opening hours for stores, restaurants, and especially pubs used to be very tightly controlled, by law, custom, or both. Among the most valuable information passed around among newly arrived members of our American community in Cheltenham, still living in hotels while awaiting the arrival of their household goods, was the discovery of restaurants that were open on Sunday. Indian and Chinese tended to be prevalent on this list.
Especially irksome was the inability to drop in at a favorite pub late on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon after a pleasant trip out in the countryside. That’s all changed now. ‘Licensing hours’ for pubs were progressively liberalized and ultimately abolished by 2005. It did take the publicans a while to decide how they were going to react to this newfound freedom, but by now things seem to have stabilized. Free enterprise!
We were surprised to find the grocery stores in Ledbury open as late as they were. It was convenient indeed—that’s how we got the strawberries for our celebration meal—but it did take a bit away from the evening charm of the place.
Britishisms
“Two countries divided by a common language,” wrote George Bernard Shaw! We tried to illustrate these differences throughout the blog as we came across them. There were none so striking that they interfered with communication, as has occasionally happened throughout history; it was just interesting to take them in and appreciate them as a part of the environment.
We talk that way among ourselves from time to time, just because it’s fun. Our favorite, an expression of thanks regularly used by a shopkeeper in Cheltenham, is “Thank you, thank you, thank you very much indeed, ta!” And it didn’t take a very large purchase at all to elicit this response from him. (‘Ta’ is said to be an abbreviation for ‘Thanks awfully (much).’ It’s more prevalent in certain strata of the class structure than in others. Makes it all the more fun to say. And it’s quick and easy. Ta!)
Politeness in general is a well known Britishism. A number of stores there have recently stopped accepting checks (‘cheques’), and it generally took them many words on an entire sheet of paper to announce this policy, acknowledge the consequent inconvenience, express their full regret for this action and their gratitude for your continued business (‘custom’), and explain all the reasons why they had to do it. Back in the US we’d accomplish this all in just two words, “No Checks!”
We wouldn’t call it impoliteness, but the British are very frank in their use of a number of terms that might be considered offensive in the US. ‘Spastic’ is one that quickly comes to mind, though its use is now on the downturn. ‘OAPs’ (Old Aged Pensioners, i.e. anybody of our age or greater) feature frequently in the news stories. We did often qualify for ‘concession’ prices (and never got carded), the best of which was Aimée and Steve’s 50% discount at a London theater on the best show in town. And we chuckled when we often came across this rather frank sign, which is also now the object of controversy (‘con traw’ ver see’).
Brits also have their own pronunciation for French words or even those that just sound French. Perhaps there’s a bit of spite going on here. For example, ‘chalet’ = ‘shally,’ ‘ballet’ sometimes = ‘bally,’ ‘brochures’ = ‘broshers,’ and the Belgian town Ypres of WW I fame is typically pronounced ‘Wipers!’
We very much enjoyed the book Brit-Think, Ameri-Think: A Transatlantic Survival Guide by Jane Walmsley. The author is an American married to a Brit, who has lived there for quite a while and come to see and appreciate many of the differences and the similarities. It’s a good mix of humor and sociology that can be appreciated and enjoyed on many levels, by the seasoned traveler or the aspiring one. Yes, it got a few low reviews at amazon.com (outdated, xenophobic, racist, brash defamatory lies!), but lots more reviewers thought highly of it and it averaged four out of five stars. We bought the first edition, and we’d surely give it five stars! It was reissued in a revised edition in 2003. You can get it used at Amazon for as little as $1.75 plus S&H.
The food essay, largely by Sue Anne
Tea, Cress, and Pudding
About cress.... delicious sprouts of mustard cress were strewn about the food and plates in a lavish and joyful fashion when we lived in the UK in the 1980s. Now there is nary a sight of it. I guess it was just a fad. But it was so wonderful. I have sprouted it myself at home, and it is fun and worth the few days’ wait.
Tea...this was such a short but confusing word to me when we moved to England. Are we talking dried leaves to put into a pot? Or evening meal for the family? Or something else? I used to hear our neighbors calling their children in for ‘tea,’ meaning that their supper was ready. I learned that occasionally the word supper is used, but mainly in the north. Well, I was born in northern New England, so maybe it makes sense somehow. We never did get used to hearing people speak of ‘eating their tea.’
Then there is the term ‘nursery tea’ which means stodgy sugary foods given to pre-schoolers. Such as jam sandwiches, crisps, and squash (orange kool-ade). Note that the word ‘jam’ in Britain includes what we would call either jam or jelly. ‘Jelly’ in Britain is Jello! We still remember the lightbulb moment when we discussed this with an English friend. Her eyes lit up and she said, “Ah, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches! Now I understand.” To them it would be peanut butter and jam sandwiches, and the alternative—with Jello—was simply unimaginable.
Moving up the ladder of tea-ness is a nice cuppa. This is most likely grabbed in a cafe or teashop while out shopping. It is not expensive and there’s lots of cookie-like sweet treats to go with it. Bar cookies are called slices. If someone invites you over for a proper chat, odds are you will get a nice cuppa and a bickie (biscuit or cookie). Or possibly some very bad instant coffee. A cream tea is just a nice cuppa with a scone, jam, and some very thick clotted cream, maybe from Devon if you are close enough.
Now we get on to afternoon tea. This is usually served in hotels and costs a bunch of money. Pots of fancy tea, savory sandwiches including some kind of fish and meat, and several small cakes. I don’t much care for afternoon tea, because of the cost, and I dislike all that much sugar at one time. Now for the controversy. I was told that the way that Americans call afternoon tea ‘high tea’ is incorrect, the term meaning just family evening meal. Afternoon tea...fancy, high tea.....beans on toast. Americans refuse to believe this. But, I believe the term ‘high tea’ can be found on some signs in the UK. It is still unclear to me if this term is used authentically in the UK, or they are just luring in American tourists. But where did the term ‘high tea’ come from? I believe that if you were well off, this afternoon thing was just to tide you over until 8 PM when you could dine big time. If you were poor, ‘high tea’ or tea was all you got before you fell into bed.
Are you ready for another one? How about ‘tea towels’? Something to dry your tea with? Nope! We would call them ‘dish towels.’ They are used as part of the process called ‘washing up,’ which we would simply call ‘doing the dishes.’ And what does one use to do the washing up? Why washing up liquid, of course! Tea towels are the universal souvenir from scenic locations throughout the country, and when they wear out that means it’s time to go back.
Another befuddling term: pudding. It usually means simply dessert. It doesn’t appear to ever mean stuff like chocolate pudding. There is blanc mange (pronounced ‘bluh monge’), a French phrase for what North Americans would call pudding. You can buy it in a can, with the label Mont Blanc. Delicious. They do tend to use a bit of French in terms associated with food. It’s ‘serviette,’ never ‘napkin.’
Back to ‘pudding’. In Britain, three things are important: crunchiness, gooeyness, and booziness. The best and most popular puddings combine all three, such as trifle. ‘Trifle’ is such a glorious example of British understatement. It is large, showy, upon a pedestaled bowl, with about ten ingredients. I once remarked that, had Americans (known for hyperbole) invented it, a trifle would be called a humongous. The sherry is the booze. The almonds on the top are the crunch. And most importantly, the sherry soaked cake, the custard, the jam, the cream and the jello supply the FIVE kinds of gooeyness.
I had a very good boozy berries in Ledbury, and that was the exact name on the menu. And all those Pavlova type things that combine the crunch of meringue, usually store bought, with more whipped cream, and fruit. It all looks wonderful on a plate, and makes a huge mess as soon as you try to break into the meringue. It is not a combination I would have thought of. Speaking of cream, usually cream is not whipped, but poured from a pitcher unto a dessert that is already rich and creamy. Summer pudding is just gooey, no crunches, but very good. Runny custard (pouring) is added on top of basically every pudding for extra gooeyness. It is warm, and usually comes from an instant mix called Bird’s. A set custard, as is more common in North America, is a flan.
Black pudding is a sausage made from blood. You either find that intriguing or gross.
Yorkshire pudding
This is neither pudding nor dessert! This is why travel is so much fun, once you get used to being confused. Yorkshire pudding is traditionally an egg mixture which is cooked in the fat drippings of roast beef. If done well, it resembles a pop over, done poorly it looks and tastes like very greasy scrambled eggs. It is an old housewife’s trick to dampen down the guests’ appetites just before serving the meat course. I noticed on this visit to the UK that a new sort of Yorkshire pudding seems to have been invented....something from the freezer case that looks and tastes like puff pastry. It was less greasy. So on the whole, I’d say it is an improvement at the carvery line.
One other item on the buffet line at the carvery which I thought horrid was this: rock hard, grease-brown balls about an inch in diameter. For all the world, they looked like ammunition for some ancient firearm.
Upon inquiry, it was revealed to me by the carver that they were sage stuffing! They were over cooked, dry, tasteless, and so far removed from stuffing as to be silly. I myself now cook stuffing in a separate pan from the meat, so technically speaking it should not be called stuffing. Maybe it is time to call it dressing, as some do. But, it tastes of onion, sage, poultry seasoning, and bread and has a proper gooey-crunchy ratio. Oh well.
And while on the subject, carveries were much more prevalent at the pubs than they used to be. At some places it’s ‘all you can eat,’ but at others it’s only one time through. Pubs are definitely upscaling themselves.
Mince Pies
The above talk of ratios reminded me how much I like British mince (meat) pies. Originally, mince meat pies were a mixture of meat and spices. Now they are usually just the spice mixture with some cooked fruit like chopped apple and raisins. The filling is quite sweet and cloying. In the US, too much filling and not enough pastry crust to balance out the tastes. The pies I have had in England are small, about 2 to 3 inches in diameter. Better ratio. Delicious.
BUT, ‘mince’ in Britain usually means ground meat. Such as you would find in a meat spaghetti sauce. (Sometimes accompanied by peas—in the sauce!) Still confused? I tried.
Green Grocers
These are corner shops that just sell vegetables. Are there any left? I didn’t see any. I remember the lines (‘queues’) at Vick’s in Cheltenham. Down the block. And huge bags of Brussels sprouts (simply ‘sprouts’ in British), golf ball or greater sized, hanging out along the brick facade.
Post Offices
These are also declining in number, so I’m told. Consolidation and modernization. We had one in our neighborhood which was in the back third of a candy store, or in British parlance, a sweet shop. They also sold cards and small toys. People would line up along the barrels of sweets to get to the Post office staff behind the wire grills. And not just for stamps, or to mail a package. Folks were there to receive in hand their government payment for various things I didn’t understand. One was for assistance with underage children. The street windows of the sweet shop were taped all up with notices and help wanted signs. This is where we found the man who came to pull weeds in our garden during the intervals when it wasn’t raining.
Our neighborhood is now missing its green grocer and its post office. Wow. The pharmacy is still there, where we bought a lot of cough drops, fluoride tablets for the kids’ teeth, and wart removal supplies for first daughter’s foot. The chippie (fish and chip shop) was still there, as well as the local (pub). On the whole, it looked prosperous and welcoming.
Marks and Spencers
This is a well known chain found in every sizable town in Britain. In the 1980s, the clothes were durable, well made, good price, and drab. And British-made. Greys, browns, and lots of pleated skirts and sensible shoes. Many sizes actually, but few patterns. And a fair selection of old lady rain hats. And plenty of grey clothing for school uniforms—no private schools included, as each of those had a custom pattern but the state schools (‘public’ in US terminology) were all rather generic.
But the food selection was fantastic in the sense of fresh ingredients, quality ingredients, and pristinely washed and chopped vegetables. Their food always looked like paintings of food to me. It was the total opposite of shopping at the food stall markets, both indoors and out. In the latter, you could get the full range of quality, including plenty of rotting apples. Cleverly rotting from the inside out, so you couldn’t detect it until you got home.
We had read that during the 1990s and 2000s the fortune of Marks and Spencers was falling, and the brand was searching to redefine itself. On the first day on our trip this year, 2008, we took our traveling companions into a Marks and Spencers in Halifax. (Really, our first shopping of the day was in a 99 p shop. Like a Dollar Store. We wanted to give them the whole British shopping experience.) Well, were we surprised. The clothes were stylish. Not one pleated skirt. A huge selection, and that was even before we got to the knickers department. Yikes, good bye granny pants! The food hall was just as I remembered it, maybe even larger.
Shelves and shelves held out a huge selection of Christmas cakes. We don’t have this tradition. And to see them in the shops in October! Of course the explanation is that they are filled with alcohol, like rum or brandy, which improves the flavor with aging. Another ‘pudding’ that satisfyingly mixes crunch (the rock hard icing), booze, and gooeyness.
Sandwiches
The land that invented sandwiches. I could live, happily, off of sandwiches in Britain. Before I salivate over varieties, let me say that partially I love them because they are so readily available. A list of just some of the places where I have bought and eaten fabulous sandwiches: Prêt À Manger, Boots the Chemists (pharmacy!), grocery stores, department stores, bakeries, and motorway newspaper/snack shops. You can’t go wrong.
Types of sandwiches I love: prawn salad, egg salad, smoked trout, cheese and pickle (chutney), savoury cheese. The last was bought at a bakery in York, and was shredded cheese mixed with mayo and a sort of Russian dressing. So, the fillings are good and the breads are first rate too, with plenty of whole grain with chewy bits like oats and wheat berries. I bought the last prawn sandwich from an open fridge at a motorway rest stop. (My brother-in-law said “are you crazy?”) It was delicious and I couldn’t have made a better one. One more observation: wrap sandwiches have arrived! We got some great ones in St. Andrews.
Bakeries
Bakeries are great in Britain. They too can produce baffling moments. Most of the confusion comes from the large number of names for the loaves which look pretty much the same to me. I thought it was tricky in France (bagette, bâtard, and ficelle...that’s about all I learned from a year living in France); you’d think it would be easier in an English speaking country. I still can’t tell a bloomer from a farmer’s arse. So I just point at the one I want. And don’t wait until the end of the day; they plan to run out, and it’s your responsibility to apologize if you come in late and ask for something they can’t deliver. After all, you’ve embarrassed them. But this means that their products are fresh and not filled with preservatives. And when they say CREAM they mean just that, not CREME. Just avoid lardy cakes. That is, hard to believe, sweet pastry with some sort of meat fat drippings poured all over it. I bought one by mistake, and thought there had been some sort of terrible kitchen accident, involving missed footing and grease flying through the air and landing on the product.
Snack Food
Yummy, yummy, yummy!
Ribena blackcurrent juice. Maltesers malted milk balls. Smarties, like M&Ms. And especially Jaffa Cakes, a layer of orange jam on a cookie, covered with chocolate!
A happy accumulation of our favorite British snacksExcuse me if I generalize but, when I lived in the UK, in the 80s, ‘salad’ meant a lonely lettuce leaf, sitting forlornly next to a precooked piece of meat. Picture it: a lovely pub, with a family space where we could be with our children, ordering chicken salad. Cold wrinkled drumstick arrives, snubbing one solitary green leaf. Same with ham salad. But now, we seem to have an international definition of salad....fresh vegetables and greens mixed with a suitable dressing, artfully arranged. Yea! By the way, what ever happen to Ploughmans? (Cheese, bread, and chutney plate.)
Presentation
We were so pleased see greater attention to presentation of food in the pubs. There’s been a definite upscaling all around—quality, creativity, presentation. It’s great!
The impressions continue
Cell phones
We had mixed experiences with our cell phones. Aimée and Steve’s phone from Telestial had worked fine for them on their trip to Germany and Austria last year. They did have to have a friendly chat with customer service before this trip to add funds and keep their existing funds intact, but that appeared to have worked out OK. They got satisfactory calls from back home when we were within range of appropriate local carriers, but their phone refused to call out for the first week of our trip. It took another long chat with customer service from a street corner phone booth (‘phone box’) in Ledbury to finally get things sorted out completely. Proof of success occurred when Aimée and Steve talked to each other, one on the cell phone and the other on the pay phone, both squeezed cozily into the same phone box.
Sue Anne and Bruce’s phone, an unlocked GSM ‘world phone’ (actually two of them), had no problem detecting the local networks but wouldn’t register with any of them. After we got home we determined that our SIM card had apparently gotten swapped with another one when the phone was in for maintenance. A quick test with a new card from Mobal seems to show that things are working OK now, but we won’t know for sure till the next trip.
We’d probably also invest in a card from Virgin Mobile or another British carrier on a subsequent visit to the UK (available ahead of time on eBay so you can tell your friends what your number will be), as their pricing structure is much better oriented toward reasonable rates within the country and overseas.
That’s a nice thing about GSM phones—you can change their personality with a different SIM card, as long as they’re not locked to a specific carrier. Just be sure that your phone covers the European bands (actually the bands everywhere but in North America). The phone could be described as ‘World Phone,’ ‘tri-band,’ or ‘quad-band,’ or it could be one that only works overseas such as the one offered by Telestial. If your US cell phone is of the GSM variety (T-Mobile or AT&T), and meets one of the three descriptions above it should work in Europe, but be prepared for hefty roaming charges. If it’s unlocked then you could get much cheaper service by using a local SIM card in it.
Internet
Internet was available at most of the hotels and B&Bs where we stayed during our first week, but we didn’t encounter too many Internet cafés or shops in the various towns and cities. Our 400 year old cottage in Ledbury wasn’t on-line, and there were very few wireless signals floating around the area, mostly all encrypted or very weak. There was one shop in Ledbury and the ’net was also available at the library, both during their rather limited operating hours which didn’t mesh too well with ours. So somehow our schedule on this trip just didn’t allow as much opportunity to select and upload pictures as we had been able to do on previous trips.
We’re sorry if we disappointed our faithful readers with this lack of real time visual reporting of our activities, and we hope we’ve made up for it with the pictures, videos, and drawings that we’ve been able to put in there now and the various interpretive links that we’ve added in to the original text.
We did take advantage of a good Internet connection in Edinburgh for a video chat with Karin (and Edgar the dog) using the free service ooVoo. It worked great!
Fiftieth Anniversaries
Our two weeks in the UK coincided with a number of interesting 50th anniversary observances that were noted in the British press: Paddington Bear, Blue Peter, and the first scheduled transatlantic passenger jet flight.
Everybody knows Paddington. Aimée and Steve’s train trip to London took them to Paddington Station, which was right in the center of the celebration of the lovable little guy.
Blue Peter is an absolutely wonderful children’s show on BBC TV. Our kids both enjoyed watching it. It’s a whole mix of interesting and educational things. No two programs are the same. They are constantly conducting mail-in competitions on one subject or another, the winners of which receive a coveted plastic button (‘badge’ in British). We really mean coveted. People keep these with their treasures forever. Karin won one when she was seven! And the Queen has a gold one.
The British deHavilland Comet operated by BOAC, the predecessor to the overseas part of British Airways, was the first jet to fly passengers across the Atlantic in scheduled service. It beat by three weeks the Boeing 707 operated by arch-rival Pan American. Airline travel has changed so much since then!
That’s all for now, but we may be back!
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Saturday - Coming home
It was before dawn when we left our little cottage, our suitcase wheels rattling along the cobblestones and echoing in the narrow lane. We’d had a fine week in this ancient market town, well off the beaten track. Many American guide books don’t even mention this part of England, and a number of our friends from nearby Cheltenham had never been there as well. Interestingly, Robert Frost and his family lived just four miles away for several years in about 1910. While there, he wrote The Road Not Taken. We were glad we took the road to Ledbury.
We tried to compute a reasonable amount of gas to put in the car so that it would be almost empty but still driveable by the time we reached the airport in Manchester, a bit over 200 driving miles to the north. Our estimate turned out to be much too timid, as we ended up donating over a quarter tank to the rental car company, at a bit over a pound a liter (about $7/gal!). It’s so much easier when they have you bring it back full. Maybe that’s why they do this.
We had allowed plenty of time for contingencies, and going through all the various procedures at the airport went quite smoothly. Until we got to security. Steve aroused their suspicions and got the shakedown. There was apparently a metal spine in his shoes that looked quite menacing on the x-ray—they even took him over to the machine to see it for himself—and they were also quite fascinated by the package of sardines and tube of Smarties (like M&Ms) in his backpack. Sue Anne and Bruce ate all their Smarties before we got to the airport!
After the authorities came to conclude that Steve was indeed one of the good guys, we ate lunch, sat around for a bit, read the paper, and finally went over to our poorly marked departure gate. People were packed in rather tightly there, the acoustics were bad, and the announcer had a local accent that was really tough to tune into. But Sue Anne and Bruce did manage to pick out our last name in the middle of one announcement. Upon investigation we found that we had been chosen for an upgrade to Economy Plus, this apparently because Economy had been overbooked. By then we had gotten separated from Aimée and Steve, so we weren’t able to advise them of this news. We spotted them getting the full shakedown at the random inspection table just before boarding, a procedure that was mercifully done away with in the US and Canada many years ago. And as Murphy’s Law (Sod’s Law in the UK) would have it, their inspection was completed just as we arrived at the front of the line, and we became the next victims.
It was nice to finally settle down in our front row, wider than normal, more foot room than normal, Economy Plus seats. Sue Anne’s feet couldn’t even touch the wall in front of us. And we were soon to discover that the seats came with unlimited free wine, something no longer offered to those in the back of the plane.
Considering our brief and fitful sleep of the night before, it wasn’t at all difficult to doze off for much of the flight. We arrived on time in Chicago, easy trip through customs, good byes all around. Aimée and Steve took off toward the bus stop for the ride back to Madison, and Sue Anne and Bruce waited a few hours till our plane left for Manchester—the one in New Hampshire this time! We ransomed the Forester out of the parking lot, easy drive back to New London, and found the house in fine order. Simon the cat was asleep on the upstairs bed. He’s not much of a watchcat any more as he’s pretty much lost his hearing.
Home! And this time the New Hampshire house, which we had just moved into for real after years of a back and forth existence with our house in Maryland, really did feel like it was home.
Thus wraps up our journey. But stay tuned. We’ve got lots of drawings, pictures, and videos to put up here over the next few days, and we also plan to summarize the major impressions we took from this trip.
Saturday - October 18
We tried to compute a reasonable amount of gas to put in the car so that it would be almost empty but still driveable by the time we reached the airport in Manchester, a bit over 200 driving miles to the north. Our estimate turned out to be much too timid, as we ended up donating over a quarter tank to the rental car company, at a bit over a pound a liter (about $7/gal!). It’s so much easier when they have you bring it back full. Maybe that’s why they do this.
We had allowed plenty of time for contingencies, and going through all the various procedures at the airport went quite smoothly. Until we got to security. Steve aroused their suspicions and got the shakedown. There was apparently a metal spine in his shoes that looked quite menacing on the x-ray—they even took him over to the machine to see it for himself—and they were also quite fascinated by the package of sardines and tube of Smarties (like M&Ms) in his backpack. Sue Anne and Bruce ate all their Smarties before we got to the airport!
After the authorities came to conclude that Steve was indeed one of the good guys, we ate lunch, sat around for a bit, read the paper, and finally went over to our poorly marked departure gate. People were packed in rather tightly there, the acoustics were bad, and the announcer had a local accent that was really tough to tune into. But Sue Anne and Bruce did manage to pick out our last name in the middle of one announcement. Upon investigation we found that we had been chosen for an upgrade to Economy Plus, this apparently because Economy had been overbooked. By then we had gotten separated from Aimée and Steve, so we weren’t able to advise them of this news. We spotted them getting the full shakedown at the random inspection table just before boarding, a procedure that was mercifully done away with in the US and Canada many years ago. And as Murphy’s Law (Sod’s Law in the UK) would have it, their inspection was completed just as we arrived at the front of the line, and we became the next victims.It was nice to finally settle down in our front row, wider than normal, more foot room than normal, Economy Plus seats. Sue Anne’s feet couldn’t even touch the wall in front of us. And we were soon to discover that the seats came with unlimited free wine, something no longer offered to those in the back of the plane.
Considering our brief and fitful sleep of the night before, it wasn’t at all difficult to doze off for much of the flight. We arrived on time in Chicago, easy trip through customs, good byes all around. Aimée and Steve took off toward the bus stop for the ride back to Madison, and Sue Anne and Bruce waited a few hours till our plane left for Manchester—the one in New Hampshire this time! We ransomed the Forester out of the parking lot, easy drive back to New London, and found the house in fine order. Simon the cat was asleep on the upstairs bed. He’s not much of a watchcat any more as he’s pretty much lost his hearing.
Home! And this time the New Hampshire house, which we had just moved into for real after years of a back and forth existence with our house in Maryland, really did feel like it was home.
Thus wraps up our journey. But stay tuned. We’ve got lots of drawings, pictures, and videos to put up here over the next few days, and we also plan to summarize the major impressions we took from this trip.
Saturday - October 18Friday - Cheltenham
It's our last day before the flight home. Time was running out on us, so we all started the day with a final run to places in Ledbury that we needed to see more of—library, Internet café, and various shops and other attractions.
Across the lane from our cottage and one building up the hill was a small but well done city museum. The building was once a school house, last used in about 1830. It was very old with Tudor timbers. There were several activities and learning areas for school children, appropriately enough. A lot of work in restoration was done by the people of Ledbury. We felt a lot of civic pride in the town, as they appreciated what they had and knew that work was required to maintain its ambiance and quality of life.
We had earlier been told about a sale at St. Katharine’s Hall, so we marked our calendars. It didn't disappoint, with a large selection of plants, crafts, and baked goods. Aimée and Sue Anne both bought soap, and Sue Anne purchased a few regional baked specialities. The selection of goods and general atmosphere was similar to a W.I. (Women's Institute) sale. Except that men were on the scene, and were involved in selling too, and it was called a country market. W.I. is a national women's club, founded in 1915. They have 6,800 branches currently. They achieved fame and notoriety with their groundbreaking nude calendar, which became the basis for the 2003 movie Calendar Girls with Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. We all wished we could have bought plants, and we all enjoyed our chats with the sellers.
Then we were off on a drive down the now familiar M50 to the M5 to the northern approaches to Cheltenham.
We spent a bit of time wandering through the Blooms Garden Center, part of a West Country chain run by the appropriately named Bloom family. It’s always fun to visit garden centers in foreign countries, or other regions of your own country. You learn so much and expand your horizons.
There was a fascinating mix of absolutely everything pertaining to gardens and landscaping there, plus lots more. Love those golden conifers that pick up the British sunlight so nicely. And so cheap they were. But it’s highly illegal to bring back live plants, so all we could do is take notes of the varieties and vow to see what we could find when we got back home. Steve did discover a big bin of soon to expire seed packets on sale at 10p apiece, so we pawed through it and succeeded in digging out some novelty seeds to give to our grandkids, along with some other varieties to try out ourselves.
Then we continued down into Cheltenham to Peter and Rosemarie Shortell’s (see blog for Tuesday). A delightful lunch of cheese, paté, salmon and leek quiche, green salad, crunchy British bread, ale, perry (alcoholic pear juice), chocolate cake, and coffee. Easily enough to keep us going for quite a while.
We left the car there and walked down to the London Road, turning right and following it as it morphed into the Upper High Street, which ultimately became a pedestrian zone. Engaged in a bit of people watching as we continued down High Street and turned left onto The Prom, or more formally The Promenade. Cheltenham is well known for its broad tree lined streets. This is where the elegant shops begin.
Outdoor market stalls from France and Germany were lined up along the side of the kerb (curb) in what we learned was a monthly event. Sue Anne helped Aimée purchase a tablecloth from a seller who spoke only French. And looked like she wondered how she ever got this job, coming to the UK once a month.
We continued our walk up the gentle hill to the Montpellier section of town. Grabbed an outdoor table at the upmarket, spacious, and modern restaurant and bar named Ha Ha (chosen to contrast with tiny old pubs, thereby expanding the experience) and waited for our friend Sheila Taylor to arrive. We hadn’t seen her for quite a few years, and this was our first meeting since the death a few years ago of her husband Alick, who had also been a great friend and neighbor of ours. Sheila had just gotten back from holiday in Crete. She really gets around, always in a southerly direction it seems. Weather in Crete had been atrocious, however, quite a contrast to the situation in England while she had been gone.
We quickly settled in to a discussion of old times, children, grandchildren, and the like. And a report of what the neighborhood looked like in the summer 2007 flood. It took a while to get the attention of the wait staff, but we finally succeeded in ordering our drinks. Steve queried the waitress about the advertised special £3 price for the normally £5 drinks, but she said it was only valid after 5 PM. The computerized till (cash register) wouldn’t let her ring up anything but the official price until then. But she earned her tip when she waited till after 5 to enter our check into the system. The mojitos were great.
We walked part way back with Sheila, saying farewell when we got to the fork in the road. Recovered our car and headed back up the M5 to Ledbury. Just as we got off onto the M50 we encountered a brief traffic jam that gave us the opportunity to grab our cameras and take a few quick shots of the magnificent and extremely short lived sunset.
While had initially planned to eat our last meal at the Prince of Wales, the accumulation of a rich lunch, a late afternoon drink, and the effects of being on the go for two weeks seemed to have caught up with us, and we were content with a light supper in our cottage. Final packing (it all fit!), set the alarm for 5AM, and we were off to bed. We didn’t sleep well, and regularly we heard the hours, and our insomnia, counted out by the church bells.
Friday - October 17
Across the lane from our cottage and one building up the hill was a small but well done city museum. The building was once a school house, last used in about 1830. It was very old with Tudor timbers. There were several activities and learning areas for school children, appropriately enough. A lot of work in restoration was done by the people of Ledbury. We felt a lot of civic pride in the town, as they appreciated what they had and knew that work was required to maintain its ambiance and quality of life.
We had earlier been told about a sale at St. Katharine’s Hall, so we marked our calendars. It didn't disappoint, with a large selection of plants, crafts, and baked goods. Aimée and Sue Anne both bought soap, and Sue Anne purchased a few regional baked specialities. The selection of goods and general atmosphere was similar to a W.I. (Women's Institute) sale. Except that men were on the scene, and were involved in selling too, and it was called a country market. W.I. is a national women's club, founded in 1915. They have 6,800 branches currently. They achieved fame and notoriety with their groundbreaking nude calendar, which became the basis for the 2003 movie Calendar Girls with Helen Mirren and Julie Walters. We all wished we could have bought plants, and we all enjoyed our chats with the sellers.
Then we were off on a drive down the now familiar M50 to the M5 to the northern approaches to Cheltenham.
We spent a bit of time wandering through the Blooms Garden Center, part of a West Country chain run by the appropriately named Bloom family. It’s always fun to visit garden centers in foreign countries, or other regions of your own country. You learn so much and expand your horizons.
There was a fascinating mix of absolutely everything pertaining to gardens and landscaping there, plus lots more. Love those golden conifers that pick up the British sunlight so nicely. And so cheap they were. But it’s highly illegal to bring back live plants, so all we could do is take notes of the varieties and vow to see what we could find when we got back home. Steve did discover a big bin of soon to expire seed packets on sale at 10p apiece, so we pawed through it and succeeded in digging out some novelty seeds to give to our grandkids, along with some other varieties to try out ourselves.
Then we continued down into Cheltenham to Peter and Rosemarie Shortell’s (see blog for Tuesday). A delightful lunch of cheese, paté, salmon and leek quiche, green salad, crunchy British bread, ale, perry (alcoholic pear juice), chocolate cake, and coffee. Easily enough to keep us going for quite a while.
We left the car there and walked down to the London Road, turning right and following it as it morphed into the Upper High Street, which ultimately became a pedestrian zone. Engaged in a bit of people watching as we continued down High Street and turned left onto The Prom, or more formally The Promenade. Cheltenham is well known for its broad tree lined streets. This is where the elegant shops begin.
Outdoor market stalls from France and Germany were lined up along the side of the kerb (curb) in what we learned was a monthly event. Sue Anne helped Aimée purchase a tablecloth from a seller who spoke only French. And looked like she wondered how she ever got this job, coming to the UK once a month.
We continued our walk up the gentle hill to the Montpellier section of town. Grabbed an outdoor table at the upmarket, spacious, and modern restaurant and bar named Ha Ha (chosen to contrast with tiny old pubs, thereby expanding the experience) and waited for our friend Sheila Taylor to arrive. We hadn’t seen her for quite a few years, and this was our first meeting since the death a few years ago of her husband Alick, who had also been a great friend and neighbor of ours. Sheila had just gotten back from holiday in Crete. She really gets around, always in a southerly direction it seems. Weather in Crete had been atrocious, however, quite a contrast to the situation in England while she had been gone.
We quickly settled in to a discussion of old times, children, grandchildren, and the like. And a report of what the neighborhood looked like in the summer 2007 flood. It took a while to get the attention of the wait staff, but we finally succeeded in ordering our drinks. Steve queried the waitress about the advertised special £3 price for the normally £5 drinks, but she said it was only valid after 5 PM. The computerized till (cash register) wouldn’t let her ring up anything but the official price until then. But she earned her tip when she waited till after 5 to enter our check into the system. The mojitos were great.
We walked part way back with Sheila, saying farewell when we got to the fork in the road. Recovered our car and headed back up the M5 to Ledbury. Just as we got off onto the M50 we encountered a brief traffic jam that gave us the opportunity to grab our cameras and take a few quick shots of the magnificent and extremely short lived sunset.
While had initially planned to eat our last meal at the Prince of Wales, the accumulation of a rich lunch, a late afternoon drink, and the effects of being on the go for two weeks seemed to have caught up with us, and we were content with a light supper in our cottage. Final packing (it all fit!), set the alarm for 5AM, and we were off to bed. We didn’t sleep well, and regularly we heard the hours, and our insomnia, counted out by the church bells.
Friday - October 17Friday, October 17, 2008
Thursday – Cotswolds
We drove past the Hobnails, scene of our lunch on Monday, turned right on a narrow road through Gretton, and ended up in the long, strung out town of Winchcombe. There was a Fun Fair being assembled there, quite possibly the one that had just been in Ledbury. The rides looked familiar. We turned left at a small lane, drove for a short distance, and were at Sudeley Castle, which we used to refer to as ‘our local castle.’ It’s a magnificent place, owned and occupied by a family that traces way back and is clearly dedicated to keeping it up and continually improving it. While many parts of it were destroyed by Cromwell’s followers after the Civil War and the rest was left for ruin, a family of wealthy wool merchants bought it a few hundred years later, brought the still existing parts of it back into habitable condition, and went on to live quite a life there.
The complete tour through the grounds and castle was quite expensive and wouldn’t have matched well with our schedule, so we opted for the ticket that would let us wander about the magnificent grounds and view the interesting exhibits.
The grounds featured informal gardens, heirloom vegetable gardens, amazing formal gardens, amusing and quirky contemporary sculpture, pheasants of all varieties, beautiful views out over the countryside, and the chapel where lies Katherine Parr, final wife of Henry VIII. Remember, ‘divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived!’ After Henry’s death she married the master of Sudeley and lived there for a few years till her death at age 37 from complications of childbirth.
View from the inside of Sudeley Castle - Cleeve Hill and farmers’ fields
The exhibits included relics found on the grounds dating as far back as Roman times, information on Henry VIII, all six wives, and other personalities of the day, and quite a bit on Emma Dent, the fascinating mistress of the house for many years who seemed to be a regular correspondent with just about everybody who was anybody during the Victorian era, a prolific diary keeper, and a committed walker who logged over 1000 miles a year as recorded on her trusty pedometer and documented in her diary.
By the time we finished at Sudeley it was definitely lunch time. We drove a few miles to the Rising Sun hotel and restaurant on the edge of Cleeve Hill, overlooking a sweeping view of the northern parts of Cheltenham, the valley to the west, and the start of the Malvern Hills and the hills of South Wales. Delightful lunch! Quality, creativity, and presentation have come a long way since the bad old days of British cooking.
A brief walk after lunch gave us the chance to take in more of the view. Interesting observations included a gorgeous con trail extending over at least half the sky, a bird hovering absolutely motionless over the hillside, and a glider apparently launched from Cleeve Hill and starting its descent into the valley.
View from Cleeve Hill of the Cheltenham valley, the Malvern Hills and Wales in the distance
We then continued down into Cheltenham. By then some of the schools were letting out, so we saw lots of children in their distinctive uniforms. We parked near our former house and gave Aimée and Steve a tour of the neighborhood, including the magnificent Pittville Park and Pump Room across the street. The Pump Room is a building where one came in the 1700s to sip the healthful sulfurous waters. It’s now used largely for events, receptions, and the like. All looked as we had remembered it, except that our former landlord certainly keeps his hedges trimmed a lot more neatly than we ever did, and the tree in the front garden had sure gotten a lot bigger.
Next we drove past Berkhampstead School, which both Karin and Sarah had attended as small children. Uniforms were still very much the same as then, except that the girls were now allowed to wear trousers. That used to be reserved for very cold weather and wasn’t really a part of the uniform anyway but a concession to necessity. Considering how school uniforms get passed down or recycled through the resale shops, we wouldn’t have been surprised if some of the uniforms we saw were indeed the same ones that existed during our time here! A new feature at Berkhampstead was a pair of small school buses, a likely recognition of the fact that many of the Mums who used to ferry the kids to school were now working and not available for taxi service. But there were still a lot of Mums gathered around.
A quick drive past Bruce’s former work place, now partially converted to commercial uses, and we were on the London Road, heading out of town. More school kids in uniforms. Drove a few miles to Northleach. It’s also long and strung out like Winchcombe, and like Winchcombe it became quite wealthy as a center of the wool trade centuries earlier. When we lived in England in the early 80s, the main road to London ran right through the town. It was a terrible bottleneck, but Northleach has become calm again with the construction of a bypass.
Love that golden British sunshine!
We looked through the church, wandered the back streets, chatted with various dogs and cats in the neighborhood, bought a few postcards and a snack. Steve left the postcards on the counter at the shop where we got the snacks, but fortunately as we were sitting in our car checking the map a woman came up to us and let us know about it. Everybody is so nice!
By then it was almost 4 o’clock and we had to decide whether to go to the rather well known Cotswold villages to the north (Swells, Slaughters, Stow on the Wold, Bourton on the Water, Mud in the Road (not really, but we did see that sign quite frequently!), Chipping Camden, Broadway, etc.) or the lesser known ones to the south. All are lovely! We opted for the latter, partly in anticipation of the opportunity to drive the car through a brook at the fords in a series of tiny villages called the Duntisbournes—Middle Duntisbourne, Duntisbourne Abbots, and Duntisbourne Leer. Sue Anne had been there before with a friend, Bruce only knew of the villages from signs out on the main road, and it was a brand new adventure for Aimée and Steve.
It was only a short drive from Northleach: down the Fosse Way Roman road, past the Fosse Bridge Inn which had been a treat dinner location for us in the past, along one of the longest and most beautifully constructed stone walls in the world, to the outskirts of Cirencester (Corinium in Roman times). Then a quick jog back north on another Roman road (Ermin Street, now the A417) brought us to the turnoff for the Duntisbournes.
It was a different world once we made that turn. The country roads were incredibly narrow—one car wide, and even that was tight! No room whatever to pass or turn around. The driving ethic was that you had to keep a mental record of the locations of the occasional wide spots in case you did encounter an oncoming car, so you knew whether it would be practical for you to back up or whether you had to hope that the other car would do so voluntarily. Fortunately we met only one car, occupied by teenagers, and they quickly volunteered to be the ones to back up. We exchanged happy waves with them as we drove by. There were also a lot of pheasants on the road. Most quickly volunteered to be the ones to move out of the way, though one certainly acted for quite some time as if she thought she could outrun us.
We negotiated two fords, each perhaps about 6 to 10 feet wide and no more than 6 inches or so deep, turning around and coming back through each in order to find all three of the villages.
Sue Anne was anxious to find Duntisbourne Leer, which has a long ford where the roadbed and the streambed are one and the same for a few hundred feet. Asking a local woman produced the answer that it was that road over there with the ‘Unsuitable For Motor Vehicles’ sign on it. And that we really shouldn’t try it. So we decided to start with reconnaissance on foot. A couple of local guys egged us on, and with the right vehicle (such as a Subaru Forester) we might just have tried. But the concept of explaining things to the rental car company, plus the size of a few rocks we could see in the water as we strolled along side on the path, was enough to make us think better of the idea. One of the guys said that they have been having problems with large trucks (‘lorries’ or Heavy Goods Vehicles—HGVs) navigating through the area by GPS (‘Sat Nav’ in British), unaware of what they’re getting into. A few got stuck at the smaller fords, and one actually went down the long ford and got trapped between the stone walls on each side. You can find lots of pictures and articles about this problem if you search for Sat Nav on Google and Google Images.
Yes, that’s the road! Imagine a lorry going through there.
You can read more about the fords at the Duntisbournes (and indeed about all 1803 documented fords in the entire UK if you wish!) at the site www.wetroads.co.uk. Click Gloucestershire to get to the page containing the Duntisbournes. Yes, there’s a Web site for people interested in just about anything!
As for the HGVs, we just read in the local Gloucestershire Echo that there is a proposal afoot to ban them from all minor Cotswold roads except for local deliveries.
We found our way out of the Duntisbournes without incident, enjoying the sweeping views along the way. On to the fast road that led to the M5 motorway near Gloucester, and back to Ledbury. Aimée and Steve had thought of attending a play in town tonight, but they found the theater unexplainedly dark. (Later: We learned that it was canceled ‘due to injuries.’) So we decided on a light supper followed by a super treat dessert of Pavlova, a meringue ring topped with strawberries and cream and accompanied by a bottle of red wine. It’s the final supper in our cottage, as we’re planning on eating at the pub tomorrow night.
Pavlova!
Tomorrow we start with a Bake and Craft sale at the local church hall and a bit more wandering and shopping in Ledbury. Then to Cheltenham for lunch with the Shortells (see Tuesday’s blog) and afternoon drinks and snacks with our former neighbor Sheila Taylor. Then it will be time to pack and get ready for the trip back home. We fly out of Manchester at 11 on Saturday, so it will be an early departure from Ledbury for us. Arrive in Chicago at 1:20 PM, say good bye to Aimée and Steve, and finally get back to Manchester, NH at about 8.
So this will be the final entry in the blog till we get home, as there won’t be any chance to post anything after tomorrow morning. Aimée promises to write up their trip to London real soon, and Sue Anne and Bruce will wrap up the final two days after we’re settled at home. Then we’ll go back through the whole blog, clean things up where needed, add further information or background links, and insert pictures, videos, and the pen and ink drawings that Sue Anne has been doing for the whole time we’ve been here. We’ll let you know as these things progress.
Thanks to all our faithful readers, thanks for the comments that some of you added here for us, and a special thanks to the friends and relatives who did lots of things to help us out while we were here.
Thursday - October 16
Thursday - October 16Tuesday and Wednesday – London
Aimée and Steve’s trip to London
by Aimée
Tuesday- In darkness we walked down our shiny cobblestone lane and then a few blocks on High Street to the train station for our 7 AM departure. After a relaxing 3 hour ride, we arrived at Paddington Station. The tube was shut down temporarily due to an accident so we strolled through Hyde Park where among other sights we saw the Princess Diana Children’s Park, then along Kensington Road. After an early hotel check in, we perused the tourist brochures (leaflets, as they call them) and decided to buy tickets for a show that evening. ‘Billy Elliot’ was our first choice. By then the tube was working and we rode to Victoria Station and the Victoria Palace Theater and were lucky enough to get the best seats we’ve ever had at any show (due to our age - yay!). We walked around London the rest of the day viewing all the famous sites in happy anticipation of the show, a musical based in a mining town in the north of England in the 1980s. Music by Elton John. We both had seen the movie a few years earlier and loved it.
For a late lunch we ate near Trafalgar Square at the Sherlock Holmes Pub, a good bet according to Rick Steves and not as touristy as it looked. The restroom key dangled from a large magnifying glass. A bit touristy, yes, but fun with great food. Stephen had baked salmon and I had cheese-stuffed mushrooms.
At the National Gallery we took in a couple of salons filled with 19th century European paintings before heading back to the hotel to get ready for our evening at the theater. We were packed into the tube as tightly as Stephen’s Scottish sardines.
The show was fantastic! Wonderful drama, a mix of lighthearted and teary moments punctuated by incredible dancing by sometimes unlikely characters (large, gruff old men, for example). Then we returned to our very nice hotel, the Park International on Cromwell Road.
Wednesday- A full English breakfast was served at our hotel which fueled us for the day of walking through a host of city streets surrounded by beautiful parks, fancy gates, many well dressed friendly folks. We walked along the Victoria Embankment from Westminster Abbey to the Tower of London. As the “mist” was getting quite heavy, we took a glass- sided tour boat back to Westminster Abbey where we encountered a a long parade of blind people (some with guide dogs or other helpers) protesting their conditions. We decided they were a very brave and/or determined lot to walk the streets of London without sight.
We, being less brave, but no less determined got to Paddington well before our 5:21 train to Ledbury so as to avoid the tube congestion. Since we couldn’t understand the train driver’s English, nor apparently could the locals, we struck up conversations with other passengers and learned quite a bit about our village area. One nice lady told us when we arrived at Ledbury station (her stop as well). Her 11 year old son met us as he raced along beside the train, while making silly faces.
Wednesday- A full English breakfast was served at our hotel which fueled us for the day of walking through a host of city streets surrounded by beautiful parks, fancy gates, many well dressed friendly folks. We walked along the Victoria Embankment from Westminster Abbey to the Tower of London. As the “mist” was getting quite heavy, we took a glass- sided tour boat back to Westminster Abbey where we encountered a a long parade of blind people (some with guide dogs or other helpers) protesting their conditions. We decided they were a very brave and/or determined lot to walk the streets of London without sight.
We, being less brave, but no less determined got to Paddington well before our 5:21 train to Ledbury so as to avoid the tube congestion. Since we couldn’t understand the train driver’s English, nor apparently could the locals, we struck up conversations with other passengers and learned quite a bit about our village area. One nice lady told us when we arrived at Ledbury station (her stop as well). Her 11 year old son met us as he raced along beside the train, while making silly faces.
Tuesday & Wednesday - October 14-15[Written by Aimée. Posted with a bit of assistance from Bruce, thus the misleading attribution below!]
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