London to York, Day 2: Bank Holiday in Edgeware (part1)

We won't spend too much time talking about the driving in England this time around. (Maybe a little...) The simple fact is that, after some harrowing moments during last year's trip, mostly in the early days, you kind of get the hang of it. I did, anyway.

But 'harrowing' is probably an understatement to describe the hour and a half we spent on our first day behind the wheel last year, when we picked up our rental car on a Monday morning in Chelsea and had to find our way out of London, adjusting on the fly to being on the left, incomprehensible road markings, busses/bikes/trucks bearing down on us from every direction in a panic of rush hour roller derby.

So, being a clever boy, I had planned a devious little strategy for this year's trip. We found a EuropCar office on the northern fringes of London, in a somewhat dreary neighborhood called Edgeware. The office was barely a mile - two turns, Google Maps assured us - from the on-ramp to the massive M1 motorway, which pointed us toward the North and York. We'd take a cab (or, as it turned out, a car hire) to the office, sign the papers and we'd be on the highway in a drama-free 10 minutes. Yeah, it'd be £40 or so to get there from Chelsea - weighed against sparring with rush hour traffic in London, a pittance.

The car arrived on time, we loaded up, said goodbye to my brother and tooled our way to Edgeware, watching the madness of London traffic through the passenger window, feeling pretty damned smug. This was no punt - Edgeware was a decent 12 or 13 miles and the trip was 40 minutes, passing through a patchwork of alternately elegant and shabby neighborhoods; open air markets next to cell phone shops next to empty store fronts next to single-name fashion boutiques. I felt at times like we could have been in Paris, Nairobi, Cairo or Sao Paolo. London is crushingly huge.

I kept checking to be sure I had my wallet and smokes and cell phone on my person. How cool would it be to lose my wallet in a hired car on the first full day of my UK vacation?

The car pulled up to the EuropCar office, dropped us in front and took off. I didn't like Edgeware, but I'm a tourist and tourists don't come here and I wasn't supposed to like it. We have four pieces of luggage, some over-the-shoulder pieces. Central casting tourists, feeling a little conspicuous.

We walked up to the door. No one behind the counter, but a little sign said to ring the bell. I rang it. No one came. Rang it again. We could see a little office behind the counter with an open door, there was a monitor on the desk, and it was on. Someone is here. Maybe they're out back in the car yard. Rang the bell. No one came. I yelled "hello?" over the adjoining gate, toward the garage I could see behind it. Sharon rang the bell (believing, I guess, that I was doing it wrong, and maybe I was); the same nobody came.

I stepped away from the door and looked - really looked - at this office. Um, this office is closed. Closed, as in no one's here. And why would that be?

Because, as we had learned at some point in the still-young journey, today was a bank holiday. I'm not entirely sure what a 'bank holiday' really is - we have Federal holidays in the States, but they're actually commemorating something. Columbus, Labor, Veterans...bank holidays seem to be days off just for the sake of having days off. Which is actually sort of a nice idea, I guess, except when your rental car office is enjoying a day off and they have your car keys.

We're barely a day into this thing, and we're looking at Plan B. Think.

OK, we had printed off the car reservation, and that's got phone numbers on it. I am immediately grateful that we set up international calling on the cell phones. We call the "emergency" number for Travel Centre, our travel agent, and get a cheerful girl named Melanie on the other end. "Oh dear," she said, learning of our predicament, "let me make some calls and see if we can fix this, and I'll call you back straight away..."

So we sat. On the sidewalk, in front of a closed rental car office in Edgeware, luggage piled around us.We watched the traffic up and down High Street. 

There was a little café down the block from us, maybe 30 yards, an outdoor table with some locals having coffee, one or two of them glancing in our direction from time to time.

I'm not particularly shy about asking people for help when I need it, but there wasn't likely to be anything that anyone there could do for us. There was also a hotel across the street, but so what? We need a friggin' car.

My bladder didn't care that it was a bank holiday, nor that we were sitting on a sidewalk in Edgeware.  I asked Sharon if she wanted some coffee, she said no, so I gamely walked down to the café and went inside. I quickly determined it was a Portuguese café; a short, surly looking older guy was inside, behind a tiny counter. There were candy bars in the counter display, so I bought a Snickers and asked if he had a restroom. He scowled at me (hey, gimme a break, I bought a candy bar from ya!! ) and pointed over his shoulder. Bio-crisis averted. I thanked him on my way out; he said nothing. Maybe I should have bought two.

Walked back, handed the Snickers to Sharon (who was in no mood for a Snickers bar), and sat down.

We wait.

West London, Day 1: No Fly Tipping, Muslim funeral homes, green headstones, Track Suit Guy and A Long Cool Woman In a Black Dress

Chris was barely awake when we got to his place, a little past nine in the morning. That used to be early for me, too, at least on a Sunday, but of course our body clocks were hopelessly scrambled and, taking a clue from last year, we were determined to get out and stay in motion, lest we slide further into sanity-flattening narcolepsy. He let us in, half-asleep, nodded with semi-acknowledgement of our immediate plans, gave us a key and shuffled back to bed.

We had two London cemeteries planned out that appeared to be within walking distance - Fulham Palace Road, and Margravine (aka, Hammersith). We had strolled through the vast and grimly elegant Old Brompton Cemetery last year, one of London's famed Magnificent 7 and barely a mile from Chris' flat, but I had found a couple of others on Google that were...well, not really in the neighborhood, but close enough for us to walk to and kill off a day. I had it in my mind we'd spring for a cab ride to one, then hoof the rest of the day, but Sharon encouraged me to just suck it up and walk; she wanted to see more of the city and I didn't really protest.

We unpacked the cameras, loaded up fresh batteries and headed out north to Old Brompton Rd, which turns into Lillie Rd, and pointed up more or less straight to the graveyard.

There was a classic Mustang parked in front of Chris' flat. It was my first picture of the trip - still don't know why I shot it. The steering wheel was missing - a theft deterrent, I assumed, since the car was gone the next morning.

Mustang, parked in the wrong direction and no steering wheel. 

So we walked.

The Goose.

And walked.

A funeral home, in a Muslim neighborhood. Somewhere in West London. 

Sharon had a rough handwritten map that she cribbed from the Google map (we could have used the GPS on her phone, since we paid for a data plan, but we were intent on being pretty stingy about tapping that, and anyway...the place was supposed to be close.) Yeah, we got a little lost a few times, but so what? We were in London, we had all day, the weather was hazy sun and warm.

Fulham Road Cemetery, about 13 acres in size and (like Margravine) in the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, dates to 1865. We were met with a sign that we didn't understand. And we didn't even look it up until after we got home. It's since become sort of our tagline for the trip.

Don't do it, mate. 

We know what it means now, so no need to write in.

Unlike the weedy and morose Victorian gloom of Brompton, Fulham Palace was a tidy and spacious place.

Fulham Rd Cemetery

Sue, the London Cemetery blogger, says that the borough responded to some incidents of vandalism in the 1980's by "grassing over" some grave sites, thus rendering parts of the cemetery rather empty of monuments. We didn't know this at the time; the place did have a weirdly uneven sense of space about it, probably heightened by a grounds-tidiness acutely lacking in Brompton, which was the only other proper cemetery we had visited in London. But the place was nice, with mature shade trees and good sight lines.

Fulham Rd Cemetery

Fulham Rd Cemetery

Dastardly squirrel - Fulham Rd Cemetery

Fulham Rd Cemetery

The best memorial was the dead-Victorian child effigy, merely yards from the entrance.

Fulham Rd Cemetery

We rested at the WW1 memorial - I was already getting my left-side torso stitch; a dull, grinding pain below my left rib cage, a bit of discomfort I encountered acutely walking around York's muni cemetery the year before, and somewhat less annoyingly at various other times. I don't know what it is. I get it when I go to England, maybe it's a sea-level thing, yeah?

Long walk to Margravine,

which is alternately referred to as Hammersmith.

Dating to 1868, relatively late in the timeline of the Victorian municipal cemetery boomlet, Margravine was somewhat smaller than Fulham Palace Road, a central walkway cut down the middle. There were some kids playing and the usual assortment of older folks and stroller moms; smaller cemetery, more foot traffic. Like a lot of the cemeteries we saw on this trip, one section was left un-mowed and only lightly tended to; it's some program that municipalities seem to be adopting to accommodate more wildlife and keep parts of the cemetery 'in their natural state', never mind that their natural state shouldn't include loads of dead bodies six feet beneath the surface.

But the place was okay, relatively peaceful but never really out of earshot from the honking and wooshing of London traffic.

Margravine Cemetery

Margravine Cemetery

Margravine Cemetery

Pillow of stone - Margravine Cemetery

Green - Margravine Cemetery

We headed back up Lillie road toward Chelsea. As it happens, the route back angled us to Brompton Cemetery, the less busy rear entrance, so we strolled in and shot some parts of the cemetery we missed last year.

Brompton Cemetery

Brompton Cemetery

Brompton Cemetery

Brompton Cemetery

Brompton Cemetery

Toward the front, we encountered a friendly bloke in a blue track suit and some dubious dental health, relaxing on a step enjoying a Bud Light bomber. Struck me as a little odd, since I had just seen a couple of cops strolling the cemetery - maybe open container laws are different in London?

He told us that a nurse somewhere that morning fixed his bum leg with a sharp tug, relieving him of the concerns of going into surgery, and he was celebrating in the cemetery with a cold beer. (A Bud Light??) I don't know if he was homeless. Kind of a tossup; we weren't going to ask.

We told him we were just starting our vacation ("Oh York," he enthused, "I love it up there..." ), and told him we liked to photograph cemeteries. Famous people? he asked, and pointed in the direction of a couple of famous dead guys neither Sharon nor I had ever heard of. No, just cemeteries, we told him. All kinds, everywhere. He asked where we were from, didn't know where Colorado was, and told us his daughter was living in New York City, determined, in his words, "to find herself a rich American husband. A doctor, maybe..." We said we wished her good luck, and him too, and we meant it. And then we said goodbye.

On the way out, we went through the immense cloister area. A professional photographer was doing some kind of a fashion shoot with a model. We smiled and ducked between them while he was futzing with his flash, but I managed to get a shot of the model. I thought Sharon was going to slap me. No idea what they were shooting for.

Fashionista in Brompton portico. No glove, no love.  

We found a headless angel stone. They're not rare, but this one really grabbed us both.

Headless angel - Brompton Cemetery

Enough dead guys for one day. We made our way out to Fulham Road, headed north and finally made it back to Chris' flat.  I was beat. Stuff looks closer on Google Maps than it really is.

The Thing begins in earnest tomorrow morning.               

Re-invasion begins

After getting to DIA ridiculously early, we found a nice spot to gawk at the gargantuan hotel building project outside the south window before riding through security.


DIA's new hotel. Not quite finished.

We were told that some Spanish company was building this thing - odd, I thought the Spanish were broke.

At the gate, Sharon went off and got a turkey-wrap thing about the size of a football. I had a bite.

We took off from Denver a little late and got to O'Hare a few minutes early, hustling over to the London-bound gate which, thankfully, was nearby. More waiting.

There was a State Department Travel Advisory in place - apparently the US  had (again) angered somebody somewhere to the point where they issued one of those "advisory" warnings, presumably something along the lines of "you probably won't get blown to smithereens or hijacked off to some god-forsaken shithole someplace, but your chances are just a little higher than usual." Of course, should you be unlucky enough to have overseas flight reservations during one of these advisory windows, there's pretty much nothing you can really do about it except worry a little extra. So, being stubbornly skeptical of flying anyway, it was easy enough for me to comply. What better way to start a two week vacation than marinating in some irrational fear?

The girl at the gate announced that all travelers on the Heathrow flight needed to come up to the desk and have their papers re-checked, which seemed a little pointless as they barely glanced at the boarding passes and passports before dropping their stamp. At least they didn't make us take off our shoes again.

The flight over was another endless nothingburger.

 

I had picked out a few books and loaded them up on Sharon's first-gen Kindle: a book about the pre-Conquest nobility ("The World Before Domesday: The English Aristocracy 900–1066" by Ann Williams), a book about the Norman Invasion itself ("The Norman Conquest:The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England" by Marc Morris, and a third about the Domesday Book ("The Domesday Quest: In Search of the Roots of England" by Michael Wood). I had taken along Ian Mortimer's terrific "A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England" on the last trip, and just about finished it, so I thought some more reading on the period might be in order.

 Well, ok, start at the beginning. The first of these treatises, Ann Williams' book about the pre-Conquest nobility was utterly pitiless. From Chapter Three: "A fourth discifer, Ealdred, attests a diploma of 958 in favour of the propincenarious Cenric, whose witnesses include the regis picerna, AElfwig. A diploma of Edgar, dated 968, is attested by three disciferi, Eanulf, AElfwine and Wulfstan, and Eanulf is among four disciferi who attest a diploma of the same king in 971." It was a lot of this.

To her credit, Williams delves deep into the meticulous substrata of nobility and the dizzying complexity of land ownership, social structure and regal ass-kissing that existed in pre-1066 England - her sources, presumably, were gleaned from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and whatever has been recovered from musty church records that have survived into modern times. The thing reads like a graduate thesis, however, and I was left, after four and a half chapters, mentally exhausted and acutely conscious that I was hopelessly out of my depth. The thing didn't revoke my inexplicable later-life interest in English history and (a probably callow) fascination with medieval history specifically, but it just wasn't a very good place to start.

After a three hours of barely-pronounceable proper names and hazily defined Latin-based terminology, I waved my white flag, suitably chastened by my smallness in the face of Williams' scholarship, and turned over to Morris' book, a far more approachable and neophyte-friendly treatise on the origins and execution of  The Norman Conquest. Alliances, betrayals, strategic marriages, misbehaving bastard children, murder most foul, ransoms....the pre-amble to the Conquest reads like a medieval fantasy novel, and Morris kept my Williams'-weary mind going for a couple more hours.

I gave up on reading about two hours before landing. Figured I'd try to get a little shut-eye, but it was a hopeless task. Body clock said it was late evening, local time had us at about 5 in the morning, and the big 767 engines just outside the window groaned loudly and relentlessly, even audible through my purportedly 'noise-isolating headphones.' I just listened to Max Corbacho and some Roach, and ticked the minutes away.

 

Our arrival gate seemed like a mile and a half walk from baggage claim - Heathrow is enormous - but we eventually got there, retrieved the bags after a longish wait, got through a long line at immigration, passed through customs and met our pre-arranged driver. It was raining lightly, the remnants of a downpour (we were told) that nearly drowned London the day before. Eerily, the weather that morning was virtually identical to that of a year ago. Yeah, big deal, it's drizzly in London a lot of the time, right?

You're not allowed to smoke in the parking garage, or it appeared that way anyway, so I burned a quick one in the half-hearted drizzle just outside the temporary parking area. Our cheerful driver loaded us up into the waiting car, and we headed off on the grey and dimly familiar ride into Chelsea.

Back in London. Here we go again.

2012 England postcript

So, before we embark on another absurdly-after-the-fact blog about the Dead Englishmen Tour 2 (for which we are actually well-prepared this time, both of us having recorded a modest sheaf of real-time notes), we wanted to officially close out the notes from 2012. One last little detail....

You may recall (and in case you don't it's here) that after getting squeezed and hustled and bullied and generally shaken-not-stirred driving out of London, we finally made it to the A1 and headed toward The North, and York specifically, with a stop in Lincolnshire along the way.

"But that little walkabout wasn't done with us."

No indeed...about three weeks after we returned, a curious entry showed up on my credit card, about $250 charged by our friends at EuropCar. I contacted our friend Gavin at the travel service. He got back in a few days and indicated (although I knew it all along) that the charge was slapped on EuropCar by the traffic lords of London, who spotted us with one of their cameras wobbling hopelessly into the dreaded rush hour Congestion Zone without a permit, during our utterly ridiculous Lost in London adventure.

We had had a feeling that we committed this infraction; we spotted one of their toxic-looking Congestion Zone signs in a sudden left turn, one of many we took that morning just because we were there, not because we had any idea what we were doing, and honestly, we checked online (and Anna, the girl behind the desk at Thornbury Castle also checked) to see if we really had crossed that sinister meridian. Neither of our inquiries seemed to show up, so we thought, eh, maybe it was an illusion.

But no. Busted.

We could have fought it, I suppose, insisting that we tried - really, we did - to put this right while on English soil, but the mind reels at the time/expense/paperwork involved in such an appeal, and we probably would have lost and owed the money plus interest anyway. Fighting City Hall is often an exercise in fruitless windmill-jousting, and doing it across The Pond, before guys in wigs, was no appealing prospect.

In any case, that and the flat tire ended up costing us an unplanned $450 or so. Not crushing when counted against the rest of the trip, which was right about or slightly under-budget anyway, and a lesson was learned.

A lesson, we'll add here, we put into good use for DET2, and from which, ironically, we were well-thwarted anyway. As we will soon see....