Church Rock, Roche, Skipton Castle

I wasn't much looking forward to morning rush hour traffic in Nottingham - but we had a long day ahead and not much choice.

Loaded up the Mercedes and up Mansfield Road we crawled toward Church Rock. The cemetery gates were open, but it was a right turn against busy traffic and I just wanted no part of it. Standing the evening before in the light drizzle at the cemetery's locked gates, we had actually discussed strategy for parking the little blue rascal - instead of trying to turn into the cemetery, we'd actually hang a left and head up Mapperly Rd, at the Victorian Church of St Andrew. An impressive CoE building, but clearly a Victorian enterprise that we didn't have the time to visit, and probably wouldn't have anyway.

Hung another left at Cranmer Rd, behind the church (doubtlessly named after Thomas Cranmer, the Tudor-era Reformation figure executed by Queen Mary for heresy, and regarded today as something of a martyr for the Protestant movement), swung around and parked the car. Someone's cat watched us pile out of the car from across the street.

Church Rock Cemetery - Nottingham

Church Rock Cemetery is a sprawling municipal cemetery, tightly packed and draped over a series of swales and gullies. Impressive stonework, and even in the brilliant sunshine of the morning (yes, the sun came out), the graveyard's weird alcoves and cul-de-sacs teased a sense of mystery about the place.

Church Rock Cemetery- Nottingham

It was actually a difficult cemetery to shoot, the sense of scale being continually thwarted by the heaving topology of the place.

At the bottom of a steep walk was an enclosed amphitheater, embracing a number of ground-level stones and a few bricked up alcoves.

Church Rock Cemetery - Nottingham

We climbed down to shoot some pictures, and happened to spy a ramshackle encampment in one of the alcoves, its resident awake and tucked back in shadow. A Polish gangster maybe, but likelier a homeless person. We knew he was there, he knew we were there, but we ignored each other. Apart from that, we were the only ones in the cemetery.

The drive out of Nottingham was easier than I had feared; we caught a break when the GPS had us slip perpendicular and past Mansfield Road and guided us down a few minor, streetlight governed side roads until we reached the on-ramp to the M1.

Roche Abbey was next, unfinished business from our 2013 trip and an easy hour up the M1. We managed to make a wrong turn (we were perfecting the art of getting lost in defiance of a very good GPS), but eventually found the steep cobblestone road down to the English Heritage site. Like many abbeys, at least the ones in the countryside, Roche is tucked into a wooded valley beside a stream, not altogether easy to find.

There was a small car park outside the site, the same one we had parked at in 2013. I pulled into a space and a older gentlemen in a beret walking his dog came up to my window and spoke to me. His accent was impossibly thick, but with a little translation help from Sharon, possessed of an inexplicable gift for being impervious to dense rural English brogues, I gathered he was cautioning me against parking here, as cars in this little area were subject to break-in's by local kids. Hooligans.

"In the middle of the day?" I asked.

"Criminals keep a schedule?" he countered. Well, yeah....if breaking into cars is your thing, you do it when there are actually cars to break into. Roche closes at 5PM, and there'd be little reason to park down here after that.

So we pulled out and proceeded down the narrow lane to the gated site itself.

Roche Abbey

In-situ grave slab, probably an Abbey patron. 14th century. Roche Abbey

Roche was founded in 1147 as a Cistercian mission, passed through a number of hands and suffered near-total destruction in 1538, during Henry VIII's maniacal Dissolution. Plundered by Henry's commissioners and locals alike, the site nearly dissolved into the forested countryside until the 1920's, when it was excavated and cleaned up.

Roche Abbey

Set deep in the narrow valley, elegant in its skeletal dignity, it will never be considered one of the must-visit's of England's several dozen medieval monastic sites; for us, it was a gem.

The next leg took us northwest toward Skipton Castle. Sharon set a route that would take us around the south side of the industrial town of Leeds, but it did take us more or less directly through Leeds' small satellite city Bradford. A tangle of fast, busy roads with tricky last-minute moves and jammed with impatient delivery truckers, it was probably the hardest single day's drive of the whole two weeks.

Skipton Castle

We had had our doubts about Skipton. An extraordinarily well preserved medieval fortress, founded in the late 11th century, the castle is now a privately owned tourist attraction. Privately owned castles can be a hit-or-miss proposition. Sudeley Castle, which we visited in 2012, was a disappointment - crowded with vendors and costumed performers, the place felt like a Tudor-era theme park, and it was a turn-off.

Lady Clifford (1590-1676)

But Skipton was a more subtle and intimate experience, an intriguing stroll through narrow hallways, yawning banquet rooms and tight stairways, all wrapped around the Conduit Courtyard. Besieged in the English Civil War by Cromwell's forces before finally surrendering in 1645, Skipton was spared the worst of the Parliamentarians' usual slighting, with only the roofing removed upon their departure.

...and her Yew tree, planted in 1659

It is said that the castle's owner, the feisty and stubborn Lady Anne Clifford, planted the Yew tree now standing the courtyard as commemoration of the the castle's restoration after Cromwell's departure.

Got dragons? Coat of arms in the Conduit Courtyard - Skipton Castle

Skipton Castle interior

Counter-intuitively, you have to park up the steep hill from the castle, and walk down to it. It was late afternoon by the time we made our way back uphill to the car, and we spied the bumper-to-bumper traffic down toward the town square with exhausted dismay.  Deep in the reaches of sheep country of North Yorkshire (its name actually derives from the Old English, sceap), Skipton is a deceptively sizable town, and what we were looking at was a kind of rural rush hour. The GPS had anticipated our heading back through town, but forget about it. We made a left out of the car park instead; our little Garmin, by now accustomed to our willful non-compliance to its perfectly reasonable demands, dutifully traced a new route for us through some minor country roads outside town, until we were properly headed toward Cumbria.  

Nottingham Pt 2: Old beer,the Cursed Galleon and Medieval Ring-toss

During the course of our 15 minute impromptu car-park chat with Christopher (we talked driving in England, visiting old buildings and life in America), we noted our fondness for old English graveyards -  the churchyards and the Victorian-era municipal cemeteries alike - and our eagerness to explore Church Rock, one of England's best muni's and one that had eluded us on our two prior trips to Nottingham.

We were worried about rain, but Christopher alerted us to another potential peril. Polish gangs, who evidently lurk the cemetery at dusk and at night, sparring over turf (some turf to fight over) and being generally menacing. Evidently part of their trade is illegal cigarettes - not necessarily a surprise, as legal ones are extortionately retailed throughout England.   

The term "Polish gangs" struck an odd note with us, a concept lacking resonance for a couple of American tourists, but it still gave us pause as we looked nervously down at the Nikons swinging at our chests. 

"Sometimes they're in there at night," Christopher noted, "and sometimes the Police chase them out. You'll probably be okay." 

My wallet, brimming with pound notes, was on the nightstand in our room, and I thought, eh, maybe I'll leave it there.

But the cemetery was closed anyway.  

We ambled down a few side streets toward City Centre. At the Market Square there seemed to be some sort of fair in progress - multi-colored lights, rides, vendor stalls - conspicuously sparkly against the grey of the evening and the grimly imposing Council House. 

What if they gave a fair and no one came? 

But...no people. Was the fair over? Or not yet begun? Had heavy rains earlier chased everyone anyway? A post-apocalypse scene, a Fellini-esque dream fugue? An hallucination?  

We climbed the hill toward the Castle. Normally a tourist magnet, the Castle was closed by this time, and probably little visited on a rainy Monday anyway. 

Nottingham Castle

Our friends at wikipedia tell us that the Castle was built originally by William the Conqueror in 1067, a stronghold to secure his occupation of Mercia, but the structure there now has little material relationship to William's castle. Rebuilt by Henry II, destroyed, re-built, and destroyed again, the original stone foundations dating to the 13th century are visible at ground level, but most of the rest was built in the 17th and 19th centuries, and the castle now stands as a museum and art gallery. 

In the adjacent courtyard,  Robin Hood (this is Nottingham, after all) is poised with bow and arrow at the ready, a few statues of Robin's homies stand nearby. 

'ello, Robin !!

The Trip

The Trip wasn't far from the Castle, just a quarter rotation around Castle Rock. The place was originally carved into the stone as the castle's brewery, the ale hoisted up through a hole in the stone ceiling. 

The ancient Trip - with the ale hoist at the top. 

The place itself is really two distinct dwellings - the timbered Inn, which dates to the mid 1600's, and the inner Inn, carved into the stone and dating to 1189. It is said that Richard the Lionhearted stayed at the Inn on his way to the Third Crusade.

Looking up at the ale hoist.

Our server guy seated us in the old section, a tiny stone-walled room up some steps from the timbered Inn section, a room with barely enough space to seat 10 diners. Various swords and other medievalia adorned the walls, 

Inside the Trip. 

and the legendary Cursed Galleon, draped in dusty cobwebs and enshrined in a glass case, stood on a shelf just over my shoulder. 

Dust me, face yer doom...

It is said that anyone who cleans the thing meets an untimely death - so no one cleans it anymore, and exactly how a ship model can gather dust inside a glass case remains a mystery.   

    

The food was beefy and generous - Glen our server recommended the Abbot's Brown ale, supposedly a recreation of the brown ale served here in medieval times, from the original recipe. It was bitey and a bit heavy, but otherwise nice; something told me it was probably crafted nearer to 21st century palettes than 12th century. I had a couple. Er...maybe three. 

Dinner finished and both of us aled-up, the bartender kindly called us a cab for the two miles back to the hotel. We were tired and it was raining. While we waited, I hung in the main pub area and watched as some locals were testing each other on the Trip's (evidently) renowned bar game: a ring hung from a ceiling chain is swung across the room to catch a hook at the far end of the pub. I don't know if this too had a tradition extending back centuries. Each of the three guys took a couple of turns at it, all to no success. Harder than it looked, I thought to myself. I just watched. One of them turned to me asked it I wanted to "give it a go." 

I shrugged and said ok. Lined up carefully facing the hook, which I could barely see. The image of dart-throwing I had seen in pubs in England - an elegant, gently-focused, simple-motion technique - flashed through my head. Don't fling it, just coax. I let the ring go and - bam - I hung it. First try. 

The three guys were flummoxed-impressed, as was I.  "You've never done this before," the guy said. 

"No, mate, I'm from out of town." 

We high-fived and they bought a round of shots. I got a little sticker-of-honor from the barkeep, who was also suitably impressed. 

After a day of pitiless rain, re-clutching cars, cheating bladder expulsion on the M1, getting lost in Nottingham, puzzling over deserted festivals and dodging scary Polish cigarette contrabandits...a moment of triumph at the Oldest Inn in England.  

Nottingham Pt 1

One of our 2012 trip's highlights, if you could call it that, was our determined effort to avoid  Swindon, a largely industrial city in the eastern reaches of Wiltshire. (Andy Partridge from the alt-quirk rock band XTC is a life-long Swindonian and something of an erstwhile cultural spokesman there.)

It was on the leg that would take us back to London from Wiltshire, after prowling the neolithic mysteries of Avebury and West Kennet Long Barrow, and the real reason we pasted a skull and crossbones on it was to avoid the Magic Roundabout, a truly malevolent intersection famously regarded as England's scariest place to drive.

Swindon's Magic Roundabout, from a safe distance.

 Avoid it we did.

What we didn't know when we left Watford, emptied of bladder and properly re-clutched with the Mercedes, was that the directions the EuropCar gave us thankfully guided us just past the SECOND scariest to drive in England, the six-circle roundabout at Hemel Hempstead.

At least they have some trees in the center. Hemel Hempstead roundabout.

Neither of us recall him even mentioning it, but had he sent us to the next exit north of Watford to gain access to the M1, this motorist-munching monstrosity awaited.

We didn't discover this bit of good fortune until weeks after we had returned to the States. Half tempted to go back and thank the dude all over again.

We were headed to Nottingham to meet up with our friends from Past Hauntings - Sean, his wife Sarah, his kids and associates - for a ghost hunt somewhere, but the weather was rainy and on the way north Sean texted us that Sarah was ill and they had to cancel for the evening. We had a room booked, so we were going anyway, but we now had the evening free.

The drive into Nottingham - through its inner-ring suburbs and winding, hilly streets - wasn't much fun, and we fumbled through a couple of bad turns before we found the Best Western Westminster (not sure why it was called that, since it was nowhere near Westminster,  a London borough) on Mansfield Road, one of the two or three main thoroughfares through Nottingham.

We had wanted to hit Church Rock Cemetery, the sprawling and vaguely foreboding graveyard right in the middle of town. 

But after dropping off the bags and spending some time chatting in the car park with Christopher, a friendly and slightly disheveled 30ish local who ambled up to us and expressed some interest in our Mercedes, we walked up the road to find that the cemetery was very, very closed, Locked tight. We'd leave that for morning.

Walking to the cemetery....something told me I didn't want to drive thru this.
But I did anyway, the next morning. 

Church Rock Cemetery - the next morning

Instead, a quick check on our GPS indicated that Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, the self-proclaimed "oldest inn in Britain" and one of Nottingham's most famous tourist attractions was a mere mile's walk from the hotel. Easy decision; the weather was holding, we were both hungry and in need of sudsy sustenance after a brutal day on England's roads, and we had wanted to see this ancient place for a long time.     

Cross eyed in Watford

The synapse-snapping ordeal of driving through rush-hour London on our first trip, learning the cadences and perils of UK driving at exactly the wrong time and place (and getting lost), inspired a teachable moment for our 2013 trip - namely, get the car well outside of the city center. make an easy beeline to the highway, don't forget to exhale.

So it was that for the 2013 trip, we picked a lonely little rental car office in Edgware, a  non-descript neighborhood in far northern London (and after which the great north-south London boulevard Edgware Rd is named), to get the car, conceding the 40 pound taxi ride out there from Paddington as a necessary expense. Two turns and two drop-shot roundabouts to the M1.

Outside the Edgware EuropCar office, in 2013. 

Simple enough, except that office was closed for late summer UK Bank Holiday in 2013, and we ended up fighting London traffic anyway. The strategy was sound...in 2013, the timing was faulty.

This year we followed the strategy again, and the office was expecting us. An early morning car run out to Edgware (alright, fifty quid, but who's counting?), in the intermittent rain, and we were in. We waited for a fussy, fur-bedecked lady to get her keys, and approached the desk.

Two years is a pretty long time, but I did complain a bit about the 2013 fiasco; the guy behind the desk, probably making little more than minimum wage, seemed stumped as to how exactly to respond (it wasn't his fault, obviously, and he likely didn't have much authority to apply any compensatory grease to this year's rental agreement), but we ended up with a sky-blue Mercedes A120 hatchback.

Bring me my chariot of fire.

A Mercedes? Well...a really little one - diesel, which was okay - and not exactly an Autobahn burner. Did we get a Mercedes because of the 2013 snafu?  Who knows.

Paperwork all sorted, they pulled the car out, went through a perfunctory button tour (key note here: perfunctory), and I successfully navigated a tricky right turn across traffic to head up to the M1. Exhale time?

Well, the two roundabouts between Edgeware Rd and the M1 were less straightforward than they first appeared and I got beeped in both. Shake it off, lad.

The long approach ramp to the M1 felt nice. On the highway at last, a teachable moment redeemed. Let's go to Nottingham.

After a few miles, the traffic on the M1 began to slow. Eh, highways do that. Then slowed some more. Then stopped. Crept forward. Stopped again. Dead stop. Ten minutes passed, crept forward, stopped again. WTF?

Speedo at 0.

Two and a half hours of this. Traffic jams are a modern feature of every industrialized nation, but this was getting stupid. Past stupid. Just not right.

Sharon turned on the radio to kill the pitiless monotony of lorries dropping clutch for their 40 yard creep and hissing their brakes for the inevitable stop. It was raining. We both had to go to the bathroom. This was getting really bad.

We happened to catch a traffic report that the M1 was closed in both directions due to a serious lorry accident; northbound traffic was being diverted off at Watford. Well, not looking forward to being in an unfamiliar place with 60 million impatient drivers, feeling the veins in my bladder stretching like overtuned piano strings. But we didn't have a choice, and eventually crept up to the exit ramp at Watford, drowning in a super-highway's volume of traffic, facing a hideous tangle of access and frontage roads. The crush eased up as side roads began to irrigate traffic in different directions, but we were still lost, still needing to pee.

And what was happening to the Mercedes? As if tranquilized by the traffic jam, the damn thing wouldn't shift out of first gear. As the traffic began to move, I tried to keep up, screaming in first gear, getting beeped. There were paddles on either side behind the wheel; I tried one, shifted to second. Wow. This thing is a clutchless manual shift all of a sudden. HONK. Shifted to third. Traffic stopped ahead, down shift, left paddle. Where are we going? Go left here. Why ? HONK. Just do it, I have to go to the bathroom. Look out !!! HONK. There's a bathroom that way? Or go that way. Turn on the GPS. HONK. Turn here...never mind, too late. Upshift. Turn here. HONK.

Sharon had the portable GPS going, turned on her phone GPS and tried to figure out where we could find a gas station. The GPS' were giving us conflicting instructions, and she was vetoing both. Before long we'd both have pale fluid oozing from our eye sockets.

We descended a long street through the probably-very-nice town of Watford and like a beacon of hope for all mankind, a BP station appeared dead ahead. On the left side of the road too, an added bonus.

The BP station, Wiggenhall Rd, Watford. 

It was drizzling. We pulled into a side parking space (we didn't need gas, having burned virtually none in the prior three hours), Sharon raced in for the bathroom, came out and passed the baton.

Both relieved, we still had a problem. The car wouldn't shift without paddle-assist, and our brave little Mercedes had no manual. We were 10 miles into a 1200 mile, ten day expedition. Paddling is for rivers.

At that moment, fighting off despair, a EuropCar courtesy van (no kidding) pulled into the petrol station, and a tallish, bearded guy of about 32 started pumping gas. I approached him ("Hello, friend," I stammered, immediately realizing that I sounded like a 19th century Amish elder, but for some reason that's all I could managed as a greeting...), explained our dilemma, and he came over, climbed into the car and explained that, while Sharon was slamming console buttons trying to wipe girl-pop off the radio, she accidentally hit the Transmission Mode button, silently changing the tranny from Economy to Manual. The button had only an obscure little icon on it, and no one at Edgware explained it to us. Since we were stuck in first gear for 2 hours anyway, backed up on the M1, we didn't notice until we were liberated at the Watford exit.

He also explained that they probably didn't include the manual because, really???, people steal them. So either this little pony's book was in some drawer in Edgware...or someone had already pinched it, for reasons life isn't long enough to speculate about.

We thanked the guy to the point of embarrassment - he found it all kind of amusing, although thankfully not in a 'tosser stupid Yanks' kind of way.

He gave us directions (more or less) to get out of Watford and head back north, bypassing the M1 backup, and we were finally headed toward Nottingham.

We gave up on the radio, and never turned it on once after that.
   

Day 1 - London rain, the cost of sitting and bad bar food

Hugging bears. Hyde Park, London

I suppose it's a common practice for hotels near a train station to let you leave your bags before you can check in - makes perfect sense - so we probably over-thanked the nice Eastern European girls at the Norfolk Towers front desk for something they do all the time. Groggy, mutedly thrilled to be in London in the first hours of a two week adventure, I was thanking everybody within arm's reach.

Relieved of the bags, we thought we'd just head out and walk.

Hyde Park, London

Hyde Park, one of London's great green spaces, wasn't far, so we ambled down with Nikons around the neck and eyes on the sky. For a city so renowned for rain, the skies that day were curiously diffident. Drizzle here, sprinkle there, brightening and clearing, then rain, then mist. I had actually bought and brought a rain jacket for this trip, but I left it in the luggage (figures).

Outside the gates of the Park, a vendor was selling hand-painted pub sign miniatures, hundreds of them. Tourist commerce isn't usually our thing, but we were free agents in one of the world's great tourist cities, and we browsed, eventually settling on three.

Genuine pub sign facsimiles

It was a warmly validating experience to hand over some British currency. The guy said his dad started the business over forty years ago - they have to buy a very pricey monthly license from the City to sell at the Hyde Park gates. Even in the rain, though, it looked like business was okay. We did our part.

The rain ebbed and swelled as we strolled through the Park. I restrained myself from fearing that we would be dodging rain for the next two weeks. At one point we settled into a couple of vacant, old-fashioned beach chairs

Guy on the right sits for free - the rest of us, not so much.

perched under a large tree, minor shelter from the drizzle, until some lad with a genuinely bizarre accent came up to us and informed us that the cost of using the chairs was £2 per half hour. We thanked him - well, I did, because I was still thanking everyone - and vacated the chairs, which were pretty well soaked anyway.

We talked about what next. The Natural History Museum was just on the other side of the Park, which sounded closer than it really was, and while Sharon had talked about seeing it, we decided instead to do a cemetery, defiantly optimistic about the weather. We headed back to Paddington Station, where we discovered that the Paddington tube stop wasn't actually at Paddington Station, but across Praed Street and down a block or so.

Time for lunch.

Up the escalator at the Station, we found the Paddington Store, which is the only authorized outlet for genuine Paddington Bear stuff - books, mugs, pens, posters, bling, shirts, plush of all sizes (including a pretty pricey Steiff) ...and lots of copies of the DVD, which we already had. The nice young man (who I also thanked) told us that the DVD was still selling well, and that the film run was a Pretty Big Deal in London the prior December when it hit the cinema. Sharon found a nice little bronze miniature of the statue.

We sat down in a restaurant a few doors from the store, a dreary brass-rail chain joint with a projection TV showing Formula 1 racing and a handful of patrons noodling on their phones, ordered some forgettable bar nosh and left as soon as we could. I wasn't really hungry, and I don't think Sharon was either, but it seemed like the thing to do.

At some point, we thought we'd take the sleepless Sunday morning in London to head up to either Highgate or Kensal Green cemeteries, both members of the Magnificent Seven, but we had now reduced our available daylight hours, and still mindful of the weather we opted instead for Paddington Old Cemetery, which was sort of nearby Paddington Station on a subway map, but not really nearby on a shoeleather scale, and the weather wasn't encouraging for long walks...unlike 2013, when we ventured far from Chelsea to hit Fulham Palace Road and Margravine cemeteries, winding us around weird neighborhoods and hospitals and grim playgrounds and Costa bladder-relief stops.

Paddington Old Cemetery

It took some doing to figure out the Tube diagram, but we managed to find the right platform and boarded a train that would take us to Queen's Park, a non-descript neighborhood of NW London. The Tube stop was actually a mile or so from the cemetery, so we had a chance to walk a bit through a non-touristy section of London, a subtle indulgence that we both had come to appreciate on prior trips. Like any great city, London is characterized by its postcard-y landmarks and iconic locales, but it's also a place, with schools, dry cleaners, shops, houses, bus stops. Putting down the camera for a few minutes and just being there is part of the experience as well.  

Paddington Old Cemetery isn't particularly old, nor (as noted) particularly close to Paddington Station, but it was a well-kept, reasonably ordered Victorian graveyard, essentially laid out around a central chapel. The chapel appeared to be in pretty rough shape, fenced off and apparently undergoing repair.

Gothic revival chapel and gatehouse, Old Paddington Cemetery.

The Victorians took their burial stonework very seriously, and the combination of a century of toxic industrial air and London weather, as well as diminishing care through generations, leaves many of these graveyards in disrepair. Every Victorian cemetery we've encountered in London has a "Friends Of.." association to raise funds for the cemetery upkeep, and few if any of them ever have enough to keep up with the grinding ravishes of weather and neglect.

We strolled the neighborhood and outside the tube stop we encountered a girl - junkie, we presumed - panhandling for spare change, pleading that she hadn't eaten in two days. All I had on me was (inexplicably) some US coinage, which she wasn't interested in, and Sharon found her pushy and less than plausible as someone in genuine straits. We're generally sympathetic to struggling street folks, but her pleas were cheap and off-putting and we passed.

We headed back to the hotel, prowled the neighborhood a bit,

St Mary's Hospital, Paddington

and finally checked into our room. Impossibly tiny, the room was nonetheless comfortable and weirdly quiet, counter-intuitively the quietest hotel room we had on the whole trip.

After some chill time, we headed back out to a pub around the corner for an early dinner. Fountains Abbey, it was called, oddly named after the magnificent Cistercian abbey ruins in Yorkshire we had a chance to visit on our 2013 trip. The place was nice enough and the service was okay, but the food was pricey and not very good. We were both pretty whipped by this time, so after eating and downing a couple of pints (the bar was selling Coors Light, on draft - a cruel joke, I thought, in a country renowned for its ale, but it wouldn't be the last time we'd see it), we went back to the hotel, assembled our clothes and paperwork for the next day and konked out.    

 

The Arrival

Paddington says Hello, welcome to London and Mind the Gap.

We changed our arrive-in-London schedule to include our first night at a hotel. That wasn't the original plan when we started piecing together this little enterprise back in the spring, but a thing or two came up and we had enough in the budget. No biggie.  

At the risk of absurdest understatement, London has a lot of hotels, and rather than float our world-traveler dinghy out on Facebook soliciting London hotel recommendations (because, how seriously pretentious is that?), we figured proximity to lots of Tube options and ease of access to/from Heathrow made the most sense. We weren't planning to spend a lot of time at the hotel - just a bed, a TV with a sleep timer and wi-fi. We're easy.

I had also, in the last half-year, acquired a cheerfully inexplicable obsession with the film version of Paddington, which came out in the States last January, dragging Sharon to three showings in four weeks. I hadn't read the books as a kid, and was only dimly aware of the polite, quasi-refugee bear's iconic status as a children's book character in the UK, but the film version, well-received by critics on both sides of the puddle, really beguiled and charmed me. I kind of wanted to see the brass statue they erected at Paddington Station in London, and being a central Tube station...well, there ya go. We booked Sunday night at the Norfolk Towers Hotel, one of several dozen in the Paddington Station neighborhood. Affordable by London standards, which is a fairly daunting scale.

Strung out as expected by a four hour flight to Newark and eight hours to Heathrow, unmet at the airport, we collected our bags and went down the escalator at the futuristic Terminal 2 (The Queen's Terminal) to grab a smoke in a grubby little corner beside one of the taxi access lanes.  A handful of youngish Euro-types were thumbing their iPhones on the three prison-grade benches grudgingly provided for smokers. We propped up against the perspex divider wall and chatted with a twitchy 40-ish British RAF veteran with a nasty stutter and a grin yawning of missing teeth. He was clutching a bouquet of flowers, preparing to meet his wife arriving on a flight from Seattle. I think he said she was American, but his accent was a little deep for me, and I never really got a hang of his stutter rhythm, so I missed a lot of what he said to us. He said he liked the States, had been to Portland, Florida and Kansas. Why Kansas? came immediately to mind (no offense, Kansans...), but I thought better of pursuing that odd detail. He was friendly enough, wished us a good time on our holiday and sallied off to baggage claim to meet the missus.

We purchased a couple of express rail tickets to Paddington Station, our first chance to test our travel-advisory cleared credit cards (success!) and made our way to the platform, meeting up with an American couple from Chicago who were just starting their four week trip through England, Wales and Scotland. We briefly traded notes on travel through the country and our favorite places. They said they were expecting lousy weather in Edinburgh, which we understand is a pretty safe bet more or less any time.

The train was fast and comfortable - Paddington Station was a cavernous dissonance of garbled departure announcements, hissing train cars and the rush of luggage toting travelers moving in every direction. It had been a while since I'd been in a train station of any significance, and I had forgotten the somewhat chaotic navigation imperatives they impose. Consisting mostly of, if you don't know where you're going, don't stand out in the middle of traffic trying to figure it out.

I went up to information booth, caught the eye of the lady behind the counter and asked where the Paddington statue was. Platform 1, she pointed, seemingly a bit annoyed.

At the commencement of two weeks' worth of destination and photo-op musts, we were officially one for one.

We made our way out of the station and up the ramp leading to Praed Street, in the soft London drizzle.

Hello, England.  

   

Well...hi again

So, yeah, the 2013 England vacation blog thing kind devolved into Unfinished Business, which was too bad because some of the best stuff happened after we last left off at Annesley Hall, prior to our trip southeast toward East Anglia.

Framlingham and Orford Castles, Bury St Edmund, the gang at the Pic in Ixworth, Castle Acre Priory....

Sorry, but that's going on two years ago and we'll have to leave those hijinx to everyone's imagination. Unfinished it will remain. Ya shoulda been there...

We return sheepishly to these pages, begging forgiveness and entreating our readers to renew their interest, because we are now three days away from...England 2015.

London, Nottingham, Penrith (Cumbria), Northumberland, Durham and York.

This place is on the bill.

Furness Abbey - Cumbria, UK

A busy schedule, more terror-laced driving, a haunted hotel or two (two, actually), and I suspect a few surprises.

No promises, but we'll try to keep posts short, current and full of that free-content effervescence you deserve from one stranger dude's inconsistently maintained travel blog.

Cheers, and see you from the other side of the pond!