York, Pt 1

We made it into York, catching a tantalizing glimpse of the ancient city wall as we navigated our way to the Lady Anne Middleton Hotel, an attractive scattering of 18^th and 19^th century buildings on a very narrow (no surprise) street just across the River Ouse from the city center. 

The hotel was facing Skeldergate Rd, but you had to drive around the block to access the crimped two-tiered parking lot behind the hotel itself, so exhaling from the nerve rattling drive had to wait a little longer. Parking in these ancient cities is an exercise in spatial and geometric contortionism, whether on the street or at a hotel, an early and frequently confirmed admonition that room to move and park your car is a junk-food commodity in the States, and a rare delicacy in England. 

  

The room was attractive and spacious, we hurriedly plugged in our various device chargers (a routine we adopted early and followed every night, the lamentable consequence of bringing  a lot of electronics with us), and pinched the hotel receptionist for a restaurant recommendation. She pointed us to Plunket’s, a little pub-bistro near the middle of the town center, a fifteen minute walk up to Station Rd and into York proper. We were more or less the only people there by the time we arrived, the chatty Australian-bred waitress fed us a decent if unmemorable meal, and we finally got a chance to use some of the pound sterling we brought over with us. I never did figure out the money – Sharon was put in the charge of that early, and we divided our meal and hotel charges between the plastic and British cash. We came home with about 80 pounds – I’ve been studying it. Still perplexed.

The city was bright and bustling, surprisingly so for a Monday night. Glimpses of the Roman wall, some of the late-medieval architecture and, of course, a blocks-away view of the famous 12^th century Minster, lit grandly against the night sky, teased us for a good wander around.

For the life of me, I can’t remember exactly why I insisted, at the very outset of planning this trip, that we needed to see York. In hindsight, many months later, I’d have to admit to surrendering the snipe hunt of searching my memory why we made it such a requirement. Must see York. Must.

Perhaps it was something a little mystical; these indulgences are risky when it comes to travel, since the places you crave to see in person are frequently diminished by their reality, in some small or great measure, and for me, getting to this city – halfway between London and Edinburgh – was no small feat.

But we were finally there. And on Monday night, we were just too wiped out to explore. There was time yet.

London to York, Pt 2

We survived London.

Our first destination was north, in Lincolnshire. St Botolph’s is a decommissioned church sitting on marshland near the tiny village of Skidbrooke, not far from the Lincolnshire coast. It was mentioned by a ghost-hunting friend of ours as one of the most haunted locations he had ever investigated, and while it took us a little further east than we were planning on the way to York, we figured we had time.

Once on the secondary highway, my biggest problem the first day was staying too far left. I’m still not certain why exactly – I think it was both the unfamiliar dimensions of the vehicle I was in, and the (probably not uncommon for Yanks) discomfort of having traffic coming at me on the right side. Sharon barked at me several times on that two hour stretch about being too far left, and indeed, I curb rashed the poor VW’s left front tire more than a few times. We stopped a couple of times in the handy little turnouts (one thing about British highways I was grateful for, especially as the secondary highways had next to no shoulder.) to catch a smoke. We didn’t smoke in the rental car – I think they threatened us with imprisonment or something. Probably just as well, I would have burned through my carton in about a day and a half. 

This was also the day I met the roundabouts. I think we counted 26 on that first day alone. I approached them a bit too cautiously and got screwed up on my entrance-lane choices more than once. The GPS was pretty good about sending us into the right exit from them (even if the signs referred to each exit by their road number, and the GPS used street names – another wrinkle that made the whole driving thing a daily exercise in cheating death), and Sharon learned quickly to tee me up by saying “ok, exit at 11 o’clock….12 o’clock”, using a clock face image to help me line up my roundabout escape. That worked well, and we stuck to that system for the next 10 days. 

Lincolnshire was mostly uneventful. Flat country, agricultural, not too much unlike driving through Illinois or Ohio. We had a number of tricky diversions and county roads to hit, so Sharon kept a close eye on the GPS.

…but did manage to snap a quick photo of The Stump, as we were driving around the ancient city of Boston. Ironically, the tower is attached to the ancient church of St Botolph's – but not the one we were headed toward.

The route to our St Botolph’s, which is kind of near the village of Skidbrooke (but in reality isn’t really ‘near’ anything), plotted us more or less around any major towns, but we came upon a motorcycle accident at a roundabout and was forced to head in to Louth. Our first encounter driving through one of England’s innumerable ancient market towns, and it woke me up.

Early afternoon Monday, and the city was buzzing – and, bang!,  hello to narrow streets lined with parked cars leaving about 1.4 car-widths for passage in either direction. After relaxing a little from the harrowing London experience, I suddenly tightened up again, trying to both negotiate the duck-in, duck-out rhythm of getting down two way streets designed for Roman carts now jammed with buses, delivery vans and Range Rovers, all of whom I imagined sensed and sneered at my CluelessYankDriverness. The city was beautiful – I felt like I wanted to just park the damn VW and get out and stroll the sidewalks, but we were already almost two hours behind schedule, and the thought of actually parallel parking the thing was just too much for my traffic-geometry overloaded mind to contemplate. I kept hearing “…you fookin’ piece of shit” in the back of my brain, and figured it was only a matter of time before I earned my very own.

A wrong turn or two after Louth, but we eventually made it to the church. 

Set amongst a small grove of trees, the church and its churchyard (two actually – one from the 18^th century around the church itself, and another more contemporary in front) sits quietly a quarter mile up a gated road, beside a barely-running brook. The church dates to Norman times and is empty and doorless, having been decommissioned in the 1970’s. 

The grounds were busy with dragonflies, as many as six or eight at a time sunning themselves on the 18th and 19th century headstones.

There was tractor activity on the private farm behind the church, but otherwise the place was magnificently still. Vestiges of the church’s post-Norman past – floor tile work, some wall carvings – still remained, although there was a little evidence of modern vandalism, including some infuriating carvings in the stone work. If the place is indeed haunted, it wasn't terribly active during the hour or so we were there. 

We did notice a steady symphony of bird noises – pigeons roosting in the ceiling, and songbirds birds outside in the trees whose cooing and chirping reverberated inside the empty church. It wasn’t hard to see how this place could be overwhelmingly creepy at night – but in the afternoon sun of a late summer’s day, it was merely peaceful and calmly at rest. 

       

Back on the road and well behind schedule, Sharon wanted now to make up some time and press toward York, afraid we’d check in to the hotel late and miss dinner. We made it over the enormous toll bridge at the River Humber and I pulled off the road at South Cave, at a little chapel and cemetery. We snapped some pictures around the graveyard, and we pushed on to York.   

London to York, Pt 1

The new day broke sunny and pleasant, a busy and buzzing Monday morning in Chelsea. We did find the neighborhood cheerful and bustling, a shade on the foofy-café and fashionista side, but we have developed a tolerance for such things living in Boulder. It had a sort of London-but-not-really feel to it.

But today was The Day.

The three of walked down to the EuropCar office, a little over a mile down Fulham Road from Chris’ flat, right across the street from the Chelsea Football Club stadium, now thankfully quiet. I felt a little like a condemned man walking his own Green Mile; sure, we were excited to get the enterprise on wheels and in motion, but I also knew that my first driving experience in Britain (if you’ve done it before, you remember your First Time, admit it) would be up this apparently treacherous street, back to Chris’ flat (to get the luggage), and then weaving our way out of one the world’s greatest cities and most clusteriffic  motoring experiences toward a highway, and north to Lincolnshire. I tried hard to remember the road in from the airport, to just get an idea of what it would be like, but of course I had no idea if we were headed in the same direction, and anyway, I was a little zombiefied the day before from 18 hours of travel and no sleep.

The paperwork took a little longer than I thought, Chris and Sharon nodding or declining all the pitches the counter guy tossed at me, while I stood there stupefied, waiting to sign something. They finally wrapped up and brought up a VW Golf. Grey. Wheel on the right (duh), and as I had ordered, an automatic.

Little know fact: a mile is longer when you’re driving on the left. Ask me how I know.

We inched our way back to Chris' flat, I found the brakes a little grabby but otherwise so far so good. We double-parked, piled the luggage into VW, Chris gave us a couple of books about England driving and sightseeing, and we were off.

We had loaded up our portable GPS with a map of the UK ($70, by the way), Sharon had the route out of London well plotted, but after 10 minutes of winding our way across West London, my fingers bleached white from constricted bloodflow on the wheel, we came up to what looked a lot like a road closure, conflicting belligerently with the GPS directions. Up to this point, I had kind of gotten the hang of the driving thing (stay behind the guy in front of you, don’t worry about the massive buses/kamikaze cabbies/speeding Range Rovers, don’t kill the cyclists and make your lane change plans early – oh yeah, and stay on the left), but immediately we were flying blind, in the midst of London traffic, and everything kind of came apart. One way streets, incomprehensible signs, the mad rush of a major city assaulting the early hours of a workday. The traffic was dense and fast, we were pinballing our way from block to block, getting stuck in turns we didn’t want to make, compounding our immersion into rush hour London faster than the GPS could extract us.

We did go by the beautiful Natural History Museum at one point, I actually found a minute to glance over and admire it.

After about an hour of this, Sharon gamely guided us out of Central London into the inner-burbs, and eventually onto the A1.

We both exhaled.

“That sucked,” I said. But that little walkabout wasn't done with us.     

In London

Next installment of the Great England Excursion.....

After dropping off bags and catching our breath, Chris took us on a walking tour of his Chelsea neighborhood, daughter Chloe and son Alistair in tow. We grabbed a bite to eat at a bright, chatty little place called Sophie’s down the street from his flat. I didn’t feel much like eating, afraid that a big meal at whatever time my body thought it was would send me into a body-clock-metabolic netherworld, so I just ordered some toast and rash of bacon from our American waitress (born in Knoxville, lived in Seattle, had been in London for 10 years and without the slightest hint of an acquired accent).

 

We made our way over to Brompton Cemetery, one of London’s Magnificent Seven public cemeteries, opened in 1840. We had had it in our minds that we would find lots of ancient cemeteries in England, but soon came to learn that the reality is a little bit more complex than “old country, old cemeteries”. The public cemeteries tended to be not terribly old – early to mid Victorian – primarily because the main burial areas for England’s dead were the churches up until that time, and the public cemeteries (especially in the city centers) were opened as a way to deal with the growing population and the rather unceremonious way of disposing of dead who were not headed toward their parish churchyard. There’s a lot behind all this, and too little time to go into it fully, but suffice to say that our encounter with our first English cemetery was a revelation.

 

Brompton was a sprawling mass of huge headstones and foliage run wild. Entire stretches of graves covered deep in ivy and other native weeds, waist-deep in areas, magnificently carved monuments sinking deep into a weird kind of urban jungle, exuding a kind of post-apocalypse vibe. The place is considered something of an English landmark (England has a lot of them), but were struck by the apparent surrender of the place to this shocking urban Amazonia. The first thought that comes to mind is “neglect”, except the place is huge and it gets lots of water, and this is a spectacularly green country, and let’s face it, who is going to spent the many hours every week trimming away ivy from 150 year old headstones, month after month? Still, my mind went back to Cleveland’s Lakeview Cemetery, the city’s largest and most noble burying ground, seven times the size of Brompton and barely a generation newer, in a similarly wet and green environment, and the place is utterly immaculate. So it made sense to us, but it didn’t.

We fired off a few dozen pictures, Chris and I got caught up on family and other affairs, and we went off to look at a couple of other Chelsea-Kensington landmarks. On our way back to his flat, walking up Fulham Road, we suddenly heard a loud – very loud – bang not far behind us, maybe 30 yards. We wheeled around and saw a Nissan Pathfinder up on two wheels, actually careening its way in our direction before dropping back down on all four and coming to a rest somewhat awkwardly in the street. The screams of children coming, we thought, from the big white passenger van behind the Pathfinder, the guy who had slammed into the Pathfinder, and was now halfway across the lane, bits of his front end and the beginning of a decent puddle of water-oil oozing from the front.

The Nissan driver leapt out, shouted “you fookin’ piece of shit !!!” at the van driver, a middle-eastern looking guy who looked shocked and practically despondent, and the Nissan doors opened and out scrambled three small kids, absolutely shrieking and crying their heads off into the arms of their mother, similarly sobbing and quaking. The physics and choreography of the accident remain a bit of a mystery to us – the passenger van was trying to make a right turn across Fulham road and clipped the right rear of the Nissan, but we couldn’t figure out how he managed to hit it as hard as he did, actually sending the SUV (mid-sized by US standards but a behemoth by British standards) up on two wheels, obliterating his own front end and rendering the van (certainly) and the Pathfinder (perhaps – we didn’t stay long enough to find out) un-driveable.  

Now, accidents happen all the time, and we presumed that on the insanely narrow and generally fast paced streets of England they are as common an occurrence as anywhere else. But…this was the evening before I was to pick up the rental car for the start of our 10 day driving tour, and I was a little shaky at the prospects of climbing into a car and negotiating the left-lane driving thing, on a Monday morning in London, in the first place. This happened on the very same piece of road I would be driving up a half-day later, and it didn’t exactly fire me up with confidence.  

The whole thing left us a little shaken – might have been probably well-on freaked out if we weren’t jet lagged out of our minds, half thrilled by the start of our vacation and half numbed by surfing a functional all-nighter.      

Travel Eastward

First of a handful of follow up entries about the England trip….

We got to the airport a little more than two hours before our first leg – to Houston – and had time to kill. Spent some time on B Concourse smoking and sipping diet soda. If we go again next year, that smoking lounge will be gone. Like most airports today, DIA will be completely purged of smoking by end of 2012. We smokers take pending changes like this in stride – “well, maybe we’ll have quit by then..” – but we were grateful to nic-up before about fourteen hours of travel, including a stopover in the proudly smoke-free Houston Bush Airport.

At the Houston gate, we met a nice couple named Janet and Andrew from LA, who took up seats near us at the gate. He was English, she from Southern California. An unlikely pair we thought, but 13 years married (about our age) and seemed to work well together. They were on their way to Barton-on-Humber to visit his 90-something year old Mum celebrating a birthday, and then westward to the Bristol area. We had both areas on our itinerary, at least along the way, and while we offered some vague interest in getting together with them, we both knew we probably wouldn’t. They were visiting family, we were on vacation and had plans. We waved at them at the baggage area at Heathrow, but that was that.

Sharon had the window for the nine hour Heathrow leg, which was fine with me since I planned to sleep (see below) and read, and it was going to be nighttime the whole way and what good’s a window at night? I was in the middle seat next to a stony faced black lady clutching a rosary the whole flight and looking for all the world like she’d rather be anywhere else than on that plane. So much for casual conversation. Also didn’t help that I had our massive laptop wedged awkwardly at my feet, forcing my legs together and a little sideways. Sounds like a minor deal, but almost 9 hours of that was a little wearying.

I noticed that people on the plane were taking to standing – just standing, some for an hour or more at a time. At first I thought they were waiting for the bathroom. I guess this is done on very long flights, keeps the bloodflow going or something. What seemed a little odd at about three or four hours started to make sense to me at about five or six hours, and toward the end of the nine hour flight I found myself envying them and their outstretched legs and properly aligned bloodflow and entautened leg muscles, but I also knew in order to join them I’d had to excuse myself over the lady with the rosary, probably interrupting a silent prayer that may well have been on behalf of all of us on that plane, and having a fundamental mistrust of air travel I managed to talk myself out of it. Eh…a few more hours of being bent hideously at the hip isn’t so bad.   

I lost track of how many people gave us advice on dealing with jet lag, one of modern life’s now-routine  assaults on the human body, but one neither of us ever had any experience with – stay up the night before, sleep on the plane, don’t sleep on the plane, stay up on the arrival day, take a nap on arrival day, take a pill, take five pills, meditate, etc etc. We both tried to sleep in flight, but our seats were near the gargantuan Boeing 777 engines and the muffled roar reverberating off the windows (sounded like B-flat) was just enough to keep us from drifting off. Besides, it was only early evening our time… The multimedia screen facing me kept ticking down the hours until arrival, which I found both a slight comfort and a consistent annoyance. It never occurred to me to turn the damn thing off – which I did do on the return flight. Sharon watched a movie, but mostly I read and zoned out to Andrew Lahiff, Air Sculpture, Steve Roach and stormloop on the iPod, and read TheTime Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England. I was most pleased to find an outlet to keep my iPod charged – not a new development I am told and yes, we don’t get out much.

 

We were warned that the line at immigration would be long – the English, and I guess most of Europe in general, have accepted long lines (“queues”, as the Brits would say) as a fact of life, being generally more patient than Americans (who isn’t?), but in fact the luggage retrieval took a lot longer. We got up to the lady’s booth after a very short line, she asked curtly why we were in the UK, asked for a contact there (I gave them Chris’ name and address, but it quickly occurred to me – what do you do if you don’t have anybody there to use as a contact? Do they put you back on the plane? Assign you a foster family? A chaperone?), stamped our passports and we went off to meet the driver that Chris had ordered up for us.

On English soil. It has begun.