Day 22 – Canterbury

Canterbury Cathedral

This is our last day in the UK and we are spending it in Canterbury to tour the cathedral. The Canterbury Cathedral is the oldest (founded in 597 but rebuilt in the 1070s) and most famous Christian structures in England. It is best known at the site of the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury who was killed in the cathedral in 1170. Becket was originally friends with King Henry II but over the years a riff developed between the two and grew over a seven year period until Henry II is reported to have said "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Upon hearing this utterance, four knights took it upon themselves to ride to Canterbury and killed the archbishop in a very brutal way.

Canterbury Cathedral (interior)

Following the murder, a kind of cult following grew from the murder and Becket was canonized and a shrine with his remains was placed in the cathedral, where it stayed for hundreds of years until King Henry VIII ordered it destroyed as part of his split from the Catholic Church.  Many pilgrims went from London to see the shrine and this is documented by Geoffrey Chaucer in his most famous text, The Canterbury Tales. There is an attraction in Canterbury dedicated to The Canterbury Tales recounting some of the more famous tales and of course we had to do that. I think it might be a bit dated, but it was interesting enough.

By the way, it was in the mid-70s today and easily the best weather we have seen on the whole trip. It was a day for short-sleeves and no need for a jacket.

Day 21 – Plymouth, Brighton and the White Cliffs

HMS Victory

Our first stop today was at the Historic Plymouth Dockyard to tour the HMS Victory.  The HMS Victory is a 104-gun sailing ship that was launched in 1765 and is best known for her role as Lord Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 against the combined French and Spanish fleets. The significance of Nelson’s victory meant that Napoleon would be unable to invade England as he couldn’t control the English Channel during the crossing, so England was spared an invasion. Nelson did not survive the battle, however, being shot by a French sniper on the main deck and in full view (where admirals traditionally stood) and there are spots on the ship marking where he was shot and below decks where he died. Nelson is by far England’s foremost naval hero. 

Deck with Twelve 12-pound Cannons (per side)

The ship was a surprisingly interesting tour as the audio guide made you feel that you were actually part of the crew during the battle of Trafalgar.

Royal Pavilion (Brighton)

From Plymouth we drove east along the English coast to Brighton.  Brighton is due south from London and a favorite spot where the English go when they want to go to the beach. However as it was mid-May and still very cool with a strong breeze off the water, we wonder how many actual beach days they would get. Brighton has two famous sights, the Royal Pavilion and the pier. The Pavilion was built by George III and used up through Queen Victoria’s time as a royal seaside resort.  It’s now open to the public, but it really didn’t interest us enough to tour. 

Brighton Pier

Brighton Pier is really very similar to any of the piers along the New Jersey shore with amusement rides and shops. 

Seven Sisters

From Brighton we headed further east and were surprised to discover that the famous White Cliffs aren’t only in Dover but actually extend from Brighton all the way to Dover in the east. The cliffs are formed by white chalk which gives them their white coloration. They are quite high and the cliffs at Dover are visible from France which is at the narrowest part of the English Channel. While the cliffs at Dover are famous from the song The White Cliffs of Dover, they are best seen from the channel and you can get a better view of white cliffs elsewhere and so we chose to see the cliffs at the Seven Sisters, located in Sussex just east from Brighton. It is a spectacular view and not crowded with tourists.

Day 20 – Stonehenge and Jane Austen Country

John at Stonehenge

In sequence, we stopped in Bath, Stonehenge, the village of Chawton to see Jane Austen’s house, Winchester to see the cathedral and are spending the night in Southampton.

Stonehenge is kind of a mandatory stop if you are in Britain and so we did the tourist thing and joined the crowd. They have a new visitor center and now they bus you out to the stone circle, but you still have the option of walking and viewing Stonehenge for free from a slighter greater distance. Of course it is about a 3-mile roundtrip walk, so we opted to pay. It was crowded but not really mobbed. It is really in a wide open area with nothing around except the A303 which is close enough to see the stones.

Roman Baths and Bath Cathedral

In Bath we took the Hop-On Hop-Off Bus tour to maximize what little time we had in town. It was a good introduction to the city and we saw the cathedral, the Roman baths for which the town is named and the Georgian architecture of the city of which the Royal Crescent is probably the best example.

Jane Austen House in Chawton

Now some Jane Austen trivia related to our sightseeing today. Jane Austen was born in Steventon in 1775 and moved to Bath in 1800 when her father retired from the ministry. She lived in Bath for about 5 years, until her father died and we saw a couple of the places she lived in Bath. She was reportedly unhappy in Bath and then moved with her family to Southampton (where we are spending the night) in 1806 after her father passed away and her family had to be taken in by relatives. Subsequently she and her family moved to a property owned by her brother in Chawton in 1809 where she lived for 7 or 8 years. She had been working on her novels for years, but it was in Chawton where she finished her novels and published them.

Winchester Cathedral

Austen became ill and was under medical care in Winchester for about a year, where she died on 18 July 1817, at the age of 41 and she is buried in the cathedral.  The cathedral is a huge structure and had maybe the highest ceiling of any cathedral we have been in.

Although all this Jane Austen stuff sounds planned, we really just stumbled on most of it.

Day 19 – Wales

Steam Train in Wales

So what is different in Wales? For one thing, their signs are dual-language with both Welsh and English showing. For example: Slow and Araf. Other than that, not much is drastically different. Still lots of sheep, maybe a little more mountainous that England. One thing that is familiar to us are some of the Welsh city names which are common also in our area – Berwyn, Telford, North Wales, etc.

Langollen Train Station and the River Dee

Our first stop was a steam engine train ride starting in Llangollen (note: double-L is pronounced like “s” in Welsh, so something like Sangosen). 

Victorian Days

We happened to be there on Victorian Days so people at all the stations were dressed in Victorian clothes, tying back to when Queen Victoria came to Berwyn in 1897. It is a nice scenic ride along the River Dee.

Brecon Beacons National Park

After the train ride we drove south through a lot of winding roads, small towns and Brecon Beacons National Park to just outside of Cardiff where we spent the night. One interesting part in the National Park was that there was a section where the sheep roamed wild and were often in the road or near it, so you had to drive very slowly at any blind spots. 

We closed the night doing something typically European – after a nice meal at the pub, we watched the Eurovision Song Contest.

Day 18 – The Beatles

Magical Mystery Tour Bus

There are a lot of things to see in Liverpool but for those of us of a certain age, the Beatles are what we came for so the day was packed with a lot of Beatle-related activities. We started today with the Magical Mystery Tour which is a two-hour bus tour which focuses on Beatles sites. We saw the homes of all four Beatles, the spot where Lennon and McCartney met plus places mentioned in Beatle songs. The end of the tour was at the Cavern Club, which is much smaller than I expected. Only drawback was my umbrella got nicked at one stop (my fault).

Penny Lane

At Penny Lane: 1) On the corner is a banker with a motorcar – the bank is still there on the corner, 2) Behind the shelter in the middle of the roundabout – No longer a roundabout for public transportation but still exists across from the bank, 3) In Penny Lane the barber shaves another customer – same barbershop still there. What wasn’t there today: There beneath the blue suburban skies – gray, cloudy and misting rain. In the evening, it turned to full rain.

Beatles Statue 

Following the tour we took the “Ferry Cross the Mersey” which is another Liverpool song reference (Gerry and the Pacemakers). It could have been better as a fog had set in, in addition to the rain, which made sightseeing a little more difficult. After that we went to the Tate Liverpool, which is an excellent contemporary art museum. I actually like it much better than the Tate Modern in London, which is much bigger. I especially liked “My Bed” by Tracey Emin and photos by Cindy Sherman, who I had studied in my Art History class last summer. Pretty cool to see the works in person. 

Last stop was at The Beatles Story which is a kind of museum on Albert Dock which tells the story of the Beatles career. It was pretty detailed but really kind of just okay.

Day 17 – Scotland to Liverpool

Lockerbie Garden of Remembrance

We said goodbye to Scotland and started our four and a half hour drive south to Liverpool. We try to break up our trips so we stopped to see the Lockerbie Garden of Remembrance. This is a memorial to Pan Am Flight 103 which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 killing all 259 people on board and 11 people on the ground. Two Libyans were tried for the bombing and one was found guilty and the other found not proven guilty. The “Not Proven Guilty” is a third possible outcome for a trial under Scottish law and one that we don’t have. While it is technically an acquittal, it basically means we know you were guilty but it can’t be proved.

We passed into England and drove though the Lake District, which was the home to poets like Wordsworth. It is very pretty country but with fantastic weather today (sunny and about 70) the small towns were overrun with tourists and so we didn’t stop much.

View of Albert Dock From Our Room

We have a great room at the Hilton in Liverpool overlooking the Albert Dock and the River Mersey. We went to dinner at Albert Dock and saw a show at the comedy club there.  The first three comedians were very funny and we could mostly understand the jokes, except when they made cultural reference to things that we didn’t know like making fun of the people in Hull. No clue what that means.  The last guy was totally different. He was a last minute replacement and a local low-class Liverpudlian whose accent so thick it was amazingly difficult to understand. Some of that difficulty might have been part of his act, but we only understood about 20% of what he was saying. Everyone else was laughing, either with him or at him. It was hard to tell which.

Day 16 – Glasgow

George Square (Glasgow)

Steve left for his morning flight back to the U.S. and so Jeanne and I are on our own once again. We have been very pleasantly surprised by Glasgow. It is the largest city in Scotland but it is pretty well devoid of tourists, or at least ones speaking a different language. You hear a lot of French, Italian, etc. in Edinburgh but nothing other than English here. Glasgow has a reputation as a blue collar city with a rough edge, and you can see hints of that, but by and large we found it open and inviting. It is also a young city with three large universities and a thriving music and pub scene. Glasgow has a very nice pedestrian zone downtown formed by Buchanan and Sauchiehall (pronounced Sucky-Hall) streets. The Scots here are very friendly but also very hard to understand. I can understand about every other word and when they tell me the price of something, I can almost never understand it. Here is one good example. We went to dinner at one pub which was full, so the girl told us to try the Butterfly and Peg which was just up the street. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that Peg is how she pronounces Pig.

Tall Ship (Riverside Museum)

We tried to have a relaxing kind of day and pretty much succeeded. We took the Hop-On Hop-Off tour bus around the city and stopped at the Riverside Museum and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Pubic museums in Glasgow are free so you really can’t complain about what you see. The Riverside Museum is dedicated to transportation and is located on the River Clyde, which used to be the site of a large shipbuilding industry. They have one of the five surviving tall ships built in Glasgow docked at the port.

Kelvingrove Art Museum

We toured the Kelvingrove Museum and I would have to give it an A+ for the building but about a C for content. They have a large collection of Scottish painters who are largely unknown to us.

Dinner tonight was in a local pub watching soccer on TV with everyone else.