Unwinding around Arundel

The title to this one doesn’t mean what you might think.  I took one more orbit of Arundel but at different distances and in the opposite direction from the two I’d done before, hence unwinding. 

Monday was my last day of country walking for the trip.  I started out with a short train ride to Amberly Station.  I’d walked by that station on the previous Tuesday and didn’t feel like repeating the walk along the Arun again.  It was just a little 5 minute train ride.

From Amberly, I picked up the South Downs Way west towards Glatting Beacon.  This cut through the walk I’d taken the previous Tuesday.  The South Downs Way is a long distance path that runs along the downs for 106 miles across the downs to the city of Winchester.  If you don’t mind a very great deal of modest hill walking, it’s a terrific path.  Mostly, it’s just worn into the chalk, so the footing is easy and you couldn’t loose the path if you tried – it gleams out bright white against the turf or crops or whatever happens to be along its edges.  I covered a few miles along it until I came to a parking lot where I’d turned down for Bignor on Tuesday. 

This time, I followed the track of the same Roman road going the other direction.  It’s called Stane Street and was part of a network of roads around the South coastal area to link various towns, forts, and farms.  Originally, it was 20-25 feet wide with a raised roadbed surrounded by banks and ditches, but only traces of those can be seen anymore.  What’s left now is fundamentally just a very straight path you could walk all the way to Chichester without walking more than 20 feet left or right if some of the roadbed hadn’t been so good that it got recycled into medieval and eventually modern roads. 

A few miles down, I ran into the strangest collection of signs I ever hope to see.  There were three of them, printed on ordinary paper then laminated and stuck to a pole. 

The top sign said simply that the bridleway was closed, identifying it by a number which wasn’t on my map, so only the location of the sign let me know that it referred to this particular path.  There were a name and contact number on it if I had any questions.

The middle sign informed me, in stunning legal detail that the county council provision requiring the closure which would have expired on the 29th of May had actually been extended until November.  This must have been one of those legal cliffhangers they make movies about, because the extension notice was dated on the 28th.  I imagine the plucky school kids, eager to protect this section of path finally talking the gruff but good hearted council member into . . . well you get the point.  This sign was saved from complete uselessness by the fact that it contained a map showing the extent of the closure – only a few hundred yards – and offering alternate paths, a little jog that would tack about a quarter of a mile to the trip.  At this point, I thought I had a grasp on what was going on and how I might deal with it.

The third sign plunged me back into confusion.  It was from the National Trust and offered a permissive alternate route running “just to the north” of the closed bridleway.  Now at this point, what I saw by way of trails, reading from left to right, were 1) a narrow path on a chalk ridge a few feet high, 2) a grassy lane that clearly saw the passage of the very occasional farm vehicle, 3) a short and recently installed fence that claimed to be electrified. 

I think what all of this was trying to tell me, without being so crass as to actually put it this way, was that I should walk on the grassy lane rather than on the chalk ridge.  This is probably what I would have done anyway since the chalk path was clearly eroded and broken in places, which erosion is probably what this whole closure was about.  However, I couldn’t quite convince myself that it could take three such confusing signs to send that message, so I used my map to hold down the top theoretically electrified wire and walked the distance in the empty pasture, ready to hop back across if anyone came by to correct me.

The rest of the walk was very straightforward and pleasant.  I touched at the village of Slindon which has a boys school and some very nice homes.  It also has a pub that claims to be open till 3 PM on Monday but doesn’t really mean it.

Garmin facts: 13.8 miles in 4:22 for a moving average of 3.2 mph.

Monday night, I saw Theft, a fluffy little drawing room comedy put on by the Arundel Players in the Priory playhouse just steps from my Inn.  It was surprisingly entertaining.  The play itself is of course negligible, but the acting was pretty good, on the whole.  As long as I thought of it as better than television rather than not as good as professional theater, I had a very nice time. 

I overheard a few of the people who were involved in the production.  The youngest actress was cast as a woman who is supposed to be slightly older than the other characters.  She had apparently decided, rather cleverly, that her character had just had more plastic surgery and she did manage to keep her brow line almost as steady as that of a botox user. 

I was very glad I’d attended. 

I suppose this about wraps things up.  I’m in London now, catching up on my play going and readapting to city life.  I’m still walking a bit, but it is a very different character of walking, and I’ve already written about London walking.  It’s strange to think of this whole trip as nearly over.  I spent so long getting ready for it then so long doing it.  I put more than 450 miles behind me, saw some gorgeous country, and met a wide cast of characters.  I’m feeling very satisfied and very ready to get onto the plane tomorrow to go home.

Another Ramble and Quiz Night

Sunday morning, I hopped on to the Ramblers’ site again.  The folks on Wednesday at told me that there were often group walks on Sundays as well.  I found a walk that started out nearby.  The rendezvous instructions left me in just a little bit of doubt.  They said to meet at the Lower Cissbury Ring Car Park.  I saw two parking lots near Cissbury Ring, which turned out to be another Iron Age hill fort with minimally visible earthworks.  One of them seemed from the map to be both further south and at a slightly lower elevation – I figured that gave me a pretty good chance that you’d call it lower.  I also had plenty of time to go there first and zoom to the other one if I didn’t find anyone.

I found a bunch of people at the first parking lot I tried, and got acquainted with a few of them while we waited for more people who were carpooling down.  This Ramblers’ group was from somewhere much closer to London.  Robin, the fellow who was leading the walk, has a weekend home in Sussex, and I think a few of the other members do as well, so some had driven there directly while a bunch of others carpooled.  Very sensible, but it meant we had a certain amount of waiting around and nose counting before we could get under way. 

There were nearly 40 of us by the time the last drivers got in.  Robin had planned out a very pleasant walk that took us over a couple of downs for good distance views and through a few pretty villages.  I’m not sure I could even trace the route.  I got very lazy and left my GPS in my pocket and hardly looked at the map. 

In one village, we stopped at the church shortly after services had ended.  The minister was still there and he pointed out a few features of the church.  He kicked back a rug to show us brass etchings representing ancestors of the poet Shelly whose family had been big landowners in the area.  He was sipping a sherry to restore himself from his mornings work and pointing out various bits of décor to us.  Allan, a fellow I’d been walking and talking with for much of the morning was amused to find that the minister knew a lot about the art history of the church but almost nothing of its iconography.  Not a tremendous surprise, really, as the church had, like any its age, been created Catholic but had participated in the slow slide of the Church of England toward the protestant over the centuries.  Unlike many others, no zealots ever went through it ripping everything down, so it had a lot of Catholic decoration left.  It also had some much more recent décor – including some purpose made tile work by William Morris – but that had all been designed to work with what was already there.

We left the vicar behind, zipping his sherry and trying to commit the names of the archangels Paul had explained to him to memory.

We had lunch in a nice pub called, for reasons I could never establish, the World’s End.  The sign was painted with the scene of a meteorite falling towards a village, so I believe the name was meant to be temporal rather than geographic, but that was as far as I got.  I joined three other walkers who made justifiable fun of what they called my fishing vest and were good company.

One minor complaint I have developed about Sussex is that the vast majority of the pubs seem to be supplied by the same brewing company, so I saw nothing like the variety of ales available that I found along the Pennines and around Coleshill.  Probably good for my health, as I always feel obligated to try new brews so less novelty meant less ale, but it made the pubs feel a little chainy.

As a finale for the walk, we went up to Cissbury Ring from the side opposite where we’d parked and walked most of the way around.  There was a visible ditch and bank around most of the hilltop, though substantially eroded in parts.  The views were spectacular.  It was a very clear day, and I could pick out a lot of the other areas where I had walked.  This is where I got the real benefit of having dropped anchor in Arundel for so long and done so much local walking.  I really had a strong sense of orientation and organization for where the terrain, towns, and roads were.  It helped me pull everything I’d seen into some kind of structure.

A few of us had gotten ahead of Robin, and we almost missed the turning down off the ring, not that I would have conceptually minded another lap to see what was to see from the other side, but I was getting tired.  We zipped back to join the middle of the column on the long downhill to the car park. 

Borrowed Garmin Facts:  Robin’s GPS said we did 12 miles even in just under 4 hours for a 3 mph walking average.  His doesn’t have an altimeter, but looking at the features we climbed on the map it was at least 400 meters.

My adventures for the day were far from over even as I parked back in Arundel.  I lounged around a little and washed up then went downstairs to discover preparations for Quiz Night in progress.  I was pretty much swept into participating and was almost immediately part of a team of 4 fiddling through a pair of questionnaires one of which wanted definitions for a bunch of terms each of which had a color as part of it.  The only one we couldn’t get was blue john, and I still haven’t gotten that one.  The other questionnaire had a bunch of photos on it, and we were to supply the names of the people in them. 

I think these do it yourself quizzes have become a standard part of quiz night, because the main event takes time to pull together.  There were about 8 teams scattered around different rooms of the pub.  This was the first time the St Mary’s Gate had tried to do this, so there was a lot of improvisation.  A fellow named Ted acted as MC and he had a hell of a time figuring out using the microphone they’d given him.  Ideally, the way quiz night works is each individual or team has a set of answer sheets, one for each round.  During each round the MC reads off a list of questions.  Everyone listens attentively and hears the questions clearly.  You attempt to answer the questions then swap sheets with someone else at the end of the round to score each others’ papers.  I don’t know how often quiz nights achieve or even approach this ideal, but we were pretty far off.

Between the microphone problems and the participants’ difficulty in resisting commenting loudly on the microphone problems, I don’t think a single question was repeated fewer than four times.  I also think a few teams decided to start a side game going in trying to wind up Ted and the other organizers, but I will give Ted credit, he maintained a perfect calm throughout.  He also had a very impressive voice.  If he’d been willing to take a vow of silence for Monday, I have no doubt he would have been better heard had he dispensed with the microphone and just bellowed.

Most of the questions were strongly British in derivation (The title of the first “Carry on” film anyone?  The title of any “Carry on” film?  The very faintest notion of what a “Carry on” film might be?) so I was almost no use at all.  Those who know me will be astonished to learn that the only question I contributed significantly to was in the sports category.  It was not, lest any of you become worried, because I remembered any significant sports trivia, it was just logic.  The question was something like “What major international sports event commenced at Soldier Field in the city of Chicago on the 17th of June, 1994?”  I knew from my time in Chicago that Soldier Field is an American football field, so would not usually be used in June.  I remembered that the US had hosted the Soccer world cup sometime in the 90’s, because a friend had taken me to see a match in DC.  Putting this together, I figured out it must have been the world cup.  I think we were the only team to get that one since everybody else moaned and made “Well duh” noises when the answer was read out.

The whole thing was good fun, though I don’t see myself making a habit of it.  My team mates, Paul, Trevor, and a blond woman whose name I never heard clearly above the noise, were extremely tolerant of the depths of my ignorance. 

 

Day Off

Today, Saturday, I took a vacation from my vacation.  I drove up to Petworth to visit a stately home there run by the trust.

On the way, I heard a very funny radio program which purported to be the coverage of an academic life time achievement celebration for a professor who, in spite of his drunkenness, philandering, and intellectual negligibility had managed to fashion a career as a notable authority on the history of merrie olde England.  It was done absolutely deadpan with interviews of people at the event who had known or worked with him all saying absolutely appalling things, but in the language and cadences that people usually use on such occasions to praise the great.  Very amusing in a kind of over intellectual way, so it appealed to me. 

Petworth House was a fun place to visit.  They’ve got a big park with herds of deer running around.  I was finally in a place landscaped by Capability Brown.  When you read guidebooks, you get the sense that this fellow was riding around England landscaping gardens of estates at the rate of about 3 per day sometimes without a commission or even permission (much like Olmstead in the US), but I’d never knowingly walked around any of his work.  It was very nice.  I also learned what a ha ha is – viz. a flooded ditch around a part of a garden to keep wildlife in or out without breaking up the view.  Presumably it gets its name from what the householder says when a careless guest falls in.

I spent four hours there, but I can’t come up with much more worth writing about it.  There is a sort of sameness to these stately homes.  It’s probably a good thing one doesn’t usually get a chance to visit so many of them in as short a time as I’ve done on this trip.  They lose a lot of the specialness that they honestly merit.  Petworth House, and the village hanging off it, are very lovely and fun to wander around, but mostly in ways it would be repetition for me to write about now.

There was an interesting exhibit in one room on the servants’ wing that had been refitted into a little museum.  It described the role of the owner of Petworth House in encouraging and even funding emigration to Canada.  For some reason, they called in “Northern Canada” even though it was mostly around Niagara, and you can’t get much further south than that.  I’d seen lots of information over the years about the reception of immigrants into North America, so it was interesting to see the story from the sending end. 

After a nice ramble in the grounds, I drove on to Chichester where I had a ticket to Midsummer Night’s Dream back at the festival theater.  I’d intentionally gotten to Chichester well before show time, so I poked around the shopping district for a while, people watching and scouting a restaurant for dinner.  There was a big do at the cathedral where they had apparently decorated with tens of thousands of flowers, but they wanted 7.5 pounds to get in.  I figured I’d seen plenty of flowers in the wild already.  I had a seat on a bench for a while and watched four guys playing croquet on part of the green.  This also positioned me well to see and hear passers by detect the price of admission and call out in alarm. 

I only saw the first act of the play.  It was a fine production, but I was only willing to drive back in the dark for a great production, and it wasn’t quite that.  I am spoiled for this particular play by having seen a tremendously creative and charming production at Washington Shakespeare Company year before last.  I think I have to take it off my list for a while.

I came back to do this journaling and of course enjoy the concert.  Had a nice conversation with a woman who saw my computer and started bemoaning the difficulty she’s having getting through her A levels with Microsoft Access.  She wants to make a career in web design.  I reassured her that you can make a perfectly successful job of web design without having a firm grasp on databases, as long as you’re willing to get good at subcontracting to database experts at need.

I think I’ll post this, then hope the concert, which is going on just below my room fades out soon enough for me to get some sleep.  They’re singing a few lines of the “Show me the way to go home” song, so that may mean something.

For the Shrimping

I think I timed this whole vacation just about right.  Friday morning, for the first time, going for a walk sounded like a chore.  I spent a while looking through the Sussex sections of my walking guides to try to get some inspiration, and decided instead to take a walk I had devised myself – following the riverside path along the Arun nearly to the sea, then walking along the seacoast to Bognor Regis.  I reasoned that this couldn’t be too difficult, since it had to be more or less flat, both from common sense and from looking at the contours on the map.  I was also curious to see Bognor Regis, because it was where Jeeves went on his holidays away from Bertie – for the shrimping Bertie would always say, and damned if I didn’t see numbers of people with dip nets on long handles pulling something wriggly out of the water, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I did successfully finish off Wildfell Hall on Thursday night, so I grabbed up my three Brontes in one as well as my guidebook and map for Dartmoor to carry down to the used book shop in town for a little change of reading matter.  I had crossed Dartmoor off my list because it’s all over hills (of which I had had plenty) and bog (of which I had had more than plenty).  I got a few pounds credit for the Dartmoor stuff.  They wouldn’t take the Brontes because of their condition.  Well, they had spent a long time in my pack after being dead for a while, so I couldn’t blame the book shop folks.  At any rate, I spent my credit and a few pounds out of my pocket on a range of the silliest, thinnest looking space opera I could find, one of which I read in the course of yesterday.  It was called SPACEHAWKS and had lots of exclamation marks.  It’s a real tonic after all the high literature. 

They had some “Anything in this bin 2 pounds” bins out front, so I tipped the Brontes into one of them on the way out.

The stroll back up to the inn worked the stiffness out of my left leg that had really been making me reluctant to walk.  I have implied this, but not said it explicitly.  Here in Arundel, when I write about walking up to the inn, I mean that literally.  Arundel is built on a steep slope, and my inn is at the street on the top.  These guys probably keep a certain number of guests here for dinner just because the thought of walking back up here after eating somewhere down the hill wears them out.

I was back to fairly enthusiastic as I headed out and down to pick up the riverside path.  It was a beautiful morning, but of course with a lingering threat of rain.  The walk along the river was easy in every way.  I saw hardly anyone beyond a few dog walkers for most of the morning. 

I did discover something very funny about the cathedral right next door.  From close to, it doesn’t look extremely large.  The buildings surrounding it are mostly two or three stories tall, and crowd it in.  The wall around the park runs just across the street from it.  You really can’t get far enough away from it in the town to see it properly.  As a result, in violation of everything you’re ever heard about perspective, when you get about a mile from it and can see it whole it looks much bigger.  I mean, it looks huge.  It looks bigger than the castle, even though the castle is both bigger and closer to you.  It suddenly looks as though Arundel is a cathedral with a few buildings crowded up to it rather than a town with a cathedral in it.  I think some of the buildings down the hill from it are a similar color stone as well, so they sort of get tangled up with it.  Anyway, it’s the first time I ever experienced that effect, and it was almost magical. 

The walk along the beach was also fairly easy, although much of it was loose packed gravel, which shifts under the foot even more than sand.  My calves got a good work out.  Bognor Regis turned out to be a pleasant enough town.  I was pretty tired when I got there, because there hadn’t been many good opportunities to rest along the way.  I did plop down on the sea wall pillowed on my rolled up raincoat reading SPACEHAWKS for a while, but I was near a major access to the . . . you know it’s so hard to keep calling it a beach . . . from a parking lot, so there were lots of families marshalling on and off the strand with all the attendant crying and screaming and threatening.  In the end, it wasn’t as restful as it might have been.  I got back up and walked on to Bognor. 

Once there, I bought a portion (OK, a bucket, but it was a little bucket) of fries and hired a deck chair to sit on the gravel and stare out at the sea and read more of my novel.  The seacoast makes the British do odd things.  For one thing, it makes them go in the water when the air is 68 degrees with a 15 mph wind blowing and a lovely bunch of stones to walk across coming and going, but that’s just the beginning.  I will confine myself to the most extreme case which was a portly father and son standing about 40 feet apart and hurling stones at one another as a form of entertainment.  Golf ball sized stones.  Fist sized stones.  They didn’t always miss.  Father tried to break off the game, I think, by walking over to stand near Mom, but that didn’t stop things.  It just meant she had to be ready to spring away at any moment.  Much hilarity ensued.

After a while, the chill started to get to me.  I poked around town looking for anything more interesting, but since I was too tall for the kiddy rides and didn’t care to feed a bunch of pounds into slot machines, I soon exhausted the amusements on offer.  There was a cinema showing the new Harry Potter, but it had just started a half hour before.  I found the train station and bought a ticket back to Arundel. 

I got back to my room and turned on the TV.  The best thing I could find was a game show in which a bunch of sports trivia cranks were shown photos and film clips and had to answer questions about them.  I actually watched about 20 minutes of this while trying to gather the energy to take a shower. 

I had a nice Indian dinner – all the way at the bottom of the hill, so you know I really wanted it.  The air had cleared remarkably.  If the world were run properly, there would have been emergency opening hours at the castle so I could go to the top of the keep for the views.  I really think I might have seen to London.

OK, time for a few words about right now.  I’m in the beer garden of the inn on Saturday night.  The lounge bar is crammed with people singing bits of various show tunes.  The bad news is they haven’t yet struck on a song they know more than two lines of, so they start and stop a lot.  On the plus side, they are sometimes all trying to sing the same song, not invariably mind you, but often.  There was just a bit of an interruption because someone’s chair fell to bits.  They just had a try at “In other words” but they literally only knew the “Fly me to the moon and . . .” and had to trail off right away.  On the other hand, they seem to know more of “I’m forever blowing bubbles” than I ever heard before.

Any more about last night?  I don’t think so.  I had a quick pint back at the inn while a bunch of people on the wide screen TV talked about a horserace scheduled for today then went up to my room and finished SPACEHAWKS.

Garmin Facts:  12 miles, 3:50, 4.1 mph plus 1 mile around Arundel.

Oh, but I forgot to put in when it happened, a few nights ago, I was reading myself to sleep and started hearing an odd clicking noise I couldn’t place.  I’m staying in a really old building that makes a number of odd noises, but eventually I figured out it was someone throwing pebbles at my window.  I pulled on a robe and poked my head out to find it was a couple of my fellow guests who were locked out because someone had failed to leave a key in the back door where I’d been told there always was one.  They were profusely apologetic, but it really wasn’t their fault.  I only include this story because it’s the sort of thing I don’t think of as happening in real life, but there it was.

Bull!

I have two literary ambitions tonight.  One is to get my journal all caught up, which this chapter will do.  The other is to finish Wildfell Hall, my third Bronte novel, which I’m quite liking, but I’m feeling ready to read something different.

One of my walking guides recommended a walk from a pair of windmills called Jack and Jill then out to a few hills and villages.  I’d mentioned this to a few of my Rambler companions yesterday and several of them endorsed it as a good area to visit.  It also had the benefit of needing a map I didn’t own yet, so I would have to dawdle around the inn until the outfitters opened.  I was feeling the 32 miles over the previous two days, and a little extra repose was welcome.  Walking out to the outfitters and back would also reassure me that I wasn’t too crippled to go walking (I wasn’t).

By the time I pulled into the parking lot by Jack and Jill, it was about 11:30.  The walk was forecast at 9 miles and looked pretty straightforward.  I even thought I’d figured out how to get to Pyecombe where there is a pub before 2 PM when lots of pubs stop serving lunch or close till evening. 

The windmills themselves didn’t strike me as anything special.  In fact, I was a little irked that these old useless windmills are viewed as picturesque while what I think of as very graceful electricity generating windmills some people are building in parts of the UK are viewed as eyesores.  Setting that aside, in the course of the walk, I did figure out why they’re such a feature of the route.  I could see them through probably half of the walk from all kinds of different points of view.  They do actually look nice from some of the distant hill sides.  In fact, the only perspective from which I didn’t find them pretty was standing right next to them.

Only a few journal worthy features of the hike.  I did not make Pyecombe before 2 PM because I finally ran across an honest to goodness bellowing, snorting bull in a field I was supposed to walk across.  He only had one horn, but that just made me confident he’d lost the other one running into something or some one.  I didn’t see him until he was quite close, and he made it very clear he didn’t like me being there.  He ran a few steps toward me and stopped, which looked enough like a practice swing to me that I hopped over a fence much more gracefully than I’d bet anyone I could have done.  I burned more than half an hour thrashing my way through a few other fields until I got back to a path taking me the right direction.  It was clear from light tracks in the foliage that I wasn’t the first one to have to dodge this fellow.

Fortunately, The Plough serves all afternoon, so I was able to get a creditable calizone and a couple of good pints.  On my walk out of the village, a woman in a car pulled over to ask me directions to a nearby village.  It happened to be part of my route, so I knew where it was but I had to fiddle with the map a little to change modes from “How will I walk there?” to “How should she drive there?”  We eventually got her sorted out and on her way.

I had a little more excitement coming down from a hill I started climbing just after lunch.  The map showed a path going due north from the summit, but as far as I could see it would take someone from a Mountain Dew commercial with a helmet and goggles and one of those luge with wheels thingies to really enjoy going straight down.  I found another way down without too much trouble, although part of the route involved a bridle trail that had a soupy clay surface that had me jumping from solid spot to solid spot.  Just like the walk yesterday, I ended with a long climb back to the parking spot.

There, I’m caught up.  Now, if I can get online, I’ll post these and go try to polish off Wildfell Hall.

Garmin Facts:  11 miles 4 hours 2.7 mph.  450 meters climbed.

Finally, another walk/theater combo

Wednesday morning, I decided to check the Rambler’s website to see whether there were any organized walks in the area.  I found one quite nearby, but it was starting in under an hour.  I scrambled into trail clothes, filled my water bottles, and made sure everything I might need was in my pack.  I raced down to the car, stopping at a picnic table to put my boots on, figured out the route and drove off.  I took a couple of modestly wrong turns, but got to the jumping off point just in time to see the group disappearing into some woods.  I figured I could probably catch them if I hurried.  I opened the back door to grab my pack and discovered I’d left it back at the inn.  This left me with two problems.  First, I wouldn’t have any water, which I would certainly need at some point.  Second, I’d look like an idiot foreigner who didn’t know enough to have all the “in case” stuff along that British walkers insist on.  I dithered about whether to just give up for about two minutes, and decided I’d still try to find them. 

I headed up to where I’d seen them on the trail.  There was a branching just there, but when I followed one of them with my eyes, it went straight towards a place name that I remembered being part of the description of the walk.  I figured it was a pretty good bet they’d headed that way and started pressing along that way.  Ten minutes along I still hadn’t seen any more sign of them, and figured I’d probably guessed wrong.  I just kept walking along while I thought about whether I should turn around to go back and get my pack or just take myself for a short walk around the area.  I’d popped out of the woods onto the top of the down by now and knew they weren’t ahead of me.  The views were nice, so I decided I’d carry on for a while then try to figure a circular route back to the car. 

Just a few minutes on, I saw a person walk onto the trail ahead of me.  I glanced at the map and figured out the Ramblers must have taken the other path down into the valley then climbed back up on an intersecting path, basically taking the punishing route to get exactly where I’d gotten walking nearly on the flat.  I decided I’d walk over and introduce myself and see about walking the rest of the way with them.  I still felt a little awkward, but they were amused to have an ignorant foreigner join them and were very welcome. 

They were a group of 17 people.  One of them, a woman named Cynthia, had put the route together and was acting as leader.  It was such a luxury to just walk without having to think about where I was going.  It was also nice to have a bunch of people to talk with, even though I wound up repeating two conversations with almost everyone I met:  a) What was I doing in England?  b)  How did I feel about the war in Iraq?  I got to where I could power through those two topics in under four minutes and leave room for them to tell me things.  Most of them seemed to be in their sixties and had started walking seriously only in the last few years.  They’d taken to it well, though.  Cynthia pushed a pace of 3 miles an hour.  A few of them complained about the pace, but they all kept up. 

I did hear surprising things about some of my fellow walkers.  I walked up on two of the women while they were comparing the finer points of their husbands’ infidelities and very calmly invited me into the conversation.  That’s probably the most extreme example, but how much more extreme do you need to get?  English reserve obviously falls apart when you start charging through the countryside together.  It was an almost uniformly charming group of people.  The only few who weren’t actively charming were just puffing too hard to enter into conversations.  I got advice about other walks to take, reviews of shows on stage in London, and good advice about what ale to try at the pub where we stopped for lunch – a small market brew called hobgoblin that was the darkest bitter I’ve ever seen and very tasty.

They even invited me to join them for tea at the end of the walk, but I needed to get back and wash up because I was going to the theater. 

Garmin Facts:  12 miles in 4:06 walking for a rate just below 3 mph  468 meters climbed, and my fellow walkers walked a bit further than I did and did one big descent and climb I got to skip.

Chichester Festival Theatre is a complex of three auditoriums and a bunch of restaurants distributed over two buildings.  They do a summer repertory season, and Wednesday night was the last preview night of a new play they are premiering.  It was in the Minerva – their smallest venue I think with a bit less than 300 seats.  It was over 80% full for a Wednesday night preview of a new play, so their audience developmentdepartment clearly knows its business. 

I don’t want to say much about the play, because I think it was good enough it might go places, and a lot of the fuel of the script is a sequence of surprises.  I don’t want to ruin it for anyone.  The use of language and the deftness of information revelation were both impressive.  I can tell you it was called Three Women and a Piano Tuner, which also lists the characters in the play.  The playwright sat next to me, so I felt very much at home.  It was an enjoyable evening all around.

 

Around and around arundel

Back at the Hilton, I did some web searching to find the inn where I am now staying.  It’s called the Saint Mary’s Gate Inn and sits right next to the catholic cathedral.  Arundel is a mid-sized town with a huge castle.  The castle is the main home of the Duke of Norfolk which is a long way off, so I’m not sure how it all happened.  He also has the additional duty of running the college of arms, so he more or less manages the table of organization for the whole nobility.  I know all this because shortly after I got into town I toured his castle.

All right, truth in advertising.  When I first got to Arundel I drove the car into the first car park I found, walked out to buy a map and find my inn, then I walked back to the car and drove it back to the car park.  I just want to make it clear that I do the park on the fringe and walk trick even when alone.

I did decide to visit the castle right after I settled in.  The town was alive with tourists, and I knew that would add an element of people watching to the visit.  I also knew that if I didn’t jump right on it, I could easily fill up my days and never get to it.  This castle combined features of many of the others I had visited with Mom or Sara.  Like Conwy it had started as a real fortification, though even older.  One end of the complex is a 12th century keep.  This means they built a hill with a dry ditch around it and stuck a tower on it.  The walls are yards thick, and the outside finish is a sort of mosaic of chipped flints in a matrix of mortar.  A lot of buildings in the south use some variation of this, and I’ve always thought it was very attractive.  Like Sizergh, it was extended over the years with living quarters being added and made increasingly more grand.  Like Penryth, the final coat of grandeur was layered on in the 19th century.  Arundel was done with more restraint, but also with even more precious materials. 

The most interesting thing, though, was the implied message of all of it.  While some of the other castles conveyed a clear goal of justifying the aristocracy, Arundel just celebrates it and reminds you that it has been going on for a long time.

After ogling the castle, I got into trail clothes and took a 6 mile walk or so – I’ll add in the specifics if I remember to.  It was basically a distant orbit of the castle, largely through Arundel Park – originally the castle’s private park but made public at the pleasure of the Duke a few generations ago.  The walking here is a lot like the walking around Oxfordshire.  There are modest hills, they call them downs for reasons no one seems to know.  Specifically, downs are long lines of chalk hills bordered by quite level plains (called Wealds just so nobody thinks I’m confused and it’s really the flat parts that are called downs).  This has a couple of benefits.  From the plain, the downs look almost like built walls going on for miles with the occasional break for a river.  From the sides and tops of the downs, the plains stretch for dozens of miles.  It makes navigation a breeze even for walkers without my fancy electronic toy.  All you have to do is climb a hill to a place without too many trees and the whole landscape spreads out below you and looks just like your map.

On one stretch of the walk, I was following a clear path, but by several other indications, I started to worry I might have wandered into a private part of the park.  It turned out I was fine all along, but the fear of being run in for trespass gave a piquancy to about half an hour of the walk.  I don’t know what kind of due process they’ve got over here if you’re where you’re not supposed to be on a Duke’s land.  I was sure the castle had dungeons I hadn’t seen on the regular tour, and I was just as happy to remain unacquainted with them.

On my return journey, it rained on me a bit, just enough to get me into my rain gear but not enough for real inconvenience.  I had a nice few miles along the river Arun (from which Arundel) and climbed the high street back up to my inn. 

Garmin facts:  5.85 miles in 1:51 walking with 17 minutes resting for 3.2 mph walking and 2.7 mph overall with 217 meters climbed.  Also 2 extra unmeasured miles between the habitrail at Heathrow and walking around Arundel and the castle.

Tuesday I did another orbit of Arundel, but significantly further out.  I started out towards the northwest picking my way through some poorly marked, heavily wooded paths.  There was no rain, but the tall grass I walked through was still wet from the night before, so my trouser legs and sleeves were soon sopping.  Three cheers for quick dry, though.  Every time I’d get out of the tall stuff for a while I’d dry out and be all ready for another drenching.  Fortunately, the exercise of the walk kept me warm enough. 

At one point I walked by a big operation of rows and rows of low cages in which it looked like someone was intensively raising birds.  I know they do that with pheasants to release on estates for shooting purposes, so that may be what I was seeing. 

Part of the way I walked on a long distance path called the Monarch’s Way – so named because it supposedly tracks the route Charles II took while retreating from, well all I’m sure is from someone he was pretty sure he didn’t want to catch up with him.  One section I walked was called “The Denture” on my map.  I asked a few other people I saw why, but no one knew. 

I eventually climbed up into the downs, specifically a hill called Glatting Beacon.  On top of that, I found the most useless trig point I’ve yet seen.  The hill top is lightly forested now, so you’d have to be lost within 10 feet of it for it to do you any good as a navigational aide.  The hilltop also bristles with tall telecoms towers, though, so it’s still pretty easy to spot and still sending signals as it presumably used to to get the name Beacon.

From there, I walked down into a village called Bignor where there is a partially excavated Roman villa.  The original building was probably very similar in size to the one I saw at Chedworth, but less of it has been brought to light.  It’s still privately owned, and the family has even less money for archeology than the trust does.  They did have some beautifully preserved mosaics that I enjoyed seeing.  The modern cottagers of Bignor make a pretty good show of their homes and gardens, at least what I could see from the outside.  A few of them were downright marvelous.

I walked back to the river by way of a few more villages then walked back along the river banks again.  Most of the riverside path was very smooth, grassy, and reasonably dry.  There was a pub to stop at about a mile and a half short of Arundel, so I was glad to have the trail cleaning my boots for me.  Of course, I hit a patch of unavoidable and highly goopy mud just before stepping onto the car park for the pub and had to go in and order my pint in socks.  The pub was where I’d hit the river on Monday evening, so the last little bit was a rerun but without the rain this time.

I got back ravenous and had a very nice roast chicken dinner back at St Mary’s Gate then sat in the pub writing until my computer’s battery and my own both pointed to empty.

Garmin Facts:  20 miles in 6:18 for 3.2 mph walking,  505 meters climbed.  I’ve given up on the resting time and overall rate, because I keep having to turn off the gizmo for long breaks to save battery power.

Walk around Wales, Drive to London

Saturday, we decided to take another walk without the car.  We wavered for a long time between taking a walk that stopped at a few privately owned beauty spots and another forested hill walk.  In the end, we decided for the less hilly walk on the grounds that if you’re going to climb uphill and not get any vistas because you’re in the middle of a forest, something is wrong.  The weather also looked like it had a good chance of being bad, and on all the climbs we’d done, we’d kept saying to each other “Gee, this would be hard if it was wet.” 

At any rate, we had a very nice walk, the details of which I will not burden you with.  We still got a modest amount of up and down in, although it was all down and up – starting at a base altitude and descending into various picturesque bits of the river gorge then climbing back out to the long distance path. 

The only interesting story to tell is that at one of the waterfalls, we saw and were completely sucked in by a brilliant example of chaos in action.  There was a turbulent eddy below one of the waterfalls.  The water was just enough loaded with chemicals from having filtered through peat higher on the hills that it foamed a bit.  We could see the foam scudding around and forming what we decided was a scum hog.  We spent minutes watching it maneuver its way around the eddy, always coming close to getting pulled back out into the current and being destroyed on the rapids, but each time just managing to crawl back.  Of course, the mechanism actually worked the other way – it had formed because it was in a bit of turbulence space that kept it growing rather than dieing, but it was hard not to perceive it as struggling for existence. 

OK, we’re geeks.

After 7.5 miles or so, we stopped back at the inn to freshen up, then went out for cream tea at a quiet riverside place.  We had earlier considered doing a tiny bit of nearby car touring, but the three day weekend was here in force.  At the end of our walk, it took us several minutes to find a gap in which to cross the road.  When the gap came, it was only because traffic in both directions was frozen.  I was very glad not to be in that scudding eddy of cars.  Chaos patterns are only easy to enjoy from the outside.

Over tea, we talked about things we looked forward to once we met up at home again as a way to keep from regretting so much that this would be our last day in Wales.  After tea, we poked around the shops a little then went back to our room to make plans for the road march to London on the morrow.  We decided we wanted to get onto the road fairly early and stop off at different National Trust properties we happened to be close to during their opening hours.  It was actually fun to examine the possibilities.  A few of the properties that looked most interesting were close to us, but didn’t open till noon.  We could only possibly see them if traffic was awful, so it was good to see that awful traffic would pay a dividend.

Seeing the crowds, we had booked a table for dinner.  We didn’t think of this early enough, so 7 PM was the latest time open.  We wound up having an OK meal next to a loud, boisterous family, the children of which managed to reduce their table to a horrible mess.  We debated asking for a different table, but the whole place was nearly full and the few openings we saw were near other families of unknown quality as neighbors, so we just chalked it up to experience.  We hung out in the garden at the inn, writing and reading, until the bugs chased us in.  When we got back to the inn, we were delighted to see that Mark and Jill had taken themselves out for a walk. 

Sunday did wind up being pretty much a road march.  Traffic was never too bad, but it was a long way to London.  We visited two properties Packwood House and Baddersly Clinton.  The gardens at Packwood had some of the most exotic plants we saw the whole trip, and Sara got good photos.  The Baron who had restored Packwood then sold it to the trust clearly made an effort to communicate the good he had done the kingdom.  The motto on his arms was even Latin for “Not for us, but for all!”  We learned from one of the stewards he’d been a pilot in WW1 and in general tried to do great things for England.  The surviving staff who had been interviewed described him as a caring employer.  Even the way the house had been laid out suggested he had a caretaker view rather than an owner view to the whole place.  I will ask you to remember this fellow when I write later about the Duke of Norfolk’s place here in Arundel. 

B Clinton, we didn’t get to see as much of.  It was very crowded, and they were doing timed tickets for admission to the house.  We couldn’t get in until 4 PM, so we decided toskip that.  We walked around the grounds, and Sara scored us some nice ice cream bars.  The house was fun to see even from the outside.  It looked entirely like a house rather than a castle except for being in the middle of a moat. I never got the story of what the moat was doing for them.

We raced on towards London.  I’m not even sure what the speed limit is on otherwise unmarked motorways, but I’m pretty sure I pressed it.  We were cherishing a hope of getting to Osterly Park very near Heathrow in time to tour the house there.  We didn’t make it, but it wasn’t for want of pressure on the accelerator.  We did get to see the grounds which were lovely and the exterior of the house which was boring just like a good Georgian building should be.  It did have a fun neo classical porch with carvings on its ceiling and pediment, but otherwise it was red brick, heavily planar, and symmetrical.  Dull, dull, dull. 

We bought Chinese food to go from a restaurant nearby and walked around the residential streets while we waited for the food.  We also stopped in to a little grocers and took an unbelievable amount of time deciding what we wanted to buy to drink.  English soft drinks are just too odd to make easy decisions about.  Sara was inclined to dodge alcohol as part of her jet lag management, and I figured I might as well for variety.  We wound up buying a big bottle of ginger beer and an apple juice mixed with other fruit juice concoction. 

We stayed Sunday night in the airport Hilton which was just as convenient and sterile as we expected it to be.  The black out curtains worked so well, we both slept past 8 am for the first time.

Breakfast at the hotel, then I walked Sara through the giant habitrail that connected the hotel to terminal 4.  We had to take the Heathrow Express train to terminal 3 to get Sara lined up for checkin.  We kissed goodbye with many regrets for another dozen days apart.  I walked back to the hotel, and if it had been one one hundredth as easy to leave her as it was to write this sentence we would have a very different sort of relationship. 

With that, I think I’ll wrap up, and try to get all caught up tomorrow evening.

Better late than . . . early

At the risk of becoming repetitive, Friday again looked like it could easily rain all day.  Our hiking guide recommended that when it rains in the hills, it is sometimes fine on Anglesey – a large island separated from the rest of North Wales by a narrow strait.  In fact, the tide is so extreme around here that at low tide it is possible to walk across, but there are several bridges now so we didn’t have to.

Jill dismissed as wishful thinking the fine weather on Anglesey theory, but still said it would be a good thing to do.  She recommended we go to South Stacks on the far west coast of the island.  It’s got lots of cliffs where some otherwise African and some otherwise polar birds breed in the warm months.  Neither Sara nor I is a big birder, but it’s always interesting to see how other fractions of the fringe lives, so we gave it a go. 

They’ve built a marvelous road across the island, so it was an easy drive and I got to appreciate some of the scenery even behind the wheel.  Military historians reading this will be interested to learn that Anglesey was where the Welsh always hung out and grew food while enemy armies were trying to bash their way across North Wales, confounded by the terrain, the weather, and the marksmanship of Welsh archers.  It really wasn’t until ships got big enough to deliver armies to the coast that there was any hope of taking Wales.  We could certainly feel the difference between the twisty little roads that are all you can get away with through the mountains and the American style road we raced across on.

South Stacks itself is a tiny little outcrop with a lighthouse on it, but the cliffs around it are full of birds.  We spent a little time in a viewing tower run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, but we clearly weren’t serious enough to stay there for long.  We walked a little under a mile along the cliff face back towards where we parked.  It was a wild, windy morning with rain just spitting enough to keep our hoods up.  Of course, this was the one day we didn’t bring binoculars along, but we saw a scattering of birds flying around and fishing.  Even more impressive to me was the wide variety of wildflowers all in various stages of blooming and seeding around us.  We moved at an absolute crawl just because there was so much to see. 

The weather started to clear just as we got back to the car, but we decided to drive on any way.  Our next stop was in Beaumaris, on the coast near the mainland.  We bypassed our opportunity to visit the butterfly palace just as we had skipped the butterfly jungle in Conwy.  In Beaumaris, we walked around the outside of the castle, which looked remarkably like the castle at Conwy, so we skipped goin in.  We did go into and spend a lot of time in the courthouse, since Jill had told us the original building there was a lot like the original of the inn we were staying in.  It was easy to see the resemblance, although each had been modified so many times over the centuries that they differed as well.  The courthouse was largely a museum to the arbitrariness of English justice to the Welsh, though with fair recognition that upper class English of the past treated lower class English just as badly as they treated the Welsh. 

We had a very nice lunch at the Old Bulls Head in town.  Sara had looked in a volume of fine dining in Wales and this was literally one of two entries for all of North Wales.  It was very good – could have stayed open even in a foody US town. 

After lunch, we had an invigorating drive across a small suspension bridge and through the town of Bangor.  For whatever reason, the traffic was awful and the signage was practically random.  Sara kept us almost perfectly on course though.  She’s always gotten light duty as a navigator before, since reading in the car makes her woozy, but she’s discovered that ginger helps.  She’s been munching candied ginger she bought in London and doing a great job with the maps.  She got us to Penryth castle in short order. 

Penryth is a purely synthetic castle, built entirely in the 1820s and beyond, but it is a beautiful collection of craftsmanship and it’s just immense.  There were rooms where it looked as though the noble having it run up couldn’t decide which of three types of arch to use, so he just told the builder to nest one of each.  Wood carving, stone carving, inlay work – it really had it all.  There were fabulous grotesques in one of the stair cases – dozens of heads no two alike and all interesting. 

The only blot on the visit, and it was minor, was that we had arrived close to closing, and the stewards kept telling us we should rush or we would miss the Victorian kitchens.  We did somewhat slight the room where they had all the most woohoo paintings hanging, and as Sara said, the Victorian kitchens were nice, but if she’d missed them to spend a few extra minutes with the Rembrandts, she would have been fine with the exchange.

Sara struck up a good conversation with an artist who was running the sales desk at an art exhibition upstairs in the stables.  (Yeah, I know, when I tell you that the other end of the stables had been used to display a half a dozen steam engines the National Trust didn’t know what else to do with, I will finally have given you a sense of the scale of the place.)  He trapped her into saying that one particular painting was essentially the only one in the show she thought had significant merit, then telling her that he had two canvases in the show.  As often happens when Sara opens by dropping a bomb on someone, he became extremely friendly.  He walked away with one of her cards, and I won’t be at all surprised if we hear from him if he’s ever close to DC.  I actually liked his stuff better than I like most modern art, but that’s kind of faint praise.  I was impressed that he painted things that were identifiably mountains but in color schemes that made them look very kinetic without ceasing to look like mountains.  It was the visual version of Pancake Hill (which my mother, the career English teacher, has since written to remind me is an oxymoron for any of you who may have been wondering).

We walked our artist friend and his banjo out to the car park.  By now, the weather was absolutely spectacular – blue sky, right on the warm/cool boundary, light breeze.  We decided we had to have some more outdoor time.  Our hiking guide had a short, easy rated walk that could be right on our way home, so we decided to stop and take it.  It kicked off just south of a village the name of which we never figured out how to say, so I’ll just leave it out here.  It turned out to be a very fine few hours of walking. 

We started out walking along a smooth track very slightly uphill through a bit of forest that is being systematically logged.  We checked in at an “Interpretive Center” that was clearly part of the logging company’s quid pro quo for the rights to cut.  They also maintained the paths we used and published a nice path guide we picked up to augment the little map in our walk guide.  The route took us past a superb group of mid sized waterfalls.  It then climbed up the western edge of the valley, high enough that we got great views back to all the waterfalls and got a sense of the shape of the whole place.  It slowly kept climbing until we could see a big stretch of Anglesey and all the way along the North coast back to Great Orme at Llandudno.  It was impossible to get lost on the second half of the walk, because we could see almost the entire route down on the ground looking just like our map.  It wrapped up with a descent that could easily have been a ski jump ramp and a short walk back to the car.

This is where I figured out that the outdoors doesn’t close at 5 or 6 pm, so since then, I’ve been shifting some of my walking later in the day to take advantage of touristy things and businesses that close early.

We had an easy drive back to Betsy, but we saw a lot of people driving the direction of the road that led deeper into North Wales from the rest of the world.  This was our first hint that the UK was headed into a three day weekend that, like the US Memorial Day, also essentially opens the summer touring season.

We got back to Betsy too late for supper in any of the restaurants, but also feeling like we didn’t need it after our nice lunch.  The only noteworthy thing the rest of the evening was that we had a great conversation with Jill – reporting on what we’d gotten up to and getting walking advice from her for Saturday.  We got the longer version of the story of how she and Mark came to be running the old courthouse, most of which probably falls into the “you had to be there” category, but we enjoyed it. 

Just put Sara on the plane

Just a brief note.  I need to check out of the airport Hilton soon and get on to my next destination.  I've referred a question to AOL Help about the weird tags that are displaying in some of my most recent entries.  I hope to get it fixed.

I'm a little behind on journal writing because Sara and I managed to fill up our days.  I figure I'll catch up in the next few.

Gardens and towns to the sea

Thursday opened fairly grey and wet.  We dawdled over breakfast to see what it would develop into.  It started to clear up, but still looked very threatening.  We decided to do a little car touring again, planning to stop places where we could get out and walk if the weather collaborated.

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First stop was <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Bodnant</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Garden</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>, an estate run by the national trust.  The gardens were just wonderful.  Almost everyone we had spoken with had identified it as a must see, particularly given the season.  The vast majority of the plants were in some kind of bloom. 

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The feature of the place is the laburnum arch – more than 100 feet of arched trellis with laburnum trained over it.  I had been seeing laburnum all over the place, but didn’t know its name till then.  It’s a fairly ordinary looking tree except that when it blooms it comes out in bunches of vibrant yellow flowers that look something like bunches of grapes but also seem like little fountains of water.  I had heard the expression dripping with blossom before, but these really showed me what it meant.  So at Bodnant, we walked under this long archway with these drippy yellow blossoms hanging from the ceiling and filtering the light.  They also gave off a very pleasant scent, although it did remind me of the scent of lemon towels a certain stratum of oriental restaurant trots out to the diners after a meal.

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The formal gardens around the house are in five tiers of terraces, then you get down into a whole valley floor planted with a mix of the same kinds of plants we’d been seeing in the forests and a range of exotics, all carefully placed and mixed.  There are also a few historical buildings, some of which had always been on the site and some of which were brought there.  All in all a stunning place to wander around, and so over the top, there was no danger of getting ideas we would think we had to replicate in our tiny garden at home.

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The place was alive with senior citizens and families.  We only saw two other apparently childless but child feasible aged couples in the place.

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Next destination was the walled town of <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Conwy</st1:place></st1:City>.  It must have become unimportant and economically distressed for some chunk of its history, because it still has nearly all of its walls.  (If it had been more important, it would have grown over them and hence destroyed them.  If it had ever had gobs of money, it would have pulled them down to recycle the stones into new, grand buildings.)  You can still do the wall walk around more than 2/3rds of the town as we did, which is an enjoyable though sometimes vertiginous way to see it. 

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We also toured the castle – in a state of repair that makes it particularly easy to see how the castle was meant to work as a fortification.  It was very much like crawling around a life sized cutaway model.  The part of it that will stay with me forever, though, wasthat they had the most ridiculous set of precautionary warnings of various dangers while touring the castle with accompanying graphics.  The one for “Some spaces are dark, be sure to allow your eyes to adjust before proceeding” looked like “This castle may give some visitors a severe migraine.” 

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We also toured the oldest house in town which was cute.  The introductory video said the house had a near brush with being bought and carried off to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">America</st1:place></st1:country-region>, but when we asked the people at the house which American had tried to buy it, we got very silly answers given in a way that made it clear they didn’t know and were making them up. 

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Third stop was Llandudno which we never heard said twice in the same way, so I have no idea how it should really be pronounced.  It is a mid sized seaside resort.  I have a bad habit when car touring of pulling into the first likely looking parking spot then charging out to see where I am after.  I just hate driving and especially driving through winding little town streets that much.  This is a habit that has gotten me (and my traveling companions) a lot of healthy exercise and a certain amount of “What the other tourists don’t see (because it’s just a long street of dull apartment blocks)” over the years.  This was no exception.

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We were driving along and passed a now entering sort of sign for Llandudno.  I saw the ocean on the left and a blue square with a white P on it.  Within moments, we were parked on a side street one block in from the seashore.  I figured we’d arrived.  We walked along the promenade, but it all seemed pretty squidgy.  When we found a map board, it turned out we’d found what was essentially the back alley <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">beach</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Llandudno</st1:PlaceName></st1:place>.  The main beach was the other side of the peninsula.

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It’s not a very thick peninsula, and Sara didn’t want to put up with me whining about driving some more and having to figure out where else to park, so we walked the main street through residential Llandudno.  I was interested to see this town.  I’d heard for years how dull and cheerless British seaside resorts were, and I was eager to see whether it was true.  I am glad to say Llandudno delivered.  When we found the actual promenade, it was much larger than the version we’d found at first, but no more interesting.  They call it a beach, but it’s nearly all stones.  The block facing the beach is an almost solid overcast of 19th century hotel frontages – picture a long curve of white wall with black framed windows relieved only by the occasional extravagant cast iron entry way.  Some of the hotels are different shades of white. 

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The street one block further in land is solid shopping – almost all chains.  Some of the architecture is glorious old Victorian excess, but nothing in any of those buildings was open.  This brings us to one of my real frustrations as a visitor in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region>.  It stays full daylight till well past 9 PM, buteverything closes up at 5 or 6 at the latest.  As nearly as we can tell, the only thing anyone does in the evenings is go to dinner, then lock themselves in their rooms till breakfast.  Llandudno does offer a few thrill ride attractions, most of them various ways to get up to the top of Great Orme head which borders one end of the beach.  There’s also reportedly a prehistoric copper mine up there, but all these attractions and the transport to them were long closed by the time we got to town.  I’m not saying I wanted to ride a cable car up to the top of a hill overlooking a boring seaside resort, but I don’t understand why I didn’t have the option.

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We had a nice Indian dinner, then walked back to our car to drive back to Betsy and lock ourselves into our room until breakfast.

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Again, no measured walking, but between the gardens, the walls of Conwy, and my unique approach to parking in strange towns, I’m sure we put more than 6 miles behind us.

Mountain climbing on the easy and hard plans

Tuesday morning, we were slightly creaky from all the walking on Monday.  After breakfast, Jill warned us that the weather forecast was clear for the next couple of days but called for clouding up and raining by later in the week.  If we wanted to do any of the high mountain stuff, we should jump on it.

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Taking that advice to heart, but not feeling like a mountain climb, we drove to the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceType w:st="on">village</st1:PlaceType> of <st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Llanbaris</st1:PlaceName></st1:place> and took the train up to the summit of Mt Snowdon.  It is the tallest mountain in <st1:country-region w:st="on">England</st1:country-region> or <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> and gives its name to this whole region – Snowdonia.  The ride up the mountain took an hour.  The views were spectacular for most of the way, although the pleasure of the whole thing was substantially marred by the educational soundtrack they played.  First, the content was cheesy beyond the dreams of Kraft.  Second, it had been recorded by a fellow with an accent that sounded as though he was going to start telling us about his Lucky Charms at any moment.

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Fortunately, we got to the top and had half an hour to scramble up to the tip top of the mountain and enjoy the view.  It wasn’t crystal clear, so I don’t think we were seeing anything more than 20 miles away, but I’m confident we were seeing that far.  More people had walked up than were there from the train, and we wished we had too, although we’d have been pretty beat.  We scrambled back down just in time to get our seats.

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No sound track on the way down, but the wind had shifted, so the coal smoke was more or less the whole air supply to the passenger car.  Views were still great, and we faced the other way on the way down, so we had a different perspective.  A lot of what I wrote previously about the layers of occupation came from what we saw along the track and even some of what the leprechaun told us – I couldn’t ignore it all.

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Some of you already know I had a surprise lined up for Sara.  I had been teasing her with micro hints for the last few days.  I always have to be very careful giving her hints because she’s so likely to work things out.  The surprise was to take her to Portmeirion, which is a fanciful collection of architecture put together between the 1920’s and 1970’s by a wealthy gentleman who thought people ought to use buildings to make the landscape more interesting rather than less so.  It really is just a pastiche of architectural styles, all of them highly decorative and in the end wonderfully put together. 

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For me, the interesting thing was that this village was used as the setting for The Prisoner, a short lived 1960’s television series about a super spy who is sent away to a weird internment center in which a mysterious organization is trying to in some ill defined way break his spirit.  Sara introduced me to the show, which is delightfully strange.  I thought it would be a good surprise to bring Sara in here blindfolded, get her to a vista where it would be clear where she was, then let her look.

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In the end, it mostly worked.  In point of fact, a bunch of work was done on the village after The Prisoner had been made and they’d shot creatively to make the space look different than it actually was, so I couldn’t find anyplace that looked exactly right.  As a result, when Sara first looked – after the sort of involuntary trust exercise of walking a quarter of a mile or so on my arm with her eyes closed – she thought I’d just found her a bizarre space, something like a town we’d visited in the Czech Republic, I told her it did resemble that, but there was something else about this particular space.  She looked around a little more then figured it out.  She actually squealed, so I felt richly rewarded for having put it all together.  We had a good time poking around the village and had a nice walk through the gardens.  We finished with ice cream cones on a shady bench on a fanciful square.

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No Garmin Facts, I credit us 3 miles between the gardens at Portmerion and some walking around Betsy deciding where to have dinner.

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Wednesday we still had fine weather.  After seeing all those people who had walked up Snowden we were eager to try a mountain of our own.  Moel Siabod looked approachable at just over 800 meters – we’d climbed more than that on Monday.  The Collins guide showed it as a difficulty of 3 on a scale of 5.  We figured we could do it.  The recommended trail head was also a very short drive away, and I was ready for another vacation from driving.

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We found the right parking spot reasonably quickly and started up the mountain.  The early part was just a walk through fields – steep in places but with very easy footing.  We climbed up to a couple of small lakes and the ruined buildings of a quarry working.  Our guide told us the quarry hadn’t lasted long, as the slate dug there proved not to be very usable, but they got a fair number of buildings up, all easy to pick out.  They also left an impressively big flooded hole.

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While we poked around some of the buildings, two other walkers – an English couple a bit older than ourselves – caught up to us.  We kept exchanging leads with them for a while, sometimes comparing notes – they had a different guide to the walk.  At the base of the final ascent, they decided to take a trail up the side of mountain while Sara and I decided to go more nearly straight up.  We had a good time with nearly an hour of scrambling up rocks.  It wasn’t much harder than climbing steep, irregular stairs, but we could never be sure it wasn’t about to get much worse.  It was also very hard to estimate how far we had left to go.  I fairly suddenly climbed over a last pile of rocks and saw the summit trig point only a few yards away.  So far as I was concerned, we could easily have had another hundred feet of climbing.

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Because we’d spent a lot of time picking routes and resting, we walked onto the summit from our side at exactly the same time as the couple who had taken the long way around.  We took pictures of each other on the top.  The views were fabulous and much more satisfying since we’d dragged ourselves up. 

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The way down was quite straightforward, although one trail our guide said we should use for a short cut back to where we had parked seemed not to exist.  The other couple’s guide gave a different descent path that did show on my map.  It was more pleasant anyway, as it took us through a nice stretch of woods.  The way down was steep, but not otherwise too bad.  We did suffer from a funny affect that from just below the summit, it looked as though the walk down would be very quick since everything below us was far away and therefore looked small.  It was hard to force our perceptions to get the distance correct.

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We said goodbye to the other couple who were staying at a hotel we passed just before getting back to our car.  Quick drive back to Betsy and a stop in the cyber café so Sara could do her mandatory Wednesday work.  We took the rest of the afternoon and evening reading in the garden at the Old Courthouse and poking around the village.

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Garmin Facts:  8.7 miles in 3:46 with 1:42 resting.  2.3 mph moving average.  1.6 overall average – lots of view looking.  Climbed 810 meters.

Lakes above Betws-y-coed

Monday morning, we stoked up with a good breakfast at the Courthouse.  The dining room is actually the old court room.  One of my walking guides recommended a route that would visit a few of the mountain lakes near Betsy and let us completely ignore the car for the day.  After all the driving the day before, this sounded pretty good.  Looking at my map, most of the route seemed to make sense.  We touched base with Jill on the way out.  She was dubious of our ability to finish the route and gave us some advice about bail out opportunities and a card for the local taxi service.  Having already walked further than I wanted to walk back from, I appreciated the card.  She also warned us that we would find the paths unevenly marked.

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Removing any suspense, we did walk the whole way around as planned and didn’t need to catch a cab.  We’re in the middle of a national park right now and are essentially here the week before the beginning of the crowded season.  As a result, most of the facilities have woken up, but we have vast stretches of the park practically to ourselves.  Our route started out near an almost empty parking lot just on the edge of the village.  It climbed through forest with occasional evidence of mining. 

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There are basically three layers of human occupation here.  It started out as agricultural territory with some plowed crops and lots of sheep and cows.  The higher country we’ve seen often has ruined farm buildings and field walls left over from this layer.  After that, a lot of the country was given over to mining and quarrying – lead, copper, iron, and slate mostly.  The abandoned mines and mine buildings we passed on Monday came from that, and the mining period left a lot of the hilltops in bad shape.  Just in the last handful of decades, a lot of the mine torn land has been reforested for the most recent primary industry – tourism.  <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on">North Wales</st1:place> has been a vacation destination well back into the 19th century, overlapping with the end of mining.  Reforesting the most ripped up areas has helped create new tourist opportunities. 

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Certainly it had worked for us.  The few places where the mining heritage showed through just added interest.  The foliage has thoroughly taken back the hills above Betsy, and there are nice paths linking the different lake cradling valleys.  Jill was of course right about the waymarking.  The funniest thing is that there were a fair number of markers, but they were only in places where the trail was unmistakable.  Anyplace there was a decision to make where it looked like our route could go one of several ways there would be no marks.

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Fortunately, there are numbers of roads and tracks through the forests most of which diverge and remeet.  Even when the real paths didn’t quite match the map, we could always find something that kept us going in the right direction and get to all the destinations we wanted to find.  We didn’t see any other walkers out on Monday.  We passed or were passed by a few cyclists on some of the forest roads, which are perfect for intermediate mountain bikers and clearly attract quite a few.  A few times we passed park operated picnic areas and often saw a few couples at each one.

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Our big social stop for the day was a tea break at the Crafnant Lakeside Café.  When we showed up at mid afternoon, there was one woman running the place, and she was in a panic as she had us and two other customers to deal with.  We ordered tea, sandwiches, and scones – traditional afternoon tea for which we were well ready after 8 or so miles of walking.  While we (and the other two who had ordered before us) were waiting, we chatted with the other customers.  One of them was a fellow who was born in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> then moved away to the midlands to make a living and had recently moved back to semi retire.  He gave us his view of what was best to see and do around <st1:place w:st="on">North Wales</st1:place>, much of which we have since done.  He made me feel very good to be a visitor here.  He made it clear how much the area relies and has relied on a long time for visitors for business.  He also gave me the impression that the Welsh have survived for so long by figuring out how to simultaneously take things seriously and lightly.

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Eventually, our food and drink showed up.  We ate at a table on the lake shore and amused ourselves watching people and birds fish.  Several other parties came in with whom we visited a bit.  Everyone was gratifyingly impressed that we had walked there from Betsy.

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Fed and refreshed, we walked back to the village by way of a few more lakes then a walk along one of the many rivers – I can’t remember and couldn’t pronounce or spell which one.  Some of the way, we followed a rough path that clung precariously to the steep bank.  Other times, we got tired of that and climbed up to a forest road that was just above that path.  We walked by and got a nice view of a waterfall called <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:PlaceName w:st="on">Swallow</st1:PlaceName> <st1:PlaceType w:st="on">Falls</st1:PlaceType></st1:place>.

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Garmin Facts:  15.8 miles in 6:05 walking and 3:00 resting for 2.6 mph moving and 1.7 mph overall with 821 meters climbed.

Oxford to Wales in a day

It is Wednesday afternoon.  Sara and I are in Café Active above the Cotswolds Rock Bottom shop, it’s basically a little coffee shop above an outdoor store.  They’ve got ISDN dial up which isn’t broadband, but it’s a little better than regular dial.  Sara is checking email and doing a little fragment of work she has to do every Wednesday.

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She showed up in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Oxford</st1:City></st1:place> right on time.  We pushed her bags into the car then wandered the city for a little.  She had forgotten to bring a hat and found a nice one in a boutique.  We bought sandwiches and a dressed baked potato for a picnic and ate it in a churchyard off a quiet square.  <st1:City w:st="on">Oxford</st1:City> is a very pretty city, and after the north of <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">England</st1:place></st1:country-region> and the rural southwest, it was a surprise to be somewhere so busy and so full of young people.

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The drive up to <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wales</st1:place></st1:country-region> was uneventful.  We caught each other up on what we’d been doing the last four weeks.  By far, this was the longest we’d been apart since we met, so it was a lively talk.  Sara told me there were nice views from the car when the highway was above the ground around, I was mostly riveted to the road.  We zipped along motorways for most of the trip until the highway turned into rural road about 30 miles from our destination.  From there, it was something like backroads <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">West Virginia</st1:place></st1:State> driving except the roads were narrower and most of the other drivers more courteous.

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We got into Betws-y-Coed late in the afternoon.  Our host at the Courthouse Inn, Mark Henlly, showed us around the place and gave us particulars about when breakfast was and where they had tourist info.  He and his wife Jill are both very well suited to the hospitality business and have been as helpful with information as they have been careful of our comfort.  The building was in fact a courthouse until sometime in the middle of the 20th century.  The rooms are all named for functions that were performed there.  We’re in the fingerprint room.  It’s a good sized room and we get the neighbor’s well tended garden as our view.  We’ve been very comfortable.

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Mark and Jill had also given us restaurant recommendations in the village.  After unpacking and settling in, we went for a walk that took us first across the nearby River Conwy then around the fringe of a golf course.  We did some window shopping, mostly comforting ourselves with the reflection that we didn’t need anything.  Had dinner in the grill room of the <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Royal Oak</st1:place></st1:City> – lambs liver just for the adventure which wound up being pretty good.

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No measured walking on Sunday, but I’m sure I ran up at least 5 miles between wandering Oxford and our orientation walk around Betsy, as we’ve heard people abbreviate the name of the village.

As much Thames Path as I needed

Saturday morning, I was able to face a short drive.  I puttered a few miles and parked in the village of Buscot.  I don’t know what the “cot” on the end of all these villages means.  Probably some sort of kin to the cot in cottage, but whenever there’s someone around who might know, I forget to ask.  Buscot snuggles up to and hosts, I think, the highest locks on the Thames.  I started out with a look at the church, then took some farm field paths back to Lechlade and jumped onto the Thames Path.  I walked along that back by Buscot and on to the village of Kelmscot. 

 

The latter was the boyhood home of William Morris who covered the better bits of the late Victorian world with elaborately patterned fabrics and wallpapers.  It was a good place to grow up if you wanted a lot of natural and medieval beauty soaked into your eyes from a young age.  I sat on the ruins of the old village cross to readjust the fit of one of my boots and found myself in the middle of the marshalling yard for a large, multigenerational family expedition.  There were twenty of them easily with children outnumbering adults and moving around too fast for me to get a good count.  A stern woman with one child in a stroller and another on her back was trying to herd the whole bunch and looked moments from adopting Sara’s preferred herding behavior of shooting any sheep that stray. 

 

I walked off quickly lest she try to get me into the pack and walked back towards the path.  On the way there, I ran into a further outrider from the troop – woman with a child in a back pack.  From the way she was looking back towards the village and sort of pacing, I figured she was with the group, but didn’t fancy the chaos, so had gotten out ahead of the main body.  I was so curious, I had to ask, and she confirmed that she was with them but the tone of her voice made it clear she was not of them. 

 

I never saw the whole crew again, so they must have gotten into a boat or driven away in cars.  I can’t believe they would have made better than half a mile an hour in open country if they’d kept walking, and I couldn’t have missed them.

 

From Kelmscot, I walked a few more miles along to Radcot, home to the oldest bridge over the Thames.  If you look hard enough, anyplace can have a superlative all its own.  Most of the way from Kelmscot, there was a black and green narrowboat hanging off my right shoulder.  The engines on those things don’t go very fast and they take some tricky handling on the winding river.  I got a feeling the driver also noticed that he was moving along at walking pace and didn’t much like it.  Every time there’d be a straight bit, he’d pull up even with me, then there’d be a curve and I’d pull away again.  Finally, he had to cycle through Grafton Locks.  I walked on from there after a brief stop for a drink of water and wrestling with my conscience about whether I really ought to let him finish with the lock before going on.  I decided he had a motor and I didn’t so all was fair.  There were a lot of straight stretches, and he got to the water by Radcot faster than I did, but he had to park his boat, so I got my pint at The Swan first.  I scored myself a technical win.

 

I had an adequate meal at The Swan, sitting in the garden.  The sun had come out strong, and people were peeling off outerwear and rolling up pants legs to get all the sun available.  It was easy for me to bag the table in the shade.  After lunch, I walked on a little bit further, but I was getting a little bored with walking along the river and about half as tired as I wanted to be.  I turned around and retraced my steps.  Most of the boaters were at lunch, so I had the river mostly to myself.

 

There were birds around in great profusion – especially swans.  The swans were either mating or fighting over territory because they did a lot of charging and dive bombing at each other and general chasing around.  I also saw some grey herons, lots of little birds I couldn’t identify, and I heard cuckoos who sound just like the ones in clocks except for not being able to tell time.  Having the river on my left hand instead of the right, entertainment from the birds, and the absence of a chugging narrowboat engine all removed the boredom from the rest of the trip, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. 

 

I had tea and a slice of fruitcake that was almost like German lebkuchen at a shop in Buscot.  I drove around to a few towns trying to find a cash machine.  Lechlade failed me, but Farringdon met my needs.  I also found The Sadlers – the companion deli to Herb’s restaurant and bought myself provisions for Saturday evening dinner.  The rest of last night was journal composition, a nice visit with Pat who wanted to know what I’d liked most about my stay so she could recommend it to other guests, then dinner with a very silly American series about a big earthquake in California on the television (Earthquake 10.5 – perhaps prepared exclusively for the export market, as I had certainly never heard of it).  I would have preferred to see something silly and British, but the only British things on were sports and dating related game shows so vulgar they offended even me.

 

I am now sitting in a Starbucks in Oxford so when I finish with this I can take advantage of the WiFi hotspot here to check mail and post this journal and perhaps even some pictures.  I’m parked near the rail station where Sara is due in about two hours.  On to Wales next.