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.
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