As promised, I’m going to post a few columns about the highlights of our England and Scotland trip which ended last week. If you’re not interested in my family vacation – and why should you be, really? – I’ll post my usual political snark-fests as scheduled.
Our trip ended up being 12 days long. Karen’s brother Will came with us, and we got the chance to see both of our daughters. We had a 10-day tour scheduled, but we flew over two days early to visit youngest daughter Emily, who is taking a couple of study-abroad classes at Oxford for 6 weeks.
Because I am a huge fan of literature, history and architecture – and sure, pretty fond of my daughters, too – I was really looking forward to seeing Oxford. And it did not disappoint!
We spent two days walking around the amazing university, surrounded by great stone buildings that ranged from – by American standards – old, to really old, to unthinkably old. The university is the oldest in the English-speaking world, with its beginnings in 1096, and its first rapid growth phase took place in the 1100s. (Rumors that Nancy Pelosi was in its first graduating class have been disproven, both because she has never been smart enough to get into Oxford, and because she was already in her late 1100s during THE 1100s.)
On our first full day there we took a walking tour led by an Oxford student on summer break, and learned a lot about the gorgeous old colleges and some of the history associated with them. Highlights were the circular Radford Camera Library, C.S. Lewis’ academic home of Magdalen College, and the natural history museum, which is housed in a beautiful, high-Victorian space filled with gothic arches made of elaborate wrought iron trusses, under a glass roof.
The ugliest building on the campus is the modern Weston Library, just a stone’s throw from the incredible Bodleian libraries. But inside the Weston I saw a Shakespeare first folio, a first printing of Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, and a hand-drawn 1932 Christmas card that Tolkien made for his kids, among many other great old books.
So the Weston has that going for it.
My daughter is staying in Exeter college, which features a gorgeous little chapel, and a dining hall that is too pretty to eat in. We stayed in a small 17th century hotel that had been built against the old city walls, just a block from the Bodleian. (If you’ve ever wondered about the height of the average Brit in the 1600s, it was apparently pretty short, judging by the doorways that we were all constantly ducking to get through as we contorted ourselves up the super-narrow, winding staircase to our rooms.)
Our last night there we attended an evensong service in the visually and acoustically impressive Christ Church. Emily is having a great time there, and is already moaning about having to come back to Florida during the August steam-bath season.
We arrived back in London on Monday at midday, and our oldest daughter Katie was waiting for us at our hotel in Kensington. (She flew in from her home in Denver to take the tour with us; because her husband only recently landed his zookeeper job there, he wasn’t able to take the time off to join us.) (And yes, he’s an actual zookeeper, and while Katie meandered around the Sceptered Isle with us, he was back at home, hip-deep in wallabies and tree kangaroos.) We had Monday and Tuesday on our own in London.
We took a train to Trafalgar Square after lunch, and then walked down past 10 Downing Street to Westminster and Big Ben, then over past the Churchill War Rooms and along St. James Park all the way down to Buckingham Palace. Westminster’s Elizabeth Tower that holds Big Ben had been under repair and covered in scaffolding when we were there in 2019, but now it looks as good as new.
We spent most of the second day riding around town in an open-topped tourist bus, reacquainting ourselves with city’s layout, and hearing about different areas of the city. We toured the British Museum for a couple of hours, and got off and on the bus several more times, seeing all of the usual sites, then finished up with a boat ride on the Thames before returning to our hotel.
Our tour officially started the next day, and lasted for eight days, four of which we spent in England and Wales, and four in Scotland. On our first day, we stopped initially at Windsor, where we saw the castle from the outside (apparently Kate and William were there, which meant that there were no tours), and the very pretty (if smallish, by the standards of the cathedrals in parts of the country) St. John the Baptist church.
Our second stop was in Bath, the originally Roman city situated in very hilly and bucolic countryside on the Avon River. It had tons of old churches and old houses, and we stopped for a quick photo op at the Royal Crescent, a curving line of impressive Bath stone that formed maybe 15 or 20 joined mansions, before walking around the town for a bit. I wanted to see the Roman baths, but all of the tickets for the day were sold out, so we wandered around the city center and had a nice lunch.
By the end of the day, we ended up crossing into Wales, where we stayed the night in the capital, Cardiff. Our hotel was only a few blocks from the impressive castle at the center of town, so after supper we walked around it. The oldest part was built by the Romans, followed by additions by the Normans, and later the Brits and Welsh.
The next day we crossed the border back into England, and ended up at another Roman walled city (which I hadn’t heard of) called Chester. I regret that we didn’t have more time to spend there, because the center city was really interesting. It contained a multi-block length of basically intact medieval buildings, which our tour guide walked us through, telling us some of the history of the town. The area featured Tudor-style, heavy, wooden-timbered buildings, decorated with carved and painted wooden figures. There was an impressive Gothic cathedral nearby, and also the remains of an impressive Roman amphitheatre.
Unfortunately, we had only an hour to walk around and get lunch before getting back on the bus and being driven back across into Wales, where a local Welsh guide took us through some gorgeous, hilly landscape where sheep outnumbered people by a good margin. We walked around a picturesque little river town called Llangollen (because it’s the law in Wales that nothing can be easy to spell), before heading back to Chester.
We arrived in Liverpool that evening and took an abbreviated Beatles tour with a local guide. As a Beatles fan (though not one so devoted as the Great and Powerful CO), it was very cool to see the school where John and Paul went, local spots where George and Paul had worked and bought their instruments, etc. We had supper not too far from the Cavern Club, which was reconstructed several doors down from where the original succumbed to an infrastructure project several decades ago.
This weekend I’ll post the second half of our trip. But in the meantime, don’t forget two important ideas:
Liz Warren is as authentically Sioux as I am a Welsh shepherd (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and
Biden delenda est!
Martin Simpson 