andamu

Sunset at O'Hare, Dec. 31, '02, waiting for our flight to board.

Two years ago today we arrived at Heathrow for a two-and-a-half week vacation in the U.K. Vacation? In the U.K. in January?! Dear reader, your incredulity is certainly well-founded, but we had a number of reasons for going at that time. The advantage of going to Britain (or indeed most of Europe apart from the ski resorts) during winter is that it is outside the tourist season, resulting in lower prices and smaller crowds. Also, most private accommodations (Bed & breakfast, self-catering etc.) and many hotels, even four and five star ones, have neither air-conditioning, nor good ventilation; summer is generally too brief to warrant the expensive overhaul of ancient buildings. But during that period, the heat settles in like a hot wet blanket, suffocating and impossible to escape. Heating, on the other hand, they have had a lot of practice with!

The disadvantages are first, that it is outside tourist season, so a number of tourist attractions are either closed (like the London Eye’s annual maintenance overhaul) or have shortened hours, and second, that it is, well, midwinter! It is cold, especially when walking outside for extended periods, and daylight is precious. Sunrise and sunset when we arrived were at 8.06 a.m. and 4.02 p.m. respectively; by the time we left it had stretched to 7.58 a.m. and 4.23 p.m. On top of that, our trusty Dorling Kindersley travel guide warned us that the average daily hours of sunshine during January in both London and the “Heart of England” was a miserly 1.5.
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I had had the opportunity to visit England and Wales for 8 weeks in the summer of 1996 as a journalist. It had been a wonderful experience, but also a very frustrating one. I did not have transport of my own (the vehicle was rented in another journalist's name), so unless we were in a city with a good public transport system, I was relatively stranded. Also the work hours were such, and the itinerary so cramped that I had the minimum free time (and much of that had to be spent at the laundrette).
I did however grab every possible opportunity to do as much sightseeing as possible, and this trip was an attempt to fill in the blanks for me, and for me to show mpo a lot of the things that I had valued on my previous trip.
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Rule #1: NEVER plan to drive a significant distance straight off a transatlantic flight.

I sleep poorly – if at all – on planes, and the previous night had not seen much sleep either, given my excitement and the inevitable worry about little details.
In Britain, even spouses have to pay a sizeable extra fee to drive a rental car. Thus, given that I grew up, got my license and drove for ten years in a country where we drive on the left side of the road in right hand drive, stick shift vehicles, I became the sole driver of the ice blue Fiat Stilo.

The rhythmic slap of the windshield wipers through the pouring rain, the release of anticipatory tension and more than 48 hours with little or no sleep turned slumber into a heavy weight that slowly and inexorably pressed down on my eyes and the back of my head.
I tried everything I could to fight it off: frequently and violently shook my head, got mpo to talk to me in a constant stream, directed icy cold air full force on my face, turned on the radio full blast and experimented with classical, jazz, rock and talk radio, chewed gum, drank soda – but nothing, NOTHING could dissuade the creeping sleep for more than a few minutes at a time.

In desperation I pulled off at the first truck stop, parked the car in a quiet spot and put the seat back so that I could sleep for a while: and was immediately wide awake!
After half-an-hour of unsuccessfully trying to sleep, we got out, visited the rest rooms, had a belated lunch in the food court, stocked up on candy and soda, and grabbed some fresh air among the raindrops.
With daylight frittering away, we knew it would be disastrous to be on the road for too long after dark, so we got back on the highway. Within ten minutes, I was fighting off the same insistent, importune sleep.

We ended up hopping from truck stop to truck stop, (roughly thirty miles apart, if memory serves), until our nightmarish ride finally came to an end on the outskirts of Bristol. By now it was strongly dark, and we had to find our hotel in an unfamiliar city with a lot of confusing roundabouts. Which brings us to this:

Rule # 2: Avoid searching for addresses after dark, especially in unfamiliar places.

Rule # 2: Avoid searching for addresses after dark, especially in unfamiliar places.

The biggest surprise about the room, after we triple-backed and found the hotel, was absence of a telephone. We had brought our GSM dual-band cell phone along and bought a local card for it, but my precious one had been dying to check e-mail and spend some time catching up on the latest news on the internet, and for that we needed a landline.
After steamy showers to wash away the grime of the flight and the day, we went looking for dinner, and found that very few restaurants were open in the evening on New Year’s Day; certainly none that we could find. We ended up buying sandwiches from a gas station convenience store for our first dinner in England.
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Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003

We slept soundly – little surprise in our exhausted state – and awoke reasonably refreshed, if a little disoriented. We had a full agenda for the day and precious few daylight hours to get our sightseeing done, so we could not afford to sleep in; this was definitely going to be a very hardworking vacation.

Image of the Westbury White Horse, taken from this site. Uffington White Horse, taken from here

We planned to kick off our explorations with a visit to one of the ultimate tourist attractions, Stonehenge, then move on to Salisbury Cathedral and drop by Westbury for a quick look at the White Horse, 180 feet long and 107 feet high at the shoulder, carved into the limestone of the hill. This ancient carving, thought to commemorate Alfred the Great's victory over the Danes at Ethandun A.D. 878, is a much more realistic representation of a horse than the rather abstract one outside Uffington. But we had arrived in the midst of a series of floods in England and Wales, triggered by unusually heavy winter rains, with a broad swathe across the lower central part of the country affected. As we entered a small town on our way, we were diverted by police because of flooding ahead, and advised that a large part of our intended route would be closed. They made some suggestions for alternates, but we ended up lost and driving mostly on faith in the general direction of south, and hoping for the best.

We finally reached the town of Amesbury, completely confused, and having lost the signs for Stonehenge went round several roundabouts several times each, back and forth, until we finally decided to stop at a grocery store and ask for directions. It turned out that Amesbury is the closest town to Stonehenge, so we did not have too far to go, but what amazed us was that three of the employees of the store did not know how to get there.

Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003 (Continued)



Surprisingly little production was made of the site; throughout we had seen only the small brown tourist boards indicating directions, and now, driving from the less-traveled Amesbury side, we saw but one small, discreet sign indicating the way.

Stonehenge is quite isolated, on the top of a gentle hillock, set among a series of such hillocks, with a road running past it. The tourist parking lot is on the other side of the road, and a subway emerges with a direct view of the stones after taking pedestrians safely underneath the road.

It was an overcast day with sudden gusts of cold wind, occasional spatterings of raindrops and a few very rare, all too brief glimpses of sunshine – in other words, a typical day in January in England.
Since the ground was soaking and the volume of visitors relatively low, most of the walkway was closed off, and we were not able to circle the stones; we had to be content with a cord cutting across the perimeter. It did take us quite close to the main circle, however, and showed us some of the most famous views.

We had paid for the audio sticks with information on the site, a guided tour if you will, but it was clearly paced for summer, when the throngs slow down progress to a crawl, and one would be standing next to each rock along the way for quite a while. In winter, this was far too much information for all but the most dedicated of zealots, and after a few (increasingly less enthusiastic) attempts with the wind miserably seeking every exposed or thinly covered body part, we basically abandoned the idea of listening to the commentary.

The wind and intermittent sprinkles quickly became too much for mpo after he had his initial look, and he returned to wait in the car. To be honest, if I had not been so obsessed with trying to capture it from every possible angle available to me, and waiting desperately for a magic moment of sunshine to illuminate the ancient monument, I probably would have felt the same.
The view of the surrounding countryside also warranted a few snaps while waiting for the sun to appear: the vantage point from the top of the hill afforded views of the rolling and undulating landscape encircling us, with meadows and copses of trees and livestock roaming in the distance.
As it was, when the sun found a crack in the clouds it was worth the wait and cold: the color of the stones, the rich green of the grass, the golden light - it was all I could have imagined, and more. What a pity then that my lens had a few stray droplets on it and that they distorted every picture I had taken in the sun!



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Thawing out in the car afterwards, we set off for Salisbury as my fingers slowly returned to life – the fine controls on a camera are difficult to work while wearing gloves.

Detail above the massive main entrance. More images in the photo album of Salisbury Cathedral. This map from the official website of Salisbury Cathedral. The map is interactive, highlighting the key buildings on mouse over, and popping up a label with its name. The entire website is wonderful to browse for more information on the Cathedral and its history. Non-IE users might experience some problems with some of the interactive pages, however.

Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003 (Continued) Once we reached Salisbury we did not have too much trouble locating the cathedral compound - or more properly, the Cathedral Close - within the city; what did present great difficulty was finding some space to park. The only parking area that we could find within reasonable walking distance was located at the center of a maze of one way streets, and totally jam-packed. This brought home another truth to us: it is not only because gas sells at around $5.70 a gallon that the average car in Britain is at least two levels smaller than that in the U.S., it is also because of the narrowness of the roads – existing long before cars – and the extremely cramped parking spots. After our third circuit through that section of the city brought us back again to the same lot, and after we finally spied an opening, we managed to squeeze our vehicle in, and us out. The walk took us far longer than it usually would; first, remember that it was my first outing among all the old buildings on this trip to Britain, and second, remember all those beautiful old buildings! They just begged me to stop, bend my head backward and gape, even the half-timbered old hotel and pub, or perhaps especially the half-timbered old pub. The gatehouse entry into the Close has a high Gothic arch and seemed part of the continuous row of buildings. We were unprepared for a whole new (well, old really) town on the other side within the Close, and it was still a fair walk to the cathedral. The wondrous late afternoon light turned its lush lawn into an improbable green, with a modern work of art stuck seemingly randomly behind a grouping of benches. Of course, everyone knows this means that I spent a fair amount of time looking at (and photographing) this from every possible angle (and quite a few improbable ones too). It was around three o’clock already, with the sun sitting low in the sky on the other side of the cathedral, so our first view was of its silhouette. My initial impression was of a building quite similar in shape to the traditional churches among which I grew up, just much larger. In the gathering gloom on the eastern side it was difficult at first to make out much of the exterior detail, apart from the scaffolding and builders performing some much needed repairs. Even that could not hide the magnificence of the lines, the intricacy of the statuary and ornamentation, or the grandeur of the scale. I might have spent an hour outside looking at the details, were it not for the cold and the promise of the sights waiting inside.

More images in the photo album of Salisbury Cathedral. This map from the official website of Salisbury Cathedral. The above is a wonderful website to browse for more information on the Cathedral and its history. Non-IE users might experience some problems with some of the interactive pages, however.

Thursday, Jan. 2, 2003 (Conclusion) And once we entered, oh, what sights awaited us! There were so many fine and interesting things throughout the Cathedral beyond the architecture itself. There were marvelous statues of great people buried there, smoothed stones with the engraved names of people laid to rest beneath them almost worn away, and the silent, moving display of the age-tattered and battle-scarred flags from the Wiltshire Regiment throughout centuries of war hanging in a row along the side. To me they all were merely incidental, bowever. My eye was drawn up along the slender columns to the magnificent ceilings above: The symmetry, the intricate patterns of the ribs, the play of light and shadow on the vaults, the detail, the design. Yes, it did not have the rich colors of Michelangelo’s masterpieces as in the Sistine Chapel – but it did not need it. In some ways, frescos would have ruined that ceiling, hiding the beauty of its structure. Along the nave the ceilings were decorated very simply, in fact, becoming slightly more elaborate in the Quire. Words are inadequate in attempting to describe it; literal attempts sound inadequate, and so an abstract will have to suffice: The Glory of Engineers, the Alleluias of Mathematicians, and the Odes of Architects. At the far end, in the Trinity Chapel, glowed a set of lancet windows, overwhelmingly blue, drawing the eye wherever one happened to be in the Nave. Outside in the Cloister Garth, a pair of trees towered in one corner, their free flowing forms a strong contrast to the strict symmetry and stark rigidity of the surrounding structure. The Cloister walk enclosing the garth had the same vaulted ceilings, with decorated arches framing the view to this inner sanctuary. The tearoom and shop hugged one side, set between the Cathedral and the Cloisters. It had a slanted glass ceiling like a conservatory through which we had a magnificent view of the bell tower. A quick cuppa fortified us for the walk back. When we left the Cathedral we found that twilight had already set in, which meant we had to scratch any thoughts of seeing the Westbury White Horse. In the end I suppose it is good to leave some things to do on a future trip. On the way to the car we ventured into a modern shopping mall disguised among historic buildings, and picked up a few sandwiches – more about those later.

More images in the photo album of Wells. I just found this map on the web, explaining our dilemma. Click to enlarge and pay close attention to the one-way direction arrows around the center, and you will understand why we kept circling, unable to find our way.

Friday, Jan. 3, 2003 The day’s program started with checking out of the hotel in Bristol. Despite spending two nights there, we left Bristol without exploring any of it, beyond getting lost in the dark trying to find an open restaurant on New Year's Day. Compared to the other items on our lists of must-sees, it became purely a convenient place to overnight; sad really, because I believe parts of it are lovely. After loading our bags in the car, we set off for Wells first, to be followed by Bath before driving through to Cardiff for the night. In England, the traditional definition of a city is a settlement with a diocesan Cathedral, which in turn is roughly defined as the seat of a bishop of a diocese. Contrary to popular belief the presence of a Cathedral alone is not enough; a royal charter designating a conurbation as a city is required (more detail).  Wells therefore is one of England’s smallest cities – but for the Cathedral it would have been a smallish market town. For such a small place it certainly gave us an inordinate amount of trouble to get where we wanted. The one way streets seemed to sweep us spiraling inward until, within reach of the Cathedral, we ran into a T-junction with a one way going in the (for us) wrong direction. At first unfazed we tried again, but no matter which route we followed, how different we tried to make our approach, at some stage we always ran into that same infuriating T-junction. We eventually gave up, pulled into a Park and Ride on the outskirts of town; and discovered a big map on a board which showed us how to get to a parking lot much closer to the Cathedral. Shifting to that lot turned out to be relatively painless after the preceding hour of frustration, and it allowed us to walk through the winding little streets and gaze at the beautiful old buildings on our way to the Cathedral. (Yes, I know I am breaking my own rule here, but only because Wells is such a tiny town – oops, city. Also, had we gone to Park and Ride first thing, we would have seen that route map right away and could have moved directly, instead of spending a useless hour spiraling and doubling back.) The sight of the Cathedral washed away all the irritations of getting there. It was simply magnificent. The West Front (main entrance) originally had more than 500 statues – many larger than life – in niches; today almost 300 of the originals remain. Started in 1180, it is the first completely English gothic cathedral. I am fascinated by cathedrals, with a particular fondness for gothic architecture. Those massive medieval monuments to God were built with none of the machinery considered crucial today, at fabulous cost among people who were starving in unimaginable conditions, stretching the boundaries of what was considered possible, breaking brand new engineering ground with every new design, both fuelling and consuming new mathematics and physics with every stone.