April
30-May 10, 2012
Globus Vacations: “Essential Britain and Ireland” (England,
Wales, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Scotland)
Bobbi in an arched passageway of
Salisbury Cathedral in England
Tour Director, Ian
Walker, working the “coach.”
DAY ONE. APRIL 30 – MAY 1. Monday into Tuesday. Dade City, Florida and London, England.
I love it when we get
to a destination and see one of the sights on the day we arrive, always
unlikely I think to myself ahead of time because on the first day of travel I
am always drained of every human feeling other than pain and weary
sleeplessness. But if I can force myself
to see something (anything at all will do), I always feel that I’ve started the
trip on the right foot, gotten a little something done right off the bat. Yes!
I say to myself with a subconscious fist pump.
Today we managed to
see the Wallace Art Collection, a mile or so from the Hilton London Metropole
Hotel in the city’s Little Lebanon district.
And we managed this barely two hours after landing at Gatwick Airport.
The day had started
some 4,000 miles from there, back in Dade City, Florida, on Monday, April
30. All day long we had taken care of
ordinary household business and reviewed travel and packing details over and
over. It’s always best to check,
double-check and triple-check everything before heading off to an international
destination (winter clothes, water proof jacket, diarrhea medication, etc.)—and
we had plenty of time to grow obsessive over our lists while we waited to leave
the house at 2:00 P.M. so we would get to the airport, according to carefully
announced flight procedures, three hours before our 7:30 take off.
We got to the airport
four hours early, checked in, and immediately (according to plan) upgraded to
Virgin Atlantic’s business class, which they call “Premium Economy.” This put us upstairs on the Boeing 747,
directly behind the flight deck. It was a
very good decision because Premium Economy featured wide recliner seats and
elevated leg rests, little storage lockers for in-flight junk, and semi-royal treatment from the staff, who
of course reserved their very best treatment for the truly wealthy folks up in
First Class. What I was learning about
my just-turned 70-year-old body was that any creature comforts that improve on
coach seating are more than just welcome on an eight-and-a-half- hour flight. In fact, our accommodations were so much
better than coach that we were actually able to sleep a little on board. There’s no better airplane compliment than
that.
We got to our hotel a
little after noon, tired of course, but not as wiped out as we’d normally have been
after such a long flight, and we got lucky again: our room was ready! We unpacked a little, and then headed out to
see the Wallace Collection, which had been written up in one of our travel
books, and which the lovely Roberta Louise had discovered was roughly in the
neighborhood we’d be staying in.
The neighborhood was
Lebanese, filled with people who spoke a thick broken English and who were
unable to help much with directions, not surprising perhaps considering that
most of the signs on the major thoroughfare, Edgeware Road, were written in
Arabic. We had asked the concierge for
directions, and armed only with the map he had given us, we ventured out—and
turned the wrong way on Edgeware. We
walked most of a mile until (with the help of a kindly man with a thick accent)
it became clear that we had been walking in the wrong direction. Now we needed to go two miles back the other
way.
When we finally got to
the Wallace Collection in the Hartford House between Baker and Bond Streets, we
were exhausted but energized because we had overcome the obstacles and finally
gotten to our first stop on our first long day of travel. The Hartford House is a remodeled Victorian
home that has been turned into a museum.
It is an exquisite collection of paintings and sculptures by artists, often
unfamiliar to us, who were nonetheless extraordinary—room after room of
wonderful surprises, like this one by a painter named Camille-Joseph-Etienne
Roqueplan, called “The Lion in Love ” (1836).
“The Lion in Love” (1836)
And then, in the middle of this collection of surprises, we turned into
a room with a famous Rembrandt self-portrait as well as a portrait of his
son. It was another proof of the great
good luck we have when we wander through art museums all over the world.
Our march back to the
hotel was a little slower as we slipped into weariness again, but we stopped
for a few extra minutes anyway at a shop on Edgeware Road for a plug for our
Kindle and Nook; the conversion plug we had taken from our travel supplies back
home wasn’t working at all. Bone tired
by then, however, we finished the trek back to the hotel, caught our breath,
and went to the hotel restaurant for a sandwich and salad—too expensive of
course, but very close and not too bad.
In fact, that was our first meal in Great Britain and Ireland, neither
of which is known for culinary accomplishment, and it, like most of the meals
we were to have, though not outstanding, was not as horrible as I thought it
might be. More good luck. But then again, it’s pretty hard to screw up
a salad and sandwich.
Having lost Monday with overnight travel that
seamlessly turned into Tuesday, our first day was actually more like two days
in one. We had gotten to London, walked
through miles of Little Lebanon, and seen the wonderful Wallace Collection
before staggering back to our hotel and having that quick but satisfactory
dinner right there at the hotel restaurant.
We were off and running, ready for Wednesday.
DAY TWO. MAY 2.
Wednesday. Stonehenge, Salisbury,
Bath, and Newport, Wales.
We had our bags out in
front of the room before we went down for 7:00 breakfast, and then at 8:00
we boarded the Globus bus and met our
driver Mark and Ian Walker our Tour Director.
Both prove to be outstanding—friendly and fully professional. Ian is very bright as well, and
well-practiced in his delivery of information and friendly patter. He’s an old pro at this tour work and yet
everything feels fresh and new to us.
Ian is fully in control of the bus (and our vacations) and everyone
agrees that we couldn’t be in better hands.
Most of the time.
Our first stop, right
on an English interstate, was Stonehenge, which we’d seen once before. And just as before, the crowds and buses and
traffic combined to diminish what should be an eerie passage back in time that
places us among the huge and mysterious stones all patterned out into a
spiritual monument with a ceremonial altar of some sort that you feel must be there
for some reason that seems obvious yet isn’t.
Stonehenge, 3000-1000 BC
The stones, which
weigh as much as fifty tons, were erected somewhere between 3000 and 1000 BC;
they are not native to the area and had thus to be moved some 150 miles from
the coast of Wales to their current location.
Like so much of Stonehenge, how this actually happened, could have happened, remains a
mystery. But as awesome as the
experience of Stonehenge is, it is simultaneously trivialized by the bus
parking, the huge crowds of camera-ready tourists snapping away, and the fully
stocked gift shop and snack bar. And
yet, the overwhelming sense of being part of ancient history, replete with holy
rites and ancient mysteries, predominates as you walk around the Stonehenge perimeter. The commercialization doesn’t entirely
destroy the experience of being here.
Thank God.
The Monday to Wednesday
travel ordeal has left everyone road weary from the outset of our ride to
Stonehenge and later to Salisbury, so most of us on the bus, including me of
course, but not Roberta Louise, sleep well between stops. The rolling bus lulls the travelers into long
miles of recuperative slumber. By the
time we reached Salisbury in the early afternoon to see the famous Thirteenth
Century cathedral, I’m actually refreshed and ready, but after walking around
the outside of the huge building, we decide not to pay ten pounds to see the
inside—after all, it’s not as though we haven’t seen our fair share of
cathedrals all over Europe. For free.
Salisbury Cathedral
Stealing a stone for our garden in
Florida
And so, after Roberta found a rock to pilfer, and after
we stopped by the sign that announced the school where writer William Golding once
taught, we headed to lunch at the “Queen’s Arms,” a real life English pub that
dates back to the mid 1500s. I had the
fish and chips and Miss Roberta had the Ploughman’s Platter of fruit and cheese
and bread. We both had beer, Bobbi some
dark brew and I something that resembled Coors Light. I was the one the sign on the wall had in
mind: “Hey lager boy! Afraid you might taste something?” We had a grand time visiting with Neil the
owner, who put our lunches together, Chris the bartender, and a regular who
stopped in for a pint. The experience
was better by far than another solemn walk through another solemn cathedral.
Sign inside the Queens Arms
Chris the barkeep
From Salisbury we
bussed and napped our way to Bath, which we’d also seen before, but this time
the experience was much better, with an audio presentation and a fuller
narrative description of the Roman baths we were walking through. And there was one audio channel featuring an
ongoing commentary by Bill Bryson, one of my all-time favorite travel writers,
whom I have “read” in the form of audio books that he himself narrated. I’ve enjoyed his books many times over in my
car—what a great delight and surprise to find him waiting for me at the Roman
baths.
The large central bath.
Bobbi with the Roman Bathmen
By late in the
afternoon, we were onboard our coach again, this time headed for Newport,
Wales, which had nothing to see, but which had a nice Hilton Hotel room ready
for us—that plus a welcoming dinner for the travelers, who had come from
Tennessee, California, Kentucky, and Florida, as well as from Australia. This was to be our welcome dinner, but Ian
the Globus Tour Director missed a chance to formally introduce himself and our
driver and all of us to all the rest of us, so we all sat at isolated tables in
the restaurant and paid little attention to one another. Pity, but we were all ready for showers and
bed anyway, so it hardly mattered.
And we had the wait
staff to amuse us—a sweet bunch of sixteen-year-olds who had very little idea
about waiting tables. One chunky teenage
girl had her underpants showing, and the boy who brought our bread and cleared
our table seemed to be in a Special Olympics table-waiting competition. All in all, it wasn’t bad—and we really did
need those showers.
DAY THREE. MAY 3.
Thursday. Newport and Cardiff,
Wales, Waterford, Ireland.
We didn’t get to see
much of Wales yesterday, but as we drove to Cardiff, the capital, we saw much
more from the bus windows—a beautiful country with a most peculiar language
that appears with its English counterpart on every signpost we passed. There are no correspondences I can see
between the two languages—and no way to pronounce the words. “Odd” doesn’t do it justice. Take for example, “Do you want a cup of tea?”
which turns out in Welsh to be this: “a
oes arnoch eisiau cwpanaid o de?” Or
this: “Chi eisiau paned o de? Or this:
“Wyt ti eisiau cwpanaid [o de]?” (I
took this example from some website just to illustrate what sort of non-English
language we’re dealing with here!) Of
course, foreign languages are usually different from one another, but Wales
being so close to England, and both of them being part of Great Britain, it
seems odd to me that they should be so different from each other.
We stopped to take a
guided tour visit of Cardiff Castle, very big, very ornate inside and out, and
very inconsequential in the great scheme of things. Yet we enjoyed the prattle of the guide and
found the interior design and the vivid colors of the wood carvings throughout
a visual pleasure. Lord Something or
Other had given the castle a hundred years ago to the people of the city of
Cardiff, and so they take good care of it, show it off to bus tours, and make a
few dollars at the same time; in fact, the Great Room where formal parties and
official events took place in times gone by, is now rented out for weddings.
Cardiff Castle
Gargoyle downspouts at the castle.
After our tour through
the castle, we were on our way again to catch the ferry for Ireland, a
four-hour crossing that had me queasy from the outset, despite the enormous,
cruise-ship size of the boat. I’m
guessing the Irish Sea must be a rolling and choppy affair most of the time
because I’ve never had a gorge-rising sea-sickness on any other ferry I’ve ever
been on. I kept my lunch down, thank
God: a hamburger that tasted so bad that
I think perhaps it was made of horsemeat.
I shouldn’t have eaten it of course, but of course, I did. Which makes it more of a miracle that I didn’t
heave, to use a nautical term.
The offending vehicle.
We got to Ireland
about 7:00 and needed another hour to arrive at Waterford’s Tower Hotel for the
night. The tour group (32 strong) had
ten minutes to find their rooms and return immediately to the restaurant for
dinner, which we ate with a California couple, Nancy and Lauren, who were great
fun. We even enjoyed the food—I had the
“seafood trio” and Bobbi had the pork loin.
But dinner wasn’t finished until about 8:30. By the time we got ourselves unpacked,
showered, and repacked for tomorrow, it was after 11:00—and then we noticed the
noise: our room was one floor above the
hotel entrance and there was a party going on somewhere on the main floor. Partiers made a regular march to the front
entrance with their drinks and friends to smoke and laugh and flirt. This went on until after two, when I finally
dropped off to sleep, four short hours before the wakeup call.
DAY FOUR. MAY 4.
Friday. Ireland: Kilkenny, Kildare, and Dublin.
Another killer
day. And I mean that both ways, though
it wasn’t as bad as yesterday. We began
with a tour of the Waterford crystal company, officially called The House of
Waterford Crystal. There was a
multi-media, surround-vision, high-volume, Disney-like assault on our senses
when the tour started, but then, with a Waterford guide showing the way, we saw
the real craftsmen (no women) at work, making wooden molds that last only about
a week before they burn themselves into uselessness. Then we saw the glass blowers and shapers,
each in charge of one thing only in the manufacture of Waterford crystal. I’m not sure how these master craftsmen who
apprentice for at least eight years can tune out the constant line of gawking
tourists and spiel-delivering tour guides; I can’t imagine how they keep so
totally focused as wave after wave of tourists file by their workstations—endlessly,
day after day. But apparently they
do. And what miracles they create.
Shaping the hot glass
A Waterford carriage
The next stop, a
couple of hours away (time I spent catching up on lost sleep), was Kilkenny,
which had its own castle (that no one bothered to tour because we had already
become blasé about castles) and a charming little town that we had an hour and
a half to explore. Which we did. There is a cute downtown main street busy
with locals doing their shopping. We
wondered how the townspeople could keep such an old-fashioned downtown
thriving, but of course there were no malls that we could see, nor any Walmart
super centers. It looked like what I
imagine a small city in the United States might have looked like seventy-five
or a hundred years ago.
We wandered up and
down, went into a few shops, bought a couple of large, soft pretzels, and had a
coffee break before working our way back to the “coach.” One of the stores we stopped in provided
pedicures of a sort: patrons sit down
and put their feet in large fish tanks populated by species of fish that nip at
all one’s unsightly foot blemishes.
Bobbi had heard or read about such places, but never actually seen one; to
me it was all new and distressing. The very
idea made me cringe.
Kilkenny, Ireland, The Pedicure Center
From Kilkenny we drove
to a horse stable, the Irish National Stud, a huge operation that included acre
after acre of horses and corrals, plus the Japanese Gardens and The Horse
Museum. We also had a double-stuffed
baked potato at the cafeteria for lunch, and it speaks to the quality of the
dishes we’d had thus far in England, Wales, and Ireland that this potato was
the best thing I’d eaten since we arrived.
And though we saw many beautiful horses there and listened as well as we
could to our guide, our favorite horse was the proud stallion Invincible
Spirit, who had been so successful at siring winners that his per mare stud fee
was 60,000 euros. He was such an earner
that his owner turned down an offer of six million euros for him. Down a few paddocks was a newborn barely an
hour old, and while its weight hadn’t been posted, 143 pounds is about
average. It’s hard to imagine how the
mares can manage delivering such huge babies.
Bobbi cozying up to a foal.
Feeding the foal.
Our next stop was
Dublin, where we got to spend two nights in a row at the Clarion Hotel on the
River Liffey which cuts Dublin in two.
For one night at least we didn’t have to unpack, shower, and repack for
an early departure. It’s surprising how
elated we were at his happy news. And
even though we had had a busy day already, we went out almost immediately to
see something of the town and to have dinner.
We made a point to find and walk the large and famous downtown
thoroughfare called O’Connell Street, on our side of the Liffey. After that we crossed the river and headed to
the honky-tonk part of town called the Temple Bar, a rowdy mix of bars and
restaurants, plus local down-and-outers and a ton of tourists. It was colorful and fun, but I couldn’t believe
this was the real Dublin, any more than Bourbon Street is the real New
Orleans. And yet it was great fun to
visit. We ate Irish stew at O’Shea’s
restaurant, which was a smallish place that nonetheless packed in a lot of hungry
locals as well as tourists like ourselves.
The stew and the beer were both good, but of course by that time we were
getting seriously tired and had to begin the long walk back across the river
where we turned right and continued for a mile or so to the Clarion. That was it for us. Sleep came quickly.
DAY FIVE. MAY 5.
Saturday. Dublin.
After another of the
huge breakfasts negotiated by Globus and provided by the hotels, and they were
all outstanding, we boarded our coach once again, this time for a local
drive-through that gave Ian an opportunity to trot out his tourism information,
which he seems to have an endless supply of, all delivered in a smiling voice
that rises and falls and entertains. He
is, after all, an entertainer who has
memorized his lines and acted out his role many times over by now. If we pay attention to his delivery, we can
catch him working his way slowly to his jokes or to his endless supply of word
histories. But it comes out naturally
enough so none of it seems (very) artificial or too practiced.
Our orientation bus ride took us up and down O’Connell
Street, down to the Temple Bar section of town, and after an hour ended at
Trinity College, where we were to see The Book of Kells on exhibit at the
Trinity College Library.
On line to see the Book
of Kells
The Book of Kells is actually a work of art, an
imaginatively handwritten and illustrated copy of the four gospels and is dated
early 9th century, which would have been the first half of the eight
hundreds. They were beautiful of course
and fascinating by virtue of their age, and for believers, I’m sure they have a
holy significance as well. For the
tourists, who file by, as they do at Stonehenge and the Sistine Chapel, there
is a sense of urgency not to dawdle—and to move out of the way of the Super
Tourist who insists on getting his nose one inch from the glass cases and then
staying much too long. That aside,
however, the Book of Kells by its size and scope and age and beauty were
awe-inspiring. I can appreciate (I
suppose because of my own decades of scholarly research and writing) the work
of the monks who devoted their lives to producing them. I found it a deeply moving experience—as long
as I kept up with the pushing crowd as we speedily passed through the exhibit.
The official Globus orientation tour was over at that
point and we were left on our own for the rest of the day, “footloose and fancy
free,” as Ian puts it when he gives us a few hours of time to fill up as we
wish. We crossed one of the streets
facing the college library and went for coffee at “Pacino’s Café,” which was
not busy at the time we were there. We
began talking to the bartender/waiter, I asking if I could buy a framed sign I
liked above the cash register which announced something or other about New York
mayor Fiorello Laguardia. The answer of
course was no, but by then we all three were chatting away, and he recommended
that we have lunch at a Dublin institution, “O’Donoghue’s.” And so we suddenly had a point of reference
and a map, and we slowly began working our way through the streets of Dublin.
A tourist embracing the statue of Molly
Malone in
front of “Pacino’s Café,” Dublin
En route we stopped at a park called Merrion Square,
to look for a map-mentioned, tucked-away Oscar Wilde Memorial, which turned out
to be a slightly oversized version of Wilde, in full color, lounging languidly
atop a large boulder. Wilde has long
interested me mostly because he wrote somewhere (as an antidote to the
too-laid-back Greek emphasis on moderation) that “moderation is fatal. Nothing succeeds like excess.” I like that so much that I put it on a sign
in my office. Success, I’ve always
thought, requires an all-consuming passion—and even then there are no
guarantees. Moderation has always seemed
to me a prescription for failure. Wilde
seemed to understand this, and so I wanted to see his memorial and have my
picture snapped in front of it.
Oscar and I.
From the park we backtracked a couple of blocks to the National Gallery
of Art, which we at first missed and headed instead to the National History
Museum. When we discovered our mistake,
we got better directions to the art museum and went there directly. We checked our bags (the lady in charge was
Australian but had lived in Dublin many years and just last year had married
her Irish “Prince Charming,” she told us), and then headed to the art, which
was a good collection of European masters like Vermeer, Rubens, Titian,
Rembrandt, and Goya, plus a long-lost Caravaggio masterpiece, “The Taking of
Christ” (1602). There was also a
standing exhibit of Irish art, which included several by Jack Yeats, brother of
poet W.B. Art museums rarely fail to
impress visitors, and this one was exceptional even in that company.
Bobbi in front of the landmark tavern,
“O’Donogue’s” in Dublin
By then we were ready
for “O’Donoghue’s”—ready that is, for a beer, a sandwich, and most importantly,
a seat. The building was appropriately
old and creaky with tiny rooms and squeaky tables and chairs. Lunch was grilled ham and cheese. That’s all they had. No menu needed! Even though tourists like ourselves find
their way to this famous watering hole, it had the look and feel of an old and
revered neighborhood bar. It was a
privilege to take our lunch and rest and beer there.
Our short, late lunch
made us realize how tired we were from the forced morning and afternoon marches,
so we plotted a return course that would get us to the National Leprechaun
Museum, which sounded promising, but when we finally found it, we learned that
there was a steep admission charge and that there were programs at regular
intervals, the next one being an hour away.
We decided to tour the gift shop instead and then work our way back to
the hotel. We knew we would never be
able to find enough energy to head back to the center of town for dinner, so we
decided to eat at a Malaysian restaurant right across the street from the
hotel. Bobbi had a curried beef dish and
I had ginger duck, both excellent—as was the lovely Malay waitress who visited
with us when we got there at 8:00 because no one was in the restaurant. We felt sorry for her because she didn’t
figure on making much money that night, and it turned out she was a college
girl, so we knew she needed the money.
We had a good time chatting with her, left her a nice tip, and felt
better when we left because the restaurant at 9:00 was almost full.
DAY SIX. MAY 6.
Sunday. Dublin, Belfast,
Edinburgh.
Incredibly, we
breakfasted in the capital of Ireland, Dublin; lunched in the capital of
Northern Ireland, Belfast; and supped in the capital of Scotland, Edinburgh.
I’ll let that stand
apart for a moment while I think again about the oddness of the statement—and
yet it seemed perfectly fine because Belfast was on our way to the Scotland
ferry and then we got to Edinburgh in time for dinner. What could be more natural than that? Three meals in the capitals of three separate
countries all in the same day.
It still sounds too
weird to be true.
Despite the capital
meals we enjoyed, most of this day was spent on the road or at sea. In Belfast, where we made a brief stop, we
learned that the famous Titanic (a
hundred years old this year) was built there.
The Belfast City Council has published a slick brochure that reads from
one cover: Titanic (1912-2012) Our
Future, and from the other cover:
Titanic (1912-2012) Our Past.
Bobbi is amazed that they brag about building a ship that sank the first
time out.
Titanic,
the pride of Belfast
But Belfast was little
more than a lunch and toilet stop between Dublin and the ferry taking us to
Scotland, this time a two-hour sea journey (half the time it took to get to Dublin),
which of course halved my discomfort. We
were on the coast of Scotland heading northeast to Edinburgh by early afternoon,
the craggy beauties of the Scottish coastline on our left, and the rolling
green pastures on our right, with more sheep than we’d ever seen before, all grazing
and frolicking, I thought, in sheep heaven.
(I’ve got more pictures of sheep in fields than anything else. Every new vista duplicated one we had just
passed moments earlier, and each one wanted to be remembered in a photo—or so
it seemed to me.) Of course we were
excited to be on our way to Edinburgh, which with Dublin, were the two most
anticipated stops on our tour, and just as in Dublin, we got to spend two
nights in the same hotel, thank the Lord.
Two nights in the same bed was more than merely welcome to the traveling
Cifellis.
Edinburgh (ED’n-burah)
was the northernmost city on our tour and was appropriately colder and by
chance wetter than the earlier stops we’d made.
Which, together with the long day of tiring travel (you’d think we had
walked half the way!), prompted us to walk to the closest restaurant that was
open early that Sunday evening, which happened to be an Italian joint that
wasn’t half bad. We treated ourselves to
a bottle of white wine with dinner, and midway through our meal our new friends
Nancy and Lauren wandered in and joined us for food and drink and dessert and
limoncello after the meal was all finished.
Memorable and fun.
Bobbi, Nancy, and Lauren in the darkened
Italian restaurant.
DAY SEVEN. MAY 7.
Monday. Edinburgh.
We liked Edinburgh at
once, so wide and sprawling and yet so tidily laid out into the Old Town and
the New Town, which is hardly “new” going all the way back to the 18th
century for its origin. After breakfast
at the nearly posh George Hotel we boarded our bus (the weather was cool but
dry) and met our special tour guide, Richard, who spoke with a heavy burr that he
had fun emphasizing for his American tourists.
The bus took the long way up the hill so Richard could tell us about the
town and eventually get us to the castle where we had tickets and an official
time to see Edinburgh’s most famous building.
Richard, the Edinburgh tour director.
Castles were no longer of burning interest of course,
but this one was different standing tall atop the hill with guns aimed out over
the intervening neighborhoods toward the sea.
But after an hour or so of castleing (especially enjoying the Scotland
Crown Jewels, the building erected to the memory of World War I veterans, and
something we’d never seen before , a cemetery for officers’ dogs), we descended
the hill and proceeded to walk the so-called “Royal Mile,” which took us past
Deacon Brodie’s Tavern, the owner of which was the model for Robert Louis Stevenson’s
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde. And near there we sat down for coffee and a scone, while we collected
ourselves, maps in hand, and got our
bearings.
The Edinburgh Castle rising above a city
street.
Castle guns at the ready.
The Castle dog cemetery.
Edinburgh in May required layers.
Our next stop was the Scottish National Gallery
featuring Botticelli, Rembrandt, and Gainsborough, even John Singer Sargent,
but by then we had walked the Royal Mile twice over, gone down little lanes,
crossed back through a beautiful cemetery (for people), and had worn ourselves
out. So when we left the National
Gallery somewhere between four and five o’clock, we walked wearily back to the
hotel for a brief rest before dressing again and heading out for our nighttime
extravaganza, “Jamie’s Scottish Evening,” which advertised itself as “The
Ultimate Scottish Experience.” We were
up for that as long as we could remain seated, be fed, and then
entertained. Yes, we thought, that would
be just fine.
The entertainment was a perfect conclusion to the full
day of Edinburgh. It was a Scottish
collection of songs, instrumentals, and dances, including an accordion
virtuoso, a bagpipe virtuoso, a fiddle player beyond excellent to stupendous,
and three young dancers who were at the very least, extremely earnest. The last number before intermission was “The
Ceremony of the Haggis,” which, according to the dictionary is “a Scottish dish
consisting of a mixture of the minced heart, lungs, and liver of a sheep or
calf mixed with suet, onions, oatmeal, and seasonings and boiled in the stomach
of the slaughtered animal.” There wasn’t
any ceremony at Jamie’s that night, but the kilted emcee did recite the Robert
Burns poem “An Address to a Haggis” just before intermission, and then, during
the intermission, waiters brought a small taste of haggis and a potato-compound
side dish to everyone in the audience, all still seated at their dinner
places. I tasted it and liked it well
enough until I found out what was actually in it. I mean, it didn’t taste like minced heart to
me.
The dancing highlanders
at Jamie’s Ultimate Scottish Experience
The accordionist at
Jamie’s
DAY EIGHT. MAY 8. Tuesday.
Edinburgh to York, England.
I think the busload of
travelers was tired out by yesterday’s long walk up and down the Royal Mile to
and from Edinburgh Castle, then round about in various additional directions
until the evening festivities slowed the pace down a bit. So today we were happy to be bussed quietly to
York, catching up on sleep en route whenever Ian put his microphone down long
enough for us to drop off. We stopped
once for coffee and a sandwich and once again more or less in the middle of an
unremarkable stretch of suburban highway in order to see the local remains of
Hadrian’s Wall, which was once a fifteen foot high and eight foot wide
protective barrier erected across England by the Roman emperor Hadrian in A.D.
122. Today the once mighty fortification
has been reduced by centuries of looters to some fifty feet in length at this particular
location and maybe a foot high. It isn’t
much to look at after all, not at least now, but the bus made its mandated stop
next to the Mini-Wall and we all debussed and walked around and on top of
Hadrian’s Wall, snapping pictures all the while. A more bizarre stop is hard to imagine,
although it’s easy to imagine what carloads of locals must have been thinking
to see a busload of tourists crawling all over their fenced-in stones.
Hadrian’s Wall, begun A.D. 122.
Eventually we rebus and
make the last leg of today’s journey to York, an interesting town that is
advertised as “England’s most complete medieval city.” Ian the Tour Director took us at once upon
arrival on a walking tour of the downtown area, including the “narrow
Shambles.” Unfortunately it was
impossible for Bobbi and me to hear the running commentary because there were
thirty-two people who needed to crowd in in order to hear. We couldn’t get close enough so we lit out
for the inner city on our own. We like
it better that way anyway. We stopped at
a church flea market where I bought a leather envelope marked with the word
“Pension” on it for 25 pence. We also
stopped for tea and cakes. We continued,
map in hand, for a couple of hours more, but we were crashing and needed to get
back to the hotel for a rest before the group’s last dinner together.
DAY NINE. MAY 9.
Wednesday. York to Stratford Upon
Avon to London.
We gathered up our
nearly spent strength for this last leg of the journey, which stopped first in
Stratford-upon-Avon to see Anne Hathaway’s huge thatched “cottage” and shortly
thereafter to the very Disney-like “Shakespeare’s Birthplace.” I had always had an image of this place: a quiet, languorous, lazy town with a
picturesque river, complete with swans, running through it. Instead what I got was the Shakespeare
Exposition and Convention Center, which is what it looked like to me; not bad
certainly, but hardly the literary pilgrimage, complete with reverent
genuflections and lowered eyes, that I’d been imagining all these years. Even so, it was hard to ignore the fact that
the great playwright was actually born here, that whatever education he had was
conducted here, and that he wandered the same streets in the 1560s, 70s, and
80s as we were wandering in 2012.
Anne Hathaway’s thatched “cottage”
It doesn’t look like much of a shrine, but
bow your head anyway.
After lunch
(Shepherd’s Pie), we boarded the bus one last time for the return ride to
London. This time we were booked in the
Park Plaza Westminster Bridge Hotel, very near Westminster Abbey, instead of the
Little Lebanon Hilton, which was on the outskirts of town. However, there was no time to lose because we
got in at 3:30 and at 5:10 we had to meet a new tour director and bus driver
who took us to a very nice restaurant for dinner (sea bass) and afterward to
the Victoria Palace Theatre to see Billy
Elliot, a musical by Elton John about a young boy in a coal mining family
who prefers ballet lessons to boxing. It
was an excellent evening and a heartwarming even thrilling show made more fun
because our young California girls, Nancy and Lauren, were seated next to us in
the third row. A suitable ending to a
whirlwind vacation.
And praise the Lord,
we get to go home tomorrow!
Big Ben from the bus window in the rain.
Billy
Elliot at the Victoria Palace Theatre, London
Bert and the California girls, show time
DAY TEN. MAY 10. Thursday.
London, England to Dade City, Florida
There was talk all
week on the news about a customs’ inspector strike in London for today, so we
worried about that as our departure date got closer. Two days ago, too, the CIA uncovered a plot
to blow up an American airliner scheduled to return to the U.S. today, so of
course we worried that the threat might yet materialize. It did not.
And neither did the strike, but we had no idea how these two threats
would play out today when we left for the airport at 8:00 A.M. in order to be
there three hours early for a 1:00 P.M. Virgin Atlantic flight.
We got to the VA check-in
area at a little before 10:00, and then got the bad news that we hadn’t seen
coming: our 1:00 P.M. was delayed five
hours and wouldn’t be departing until 6:00 at the soonest. The plane we were scheduled to fly on had
been delayed somewhere else and our flight needed an airplane that was being
flown into Gatwick Airport expressly to get us back to the U.S., but they
weren’t even sure it would arrive, get serviced, and be ready for departure at
6:00. We were crushed, of course: we had arrived three hours early for our
flight and now it would be another five hours at least before we could begin
our nine-and-a-half-hour flight home. It
was an hour longer than the flight to England because there’s a tailwind from
the U.S. to England and a headwind on the way bag. More to be disappointed about.
But just as we began
to sag into this new reality, I asked if there was another flight—and there
was! It was scheduled for 11:00, barely
an hour from then, but it was full anyway.
Wait, I wailed, are there any upgrades available on that flight to
Premium Economy? Then came a five minute
wait, and then, yes, there were two seats left!
We paid the upgrade charge, flew through the check-in procedure, worked
our way through security and customs, and found our way to the gate minutes
before it was to be boarded. Yikes! Tragedy avoided at the last moment! And we would be getting into Orlando
mid-afternoon instead of the middle of the night. We practically held our breath until we were
safely in our seats and that damn airplane took off.
We’d had a wonderful
ten days on our bus tour, and so it was only fitting that we should have yet
another good day traveling home. And so
it was.
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