Walk over fells to Lang How

This was the walk that wasn't supposed to be: for the want of £3, we discovered it.

This morning we left Ambleside, in Eddie, with lunch, water and windbreakers, headed for the White Moss Common parking lot. It was only a five minute drive, and we were going to walk around Rydal Lake. After two days in Ambleside and seeing all the walkers, we were going to see what all the fuss was about. This three and a half mile hike was recommended in a guide as a family hike, and we figured it would be a sort of easy, friendly introduction for the boys to walking, a practice we didn't want to turn them off of.

But when we got to the parking lot we found it was Pay-and-Display, and we didn't have the three £1 coins we needed. We decided to go to the nearby village of Grasmere to see if we could get change. On the way, Kate saw the fells, the upland areas above treeline, and said, "Wow, why don't we go up there?"

Easy to get to Grasmere, not easy to get change: one thing led to another. We dropped Kate off on the main street, which was lined with stores and cafes (gosh, pretty upscale for a small village; what's going on here?), and had, of course, no parking. After we turned around in the cramped parking lot of a posh hotel, and I bumped my head on the car door trying to wave to Kate--we're over here!) she said all stores had refused to give her change. We decided to buy a coffee to get change, and while she was off doing this (we are in Eddie, wedged in an alley illegally), I perused the map for possibilities around here. Actually, Grasmere looked like a pretty good starting place to walk up on a nice fell to its southwest. There might be a nice view down into the valley called Langdale from there.

All around us, was a constant stream of hikers moving through Grasmere from the pay-&-display lot on the edge of town. Ah: clarity dawned. The first, and perhaps hardest thing about hiking in the Lakes is finding parking. Nothing else happens--no nice walk, no fell views, no wicked weather--until you find parking. You could be all set to go, in your Patagonia coat with your Karrimor pack and your twin nordic walking poles, and be in tears, dead in the water, because you can't find parking.

So, £1 coins in hand we parked in Grasmere's large pay-&-display, and set out through the town (running to stay just ahead of a large Japanese tour headed for the churchyard and the Wordsworth graves). We ran the gamut of shops (organic skin care, woolen sweaters, garden supplies, hotel, restaurant, gingerbread factory), and found our way onto a little road out of town, a stone wall on either side and naturally (are you joking?) no sidewalks. The surprisingly large number of posh hotels (what is this place?) began to gave way to fields, and then IT happened. A fighter jet came screaming in overhead from the east at an impossibly low altitude and banked hard over Grasmere to negotiate the valley as it turned away to the north. Another one was hard on his tail. "Wow!" said Kate and spun around with light in her eyes. You see, Kate LOVES fighter planes, so this was not like something ruining our Nice Little Lakes Experience: this is actually making it better.

Now we left the road onto a public footpath, and climbed up through lovely fields and trees, by moss-covered stone walls, the whole thing looking like a picture on a calendar ("England Through The Seasons"). We ascended up out beyond trees, where it's just endless grass and ferns, and began to encounter sheep. Another fighter jet roared over head. Kate was in heaven: sheep, fighter planes, and partial cloud.

The boys did great, as they tend to on these kind of hikes. Will was into music, composing pieces on his new harmonica as he ascended. In fact we were treated to harmonica music all day, all over the fells. I suspect some of the hikers we passed had never heard a little boy playing the harmonica above treeline before. Galen was somewhere else, listening to his mp3 player, practising to one day become a teenager; but no slowpoke.

At some point we left the track to attempt some cross-country navigation, since I naturally can't stay on a trail. Had lunch on a point of rock. The boys eagerly pulled out their latest find: "Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding" flavoured potato chips. (They were nasty. Yesterday they had "Dutch Edam Cheese" flavoured, which were pretty good. If you're guessing that this little potato chip campaign has something to do with the World Cup, you're probably right.)

Discovered a compelling, craggy hill on top of the fells called Lang How; climbed it. Fantastic views in all directions. Found some marshes and pools. Sheep everywhere. It reminded Kate and me of hiking on tundra in Alaska, the way the green turf is draped over the bones of the rocks; except for the sheep, and the fact that down off the fells we could see fields and small civilized towns. And so I began to relate hiking in the Lakes to my experience of hiking on Hudson Bay Mountain in Smithers. You can imagine it's wilderness until you look over the edge and there's a town down there. Kind of spoils it. But here I think that's very much what people expect and want. They want to be in sturdy hiking boots approaching the summit cairn in the morning, and taking tea in the garden of the Hotel a few hours later. That may in fact be the pattern for a lot of European hiking, and that might explain why it's so popular.

Found another footpath running across the fells and followed it back towards Grasmere. We descended through fern forests which smelled wonderful. We returned to the world of trees, and rock fences, and left the sheep behind. In Grasmere we bought some of "Sarah Nelson's Original Celebrated Grasmere Gingerbread" from a tiny shop in the church, as another fighter plane roared overhead. "Does that go on every day?" I asked the lady. "Pretty much," she said, and the baker behind her added, "Except when it's wet--then you don't hear 'em." I could just imagine when the cloud was low: these valleys as cul-de-sacs.

Kate liked the gingerbread so much she went back in and bought more. On the way back to the car she got sidetracked into organic skin care and bought some body balm. Truly a red letter day for her. (We got lots of ideas for her birthday, which is Wednesday.)

Drove home, dropped our packs, and walked down through Ambleside to the Galava Roman Fort, which is a ruin at the north end of [lake] Windermere. Poked around there, and then walked over to the Ambleside Dock, where a steamer calls every hour or so to take you down-lake to Bowness-on-Windermere, the only big town actually on Windermere. There was an office renting beautiful wooden rowboats, and we dearly wanted to hire one, but they were closed for want of staff.

Walked home. Kate got dinner ready, Will polished his harmonica, and the boys turned on the telly to catch their favourite CBBC show: "Night Garden." Which I can only describe as a tele-tubbies-like fantasy about tiny creatures. It's gentle and fantastical.

I went to the Queens Hotel to check the email and learned the sad news that Fletcher, our cat, had had to be put down over the weekend. (He had been dying of kidney failure for over a year.) I phoned the vet and got the details. There were lots of long faces around our dinner table.

Rain and rest and shopping

I went for a run this morning, and in 15 minutes I was surprised to find that I had made it to Rydal, the next village up the Rothay valley. I'd been looking at maps and thinking that was a long way. The whole area strikes me as being remarkably like Princeton, where I grew up in New Jersey. Those of you who also grew up, or lived, there would recognize here the compact stone walls, the nicely finished houses, the deciduous trees, the green fields. Everything is very pretty and genteel. Simultaneously there's the feeling of exclusivity: most of the properties have walls to distance themselves from you and you hardly feel welcome going in a private driveway. Belying the idea that this is a "mountain" region, there was a sidewalk ("pavement") and bus service the whole way. However it being a Sunday morning I saw almost no one. Two other walkers. A farmer feeding his sheep. A heron and a pied wagtail.

Back home, the boys woke up and turned on the telly to find out what had happened in England versus USA. It had been a tie, 1:1.

It was a rainy day, as predicted, and we spent the day lazing about, shopping, figuring out internet and reading. It was lovely. It rained heavily at times, and at others it was almost clearing. But after 10:00, the town was full of people, some dressed in common rainwear, some with very serious outdoorwear, some in windbreakers. There were families with teenagers, groups from Japan, and elderly people. Amazing elderly people. They are almost always wearing backpacks and they are Here To Walk. Apparently the English do not give up when they get old.

I sussed out the wifi internet; there are many choices but the bar of the Queens Hotel is the thing. It's got the table with the outlet and the unencrypted network that the traveller wants. Kate meanwhile took advantage of the copious outdoor retail and sussed out rainwear. She replaced her famous blue raincoat with a lime green one. (She dragged the boys through about twenty stores and they were very good about it). She also did a little pre-birthday investigation regarding what presents she might want. Will found a paperback copy of Arthur Ransome's "Winter Holidays," which is the next book that we need to read in the Swallows and Amazons series. (These books are set here in the Lakes, for any of you unfortunately enough not to have read them. Before we leave I need to go to the lake called Conniston Water and see where Ransome spent his childhood holidays, and the landscape that inspired him to write these wonderful stories.)

In the house, Will and Galen have discovered a little toy roulette game. It has a wheel, chips, and a green felt betting area. I've taught them how to play, and they can't get enough of it. Galen turns out to be a terrible gambler, always betting on the wrong thing and soon out of chips. But Will, frighteningly, is a natural! He always comes away with a large pile of winnings.

The sky cleared at about the end of the day, and we had dinner at home. Started reading Winter Holiday aloud. (We're also in the middle of Prince Caspian.)

Kendal and Ambleside

In the morning we went down to the breakfast room and had the most wonderful breakfast. It was a real dining room with big windows showing the river an the bridge. It was lovely and the boys were grinning from ear to ear over the buffet.

We walked to Enterprise, which was just around the corner near the station and rented our car. We got a silver Hyundai i30, which, while not as special and snazzy as the Renault we had in Brighton, is a darn sight smaller and better than the Vauxhall Insignias. We parked it back at the hotel, loaded our bags in it and checked out.

We walked up to the pedestrian shopping streets of Kendal, and went to drugstores and bookstores. In Waterstones we found our first really good bookstore in England, and I bought a few late birthday presents: one of the Wainwright guides ("The Eastern Fells"), "Geology Explained In The Lakes District", and , and Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Tmie to Keep Silence," a book on monasteries. Kate picked up some curriculum for Will, and Galen discovered a new series, Mr. Gum.

I went into a store to top up my mobile, and all the employees had the St. George flag (that "English" flag) painted on their faces. World Cup fever.

A kind of farmer's market was going on in the streets, so we provisioned up with fruit and nuts, and headed for Ambleside. We weren't suppose to get to our cottage until 2:00, so we delayed by stopping in Windermere and poking around in the Co-op and a candy store. (Kate pleased the man in the latter by asking which, of the hundreds of jars of candy he was selling, were the best mints.) Then while Galen and I explored the Lake District Park's visitor centre, Kate and Will discovered Booth's grocery store, hidden in a large building beside the railway station. They bought hte rest of our provisions. I got one of the famous (among hikers) Kendal Mint Cakes: a small, hard, slab of minty sugar. Kind of like a big mint Pez. It's good. If you're in the mood for eating a block of sugar. I'm sure it tastes great on the trail.

Arrived in Ambleside and located our cottage at 4 Park Street. It's a thin slice of a dark stone building, maybe fourteen feet wide, but three floors high. The outer walls, like all of Ambleside, are course on course of massive dark gneisses, slates or shales. They are seemingly built without mortar, but on closer inspection the mortar is just deep within. It's a very attractive architecture. Within, on the second floor (we'd call it the third floor in North America) is the boys' bedroom and the bathroom; on the first floor is our bedroom and a spare room; on the ground floor is the kitchen and living room. It's a vertical life when you have to run up two floors just to use the toilet!

Ambleside is a compact town of narrow winding streets, overhung with trees, built on a gentle hillside. As we walked about we went past outdoor store after outdoor store, separated sometimes by hotels or cafes. There are perhaps more outdoor stores per square mile than anywhere in North America: more than Boulder, Colorado, Jackson, Wyoming, or Canmore, Alberta. It's as if you took the dollar stream that tourists spend in Aspen or Whistler, and magnified it by being just a few hours from, say, New York--but set within the genteel architecture, deciduous trees, and compact spatial layout of a New England town. Ambleside is a bonfire of outdoor spending. Imagine having an entire store dedicated to hiking boots; here, there is more than one. Expecting a big store with every imaginable type of outdoor gear? There are fifteen or twenty, all within a few blocks. Millets, Gaynors, the Edge Of The World, The Climbers Shop, Jack Wolfskin, etc. etc.

We walked up to Stockghyll Force, a waterfall on a creek outside of town. It has however, like most small features around here, almost legendary status among Lakeland Lovers, another consequence of Britain's most popular National Park being scrutinized, surveyed, written about, measured, waxed lyrical over and generally exalted. It was lovely: clear water flowing down over rocky beds through a beech forest. But it was, well, really a minor trickle in the world of waterfalls. It was like an exercise in aesthetics, rather than a blow-me-away natural wonder. Which I suspect is the right attitude to bring to the Lakes. We're not here for the highest mountain or the most massive rock face: we're here for Some Very Nice Stuff.

We walked back down into town and found Wearing's Books: specializing in maps and guides. You can't really take me to towns like Ambleside: it makes me crazy. I coveted the guides to hiking in the High Tatra, the Carpathian Mountains of Romania, and Corsica. I drooled over the many guides to where we were. I recognized that it was my life's mission to hike all of the routes in all of these books. Then my kids finished their ice creams and we moved on.

Home to watch a bit of the World Cup hype (Britain versus the USA tonight), cook dinner and unpack. The World Cup coverage revealed another important British theme: the avoidance of the uncomfortabletruth. The station the boys were watching was full of hype, prepping everyone for the beginning of the game in 30 minutes, showing backgrounders and features on the World Cup, and talking about the line-up for the game. But, when 7:30 came, they switched to rugby coverage. What was going on? Apparently only certain pay channels had the rights to show the actual game. But they had never warned us of this. You were just supposed to know that this channel was never going to show you the game: you had to go to the pub to see it.

Travel To Kendal

We got up early to a beautiful sunny day, and did the pack and clean up thing. I hadn't slept that much: after-effects of the Cream Tea.

The boys watched some wierd stuff on CBBC: Zingzillas and Chuggington. We packed the car, and Kate replaced the concrete block we had moved to enlarge our parking spot. Drove to Barnstaple, where I found the Enterprise place. Kate was amazed! I love impressing her that way. Enterprise sent us to the railway station in a taxi, and we were actually so early that we could get on to the 9:43 to Exeter -- an hour before we'd planned. Found seats and luggage space, for a pleasant ride to Exeter St. David's.

At Exeter we got civilized and used a lift to move between platforms. We learned that you can't get reserved seats unless you arrange them the night before. So we sat in the sun on a bench and tried to guess where coach C, the unreserved coach would come in. Our train was 10:57 "Cross Country" train to Glasgow Central--although we were only riding it to Birmingham. It's one of the major changes to England since I last visited: British Rail has been replaced by a mosaic of private companies: Virgin, Southern, Cross Country, First, and a host of smaller ones. On this train we got good seats: two facing forward and two facing back, luggage nearby.

The design of the British coaches has half the seats facing backwards at all times--often they face in the opposite direction across the aisle. It seems silly, as if they can't be bothered to align the coaches with the direction of travel. Or maybe it's just an invitation to consider whether the glass is half full or half empty. In any case, you get quite used to riding backwards.

Birmingham New Street station is like Penn Central in New York: all underground. We came in on platform 9, and made our way via a lift and even deeper "subways" (tunnels) to platform 4b, where we found our train already loading. It was pretty full already. The best we could do was to stash the big bags in the hall outside the toilet, but we did find four seats together, albeit riding backwards. (Finding a place for your luggage on British trains is like parking in British towns: you can only do it by inconveniencing someone, and you're supposed to do so, and act as though it's normal.)

Nonetheless this was also a pleasant ride. Two little girls across the aisle from us kept us entertained, and we were in Lancaster by 16:08. Lots of students in school uniforms on the platform, reminding us that it was a Friday afternoon. Here in Lancaster we had to wait an hour for our 17:25 train, but it was a fun station to hang out in. Galen kept reading the board to see what was coming next, and we watched trains roar through or stop for a minute. The train to Kendal was quite crowded and we did not get seats, but we didn't mind since it was only 30 minutes. The interior of the Transpennine Express coaches was purple!

Stepped off the platform at Kendal and contemplated the town map. It looked totally different from my map, because north was down in the corner. Not exactly clear how they chose which way was up. Walked our bags down the street to the Riverside Hotel. Got a wonderful room, on the third floor, on one end, facing out over the river.

Went for a walk to find some dinner. Discovered Kendal's remarkably posh pedestrian shopping area. There are more outdoor stores here than anywhere else we've been! Only slightly behind are estate agents: obviously real estate is a big deal here. The prices are high. A log home on a river near Ambleside will run you £685,000. We ate some fish & chips,and some chinese food; neither was outstanding, but it was all we needed.

Home to the hotel room and watched World Cup for a few minutes on TV, and took showers.

Rest Day In Appledore

It was a rest day of rest days. We had nothing on plan, except mailing off our excess loot, making a stab at connecting with the internet, and visiting the North Devon Maritime Museum, which is a block from our house. We never even picked up the camera.

I went down to the Docton Court gallery at 10:00 and hooked in to their internet, and met David Carter, who is the local historian who has written the two volumes of the Illustrated History of Appledore. He's also the lead guy in fighting the proposed Richmond Dock development, about which we see flyers and posters on every telelphone pole. The issue is that a developer wants to put housing in the historic shipyard below our cottage. The local residents seem largely opposed: many houses we pass have signs in their windows saying "Save Richmond Shipyard!" It's half a world away, but their trials are much like what we experience opposing the molybdenum mine in Smithers. Public protest to government is only being accepted at certain times and in certain formats; comment has to be restricted to constructive suggestions; the developer resubmits his plans with only minor changes; and so on.

Went up next to meet Kate and boys at the Maritime Museum. I thought they'd be done in a few minutes in this small local museum, but when I got there they were enthralled, and they were there for two hours in the end. Besides the excellent exhibits, the museum had two great men who told us us stories. There were exhibits on local ships and ship builders dating back to the 16th century (explorers to the Northeast Passage, and fishermen to Newfoundland, then traders in Virginia tobacco, and so on). We learned that the City of Chichester, the cargo ship Galen and Will liberally shelled from the Newhaven Fort, was built here in Appledore, as was the keel of the Queen Elizabeth air craft Carrier yet to be launched.

One room was titled "Appledore's Secret war," and in photographs told the story of all the bizarre and sometimes disastrous military inventions that during the war were tested on the beaches near here. One was the Great Panjandrum, a 12 foot high wheel (like a cable spool) which was filled in the centre with explosives and fitted with rockets around the edges. The idea was that the landing craft released the panjandrum, the rockets were lit, and it rolled up the beach at 60 miles per hour. The explosives detonated in the Atlantic Wall and blew a tank-sized hole through it. When tested on the public beach in Westward Ho! in 1944 it got loose, some of the rockets came off, and it began to go every which way, and was, actually, a disaster. More recently it has been suggested that the whole thing was a disinformation campaign to convince the Germans that the Allies were planning on invading near Calais, where the Germans had such a wall. That's why it was tested so publicly.

One of the men volunteering at the museum was Jim Jackson, who organizes the Appledore Book Festival. Last year, to kick off the festival, he built a half-size model of the actual Panjandrum, and ignited it on a local beach.

We popped back to the cottage for lunch and tried to eat our way through our remaining food. Then went down to John's and bought some padded mailing enveopes for sending home books the kids have finished, etc., around the corner into Market Street for Will to buy the tiny VW bus he's been dreaming of, up Irsha Street to the RNLI for Kate to buy a t-shirt (unfortunately their store was not open) and home again.

I went out at 4:00 for a Cream Tea at the Schooner Tea Room. Advertisements for Cream Teas are everywhere, as if they are an indispensable part of any visit to Devon (or Cornwall). They look kind of tasty and I thought perhaps I should not leave Devon without trying one--and no one else wanted to go. (Kate: "I've tried that, and once was enough!") It was lovely having tea by myself, but the Cream Tea, well, it's a bit of a killer. I mean, a public health hazard. They serve you a couple scones and a lot of clotted cream, which is sort of like whipped cream with butter in it. It's like when you order nachos and it comes with a side of sour cream, and you think "That looks like it'll lead to a coronary, so I'll just skip that." But here the clotted cream is, like, the main point: you spread it on the scones and just eat it. I dug in because, well, when in Rome... but I really couldn't believe it. Couldn't eat for hours afterward.

We mailed our packages off at the Post Office in John's, which was wonderfully easy. Lots of school kids on the Quay jigging for crabs and taking turns at kayaks. Stiff wind blowing from the northeast. Tidal rips in the estuary.

A Walk To Westward Ho! And Back

When we first went to Westward Ho! last Saturday we had thought it would be fun to walk there from Appledore on the South West Coast Trail, and today we did that. The weather report said that it would be a mixture of sunny breaks and rain showers however, so we packed our raingear as well as our swimsuits. We made sure the eboys both had their walking shoes on, instead of Crocs, but we had barely made it to the playground at the far end of the Quay when Will began to complain of hot feet. "Let's just be smart and turn around right now and get him his Crocs," said Kate. "Anything would be better than hearing about his hot feet for six hours!" So we did that, and with Will happily skipping along in his Crocs, we headed off.

As you leave Appledore to the north you go down yet another pretty street lined with cleverly painted houses that we had not yet seen: Irsha Street. We saw some new colours: lavender, purple and darker green. At its end was the RNLI lifeboat station, and then roads ended and the path continued as a muddy track right above the sea. Tide was thoroughly out, at full ebb, so we were skirting around a vast area of mud identified on the map as the Skarn. When the path divided into High Tide and Low Tide alternate routes, we took the High Tide one because the mud did not look appealing to us. Both routes united at the Northam Burrows County park: 'burrows' seems to be a common name for dunes here.

A friendly attendant at the park gate asked if we'd been here before and recommended we walk straight across the area towards an interpretive centre on the far side. The map showed a golf course in the way, but when I asked if that would be a problem he just shrugged his shoulders. And it was the strangest golf course: it was a sheep field, the grass thickly littered with sheep droppings, and yet it also had tees, fairways, and holes, not to mention sand traps. To Kate's great interest, sheep were being herded into pens by two people and two dogs: we got to watch the dogs racing back and forth doing their work, and doing it very well.

At the interpretive centre we climbed a long berm of cobbles and at its top we heard and saw the sea. Before us was a long stretch of sand out to the water, perhaps 300 metres, and to our right and left it stretched on for kilometres. Westward Ho! was visible down to the left. There were almost no people about: a few were walking dogs. We sat down and lunched.

For a long time, Galen and Will drew things with sticks on the immense canvas of the clean sand. There were occasional peeps of sun, but on the whole it was windy and cloudy, the wind from the sea (northwest) and the clouds apparently moving in from the land (southwest). Far out to sea a thick bank of cloud was visible beyond blue sky. Then the boys decided it was time for swimming, changed into trunks and headed for the shallow surf. I put on my suit too and joined them, although I was only brave enough to go in up to my hips. It was screamingly cold, except when the occasional mysterious warm current would wash around our feet. Most of the waves came from straight out, but there was also a small supply of waves coming from the left, as if they'd bounced off a headland beyond Westward Ho!. Kate wisely watched from the safety of the shallows.

When finally chilled, we dressed, packed up and hiked down to Westward Ho! to investigate the mini-golf. To us who have played mini-golf across North America, it was a fairly unimaginative course: 9 pretty straightforward holes for £7.50, but the boys played in such a civilized manner that I couldn't have been happier. (Mini-golf in our family is sometimes the occasion of a breakdown of good behaviour.) Kate wisely (again) took a walk and explored while we did this.

We had agreed to meet at the RNLI lifeguard truck on the beach, but when we went to go there, there was no lifeguard truck! There was no beach! The tide had come up so high that the entire beach was gone, and the lifeguard truck was parked up on the ramp (Kate next to it), and the lifeguards were out surfing. We bought ices, and Kate, unusually, argued for chips and hot chocolate as well. While we ate these in the lee of some big rocks it began to rain in earnest.

In full raingear we hiked north out of town on the Pebble Ridge, which is the actual name of the berm of cobbles that runs behind the beach. It was like a backpacking trip when hiking in bad weather you lose touch with your buddies: adjusting your hood to screen your face from the driving rain, and watching your footing on piles of wet round rocks. When the rain stopped, we found ourselves in an area where round depressions had been scooped out of the summit of the ridge, as if people had been making shelters for tents or fires or picnicking. Each was about two feet deep and ten feet in diameter. We stopped in one: it was warm to be out of the wind in there. The thing is that they were quite close to each other: one every ten yards or so, so either there are typically a heck of a lot of picnickers, or there is some other explanation.

Once we left the Pebble Ridge and headed back across the golf course, it got hot. The sheep had been released and spent a lot of time baa-ing at us. There were also golfers to avoid. At the Coast Path, even though it was fully high tide now, we took the Low Tide trail: we could see now where it went and it was both above water and non-muddy.

Coming back into Appledore we visited the RNLI lifeboat station. RNLI stands fr the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, and its a charity rather than some arm of the government or military. Kate was so inspired by their stories of rescue that she's decided to join as a supporter. (If we lived here she said she'd be volunteering too, but only for on-shore duties.) Kate also has her eye on a pale green bit of house on Irsha Street that is for sale: it looks like it has a commanding view of the estuary out the back.

Bought a cod & chips for Galen at Sylvester's (no line!) as we came through the centre of Appledore. It was so big we were able to feed the entire family on it. When we got home Kate took in the laundry, and as we ate dinner it poured rain outside. But just a shower again: soon the sun was shining. We hung the laundry inside the house.

Woolacombe Sands

I got up at 7:00 a.m. to listen to BBC 2 for the weather report. They said, "It was a dreadful day yesterday, but it's getting better. Up to 17 today, but still plenty of showers for this morning." From this we deduced that after some point this morning it would stop raining, and we debated about what to do. However, when we saw blue sky out the window at 9:00 or so, we decided it was our day for Woolacombe Sands, a giant beach that Kate had set her sights on.

(The news report preceding the weather forecast was, well, surprisingly 'tabloid' for the BBC. They led with the story of the team from Devon heading off to London to press the case that the Cream Tea should be recognized as a special food under EU law, like champagne. They interviewed several team members, one of whom said, "It should go quite quickly, unless we run into some red tape in Europe." Which implied, first, that he really had no idea how the process worked, and second, that he didn't think he lived in Europe. If we're not in Europe, where are we?)

We set off just before 11, with a bit of light rain still pattering down, but blue sky still in view. As we approached Woolacombe, the blue sky grew bigger and bigger. We passed many holiday parks, and the number of VW campers increased noticeably. We parked by the beach, and beheld the miles long stretch of sand, but with most of teh activity right at this end. Thee RNLI lifeguards were there, with the red-&-yellow flags marking out the area to swim in, their special truck and a jetski on a trailer. The were loads of people there, and a chip cooking truck out on the sand.

Galen and Will jumped right in. The tide was rising, so every now and then Kate and Morgan had to move their stuff back higher up the beach. The water was very cold (all the other children had wetsuits on, but not these hardy Canadians), but as the waves would recede across the sand it would pick up its heat and it was quite warm when it returned to the sea. When the sun would come out, the sea was a beautiful green and blue, almost Carribean. The waves were big (about 6 feet) but they would break quite far out and they were very mellow when they reached the beach. There were lots of surfers, including some parents with their children.

We also got the watch the RNLI practising. They took out the jetski and roared around in the surf.

We ate lunch, bought some chips for dessert, walked down the beach and then Galen and Will wanted to go back in. They put their suits back on (we would change in the car, even though available for hire were not only wetsuits and body boards but also a line of multi-coloured beach huts) and dived back in! They lay in the path of oncoming waves, and Galen rescued moon jellyfish being washed ashore, by lifting them up on pads of sand. Finally, Will was practically blue, and they had to come out. Will also said his leg hurt, and when we found two thin red lines on on it we surmised that he had been stung by one of the mysterious blue jellyfish we had seen. (Will said, "There was a jellyfish swimming with us!") But it was a minor thing, so we set off.

We next walked around the coast a little way to Barracane Beach, a tiny pocket beach, only about 15 metres wide, between vertical walls of rock. The beach was all shell bits, and adjacent to it was a fantastical landscape of rock and tide pools. The strata were turned vertical here, and the way they had eroded made little walls and walkways. The surf was rolling in right at the same level just off shore, giving the impression that we were below sea level in a walled garden. In the pools were limpets and seaweed.

At this point we began to realize we were actually getting sunburnt on the backs of our necks, so we turned to leave. One more bit of business though: we went into the touristy streets of Wollacombe Village to buy some ices.

On the way home we detoured where it said "Superstore" in Braunton, but when Kate saw it was a Tesco's, she said "Keep on going!" So we just kept going. Missed a turn in Barnstaple, and in the confusion that followed I instinctively pulled into the right lane in an intersection. Got out of that awkwardly, and found our way back to the right road. Stopped now at the Sainsbury's in West Barnstable, and went in to get apples and milk. As always, shopping was a delightful adventure, and we emerged with all sorts of other treats as well: Battenberg cake, mint Polars, olives for Will, Fox's ginger cream biscuits, dark chocolate Hobnobs.

Made it home about 7:00. Dinner, Laundry, Reading... and to bed.

Tintagel and Padstow

Galen has been saying he wanted to go to Padstow, in Cornwall, ever since we began planning this trip. It's a small harbour he's sailed around many times in "Ship Simulator," so, yes, here were were going to a place because someone had seen it in a computer game.

It looked like a long drive, so we left pretty early, about 9:20. It was an actual rainy day! As we drove the twisting and winding (yet narrow!) A39 towards Bude, with all the windows up, Will started to feel sick. (This was when the car got the new nickname, the Stinky Whale). We spent a long time in a remote yet charming lay-by near the turn for Hartlands Point, and then proceeded with all windows open. It was mighty cold! But it worked for Will, and he made it into our first stop, Tintagel, without problem.

The village of Tintagel is, as you will read in many a guide book, a bit of a disaster. The famous castle (which I was wanted to see; I was the motivating force in coming here), built half on a headland, half on a island, and graced by a lot of Arthurian hoopla, draws so many visitors that every tourist shop imaginable has sprung up in the little village. As you drive in, the word "commercial" does come to mind, but that said, the village is set well back from the ruin and does not really intrude on it. And there's a lot of interesting pottery for sale.

Somehow we were befuddled at first. We parked in a car park whose sign heralded "Closest to Castle!" but then, on foot, we somehow missed the signage for the castle and wound up walking into a newish development of detached houses, and came upon to a ghastly castle-like hotel ("Camelot Hotel: Best coffee in Cornwall!") built overlooking the real ruin. Now we could see where we should have gone, so we trekked back into town and down the right path. We passed a bakery where they were making pasties in the window (Will had to be promised one later) and a sign that said "Land Rover service, £1.50." They'll actually drive you, in a Land Rover, down the long path to the shore where the ruin is; and more importantly, back up.

But we walked. It was pretty windy and rainy at times, but there was still a man in the little English Heritage booth at the entrance to the ruin. "So you want to go in, do you?" he said sceptically. We showed him our English Heritage card and he passed us through. Down slippery steps in spitting rain to a little wooden ramp that goes over to the island, and then up more wet steps, switchbacking up to the entrance of the "Island Keep." There were birds wheeling in the gap between the headland and the island, and it was, well, despite all the New Age excitement, quite magical. We had the ruins mostly to ourselves because of the weather, and we explored all over. The views out along the coast were also wonderful, with high cliffs in both directions, and caves. Just to the south we were pretty sure we could see the cliffs where they filmed the "Cliffs Of Insanity" scene in the Princess Bride: massive black cliffs, topped with thick green turf, white birds wheeling in the gulf of air, surf crashing at the bottom. But really all of the Cornwall coast seems to look like that. So maybe it wasn't.

Most of the wheeling birds were gulls, but there was one pair that were something different. For one thing, they had white spots on the top of each grey wing; for another, they almost never flapped. Their bodies were shorter than a gull's, and they heads and tails were white. Mystery bird.

Reminding us of the day's theme of visiting a place familiar from the computer, Will said, of the grasses waving in the wind atop the island, "That's just like special effects!"

A quick visit to the gift shop, and walked back up to the village, where we bought pasties and ate them inside a small shop while it continued to spit rain outside. A quick survey of the street indicated one could by a hundred different kinds of pasty, and ice cream, but little else. Piled into the car and drove to Padstow. Both boys slept.

Padstow was unexpectedly charming, a town on a blue-green estuary (more Caribbean water!) with a working quay of fishing boats, and a full-blown tourist scene next to that. It was definitely raining now, and yet it was downright crowded! Galen and Will danced with glee to see the actual places they know from Ship Simulator ("I always try to bring my boat in through that entrance to the inner harbour and I always scrape the sides!") and we shot the requisite pictures of them in front of these scenes. We ran from shop to shop to stay dry. The Pasty thing in Cornwall is even more out of control than it is in Devon. There were actually three pasty shops in a row on one street.

Headed out around 5:00, and the last stop on the long drive home was to buy some petrol. Pulled over near St. Kew to do just this, and we could not figure out how to get the gas cap open! However it was merely the last of a long series of challenges we'd faced that day. The solution to this one was my pocket knife. I don't think I actually broke anything.

Arrived home about 7:00 and had a late dinner. The drive was exhausting. I don't think I've ever shifted gears so much. Every 60 seconds there is a different speed zone or type of curve, or change in grade. (And this is a green A-road!) And the oncoming traffic zooming past you mere inches away. It would be delightful if it weren't so dangerous.

Tarka Trail

It was overcast this morning, and without internet we had no idea how to check the weather forecast. We tried listening to the radio while making breakfast, but it was all either religious programming or church music. It is a Sunday morning, after all. (Note: the caretaker for this cottage just dropped by and told me I could listen to "Heart" for a weather forecast, and it's somewhere on the dial below BBC 1, which is near 90MHz, FM.)

Will slept in, so we didn't really get going until after nine, but we decided at that point to go cycling on the Tarka Trail. The Tarka Trail is what we'd call a "rails-to-trails conversion" in North America: an old rail grade, its tracks taken up, renewed now as a trail. Such trails are usually a very gentle grade, and in fact here on the estuary the map indicated this one would be dead flat. The trail is named for Tarka the Otter, a character from a popular children's book set in this area (which none of us have read).

(Let me digress for a bit of geography here. Two estuaries meet off Appledore: the Taw and the Torridge. A few miles up the Torridge estuary is Bideford, our nearest town, and a few miles up the Taw estuary is Barnstaple, where we arrived by rail. The trail follows the estuary edges between the two towns.)

When we left the cottage an ominous fog was blowing in quite thickly from the west, but we forged ahead anyway, the principle being that you never decide to turn back before you're actually on the route.

We knew there was cycle hire in Barnstaple at the train station, but our OS "Explorer" map (that's 1:25,000 topographic, with public footpaths and other trails marked, plus various other information of interest to walkers) also indicated "Cycle Hire" on a lonely stretch of the trail, halfway between Barnstaple and Bideford. We decided to try to find this cycle hire place, because it looked like a fun, remote place to ride. We really didn't know how many miles the kids would be good for.

The map was unclear on how one actually gets to this place--there did not seem to be a road--so we drove to the nearby village of Fremington, and looked for signs. We found one to "Historic Fremington Quay" and that led us to a one-lane road (with many confidence-inspiring lay-bys), along a tiny sub-estuary called Fremington Pill. It brought us to a lonely yet lovely building out where the mud flats begin, complete with tea house, rental cottage, parking lot, and cycle hire. It was very magical.

The estuaries have vast mud areas that disappear at high tide. Tide was approaching high now, so we were looking out across long grass to water, and across the estuary we could see an airport, possibly at Royal Marines Base at Chivern. A white plane with long wings, like a glider, repeatedly took off and landed. The wind sock there was standing out. No fog any more.

The guy at the cycle hire shop expertly and rapidly fitted us all for cycles. Galen declared this was a Crazy Mission and that he would Not Go because there were no helmets. However, free helmets materialized, along with panniers, a lock, and a repair kit. We were extremely well-outfitted. We ate our picnic lunch and set out on bikes westward, for the village of Instow, about a mile and a half away. The wind was in our teeth, but it was dead flat, riding along above salt marshes and between rows of trees scultpted by the sea breeze. We stopped to adjust this and that, and teach Will how to use gears, and we passed many a family, and older couples botanizing and birding along the way. Wild roses were blooming, the hawthorn was blooming, and lots of other little flowers. In many places the trial was lined with trees: oaks, ash, hawthorn, willow or pine. When we arrived in Instow, the boys were doing quite well.

Instow is a small viallge like Appledore, which it faces across the Torridge Estuary. All its buildings are white or pastel, and there is a quay whcih runs the length of the waterfront. We saw sailors in wetsuits wading out to their light sailbaots and preparing to race, There was an excellent, steady wind. We continued on towards Bideford. The water (to our right) was bright blue, like a Carribean blue, and Appledore was a compact village on the far shore. Near it was the huge shed of Babcock's Appledore Shipyard, a major employer here. We cycled under the bridge of the A39, and came into what is techncially not the part of Bideford on the east side of teh river, but a separate town named East-The-Water. Will was pretty interested in turning around at this point, but we tempted him with a visit to Happy Pasty, a pasty factory in Bideford we'd seen an ad for. We stashed our bikes at the old station in East-The-Water, and walked across the 600 year-old brdge of 24 arches, of which Bideford is right proud. We found the Happy Pasty, closed, alas, for Sunday, and vowed to return.

Now with the wind at our backs we cycled the three miles back quite quickly, Stopped in Instow for ice cream. The sailing races had ended, and we could see sailors pulling their craft ashore into the "North Devon Yacht Club." Timing, to take out the boat at just the moment the tide was still high enough, looked crucial. These sailors were wearing very heroic-looking, quasi-military gear: full-body, black wetsuits and trim grey lifevests. Racing is a serious business here.

The weather cleared fully now, blue sky everywhere. At about 3:30 we turned the bikes back in at Fremington Quay, and headed home. In the Whale's parking niche, Kate moved the little concrete blocks so I could wedge our marine mammal another inch further in. She and Will stopped down at John's of Appledore for milk and eggs. We did a load of laundry and cooked chicken tikka for dinner. Will experienced a burst of energy and led Galen and me on a round-the-block race (up through our garden and out our back door; along the alley, then drop steeply to New Street; along descending New Street, dropping past our front door and out on the main road at sea level; around the fire house and back up up up the alley to our car. Whew!) Kate and the boys went for an after dinner walk to the playground.

Westward Ho!

Our first day of "relaxing." We had a relaxed get-up and a relaxed breakfast, and still it was only like 8:30. We went for a relaxed walk around the narrow streets of Appledore. In one tiny shop, where half of it was tourist stuff and the other was boat repair supplies, Kate bought a red toque. By eavesdropping on others we learned there's no chemist (pharmacy) in Appledore, but you can go up to Northam for one (a nearby village).

We went into a few of the galleries hosting special exhibits for the Visual Arts Frestival, and saw some fun creative stuff. There are yurts on the quay where you can learn about the festival. With the tide now high, we watched boys fishing for crab off the Quay. You can buy a little crab line (it looks like kite string wrapped around an H-shaped frame) and bait, and a bucket to hold your crabs, at a shop near the one where Kate got her hat. We saw several postcards that featured VW camper-busses driving around Devon, or parked in front of various bits of the Devon coast. Realization: there is a VW camper thing in Devon.

We piled into the Whale, and with Kate outside directing I managed to get it scrape-free out of our alley. Our first stop was Marshford Organics, a small farm shop on the way out of town. Will came running out to say, "Dad, it's the kind of store where you love everything!" We bought half our groceries there (Kate: "I want to Move Here") and went for the other half to Morrisson's in Bideford. This was a big, busy store with a large parking lot. We went up and down all the aisles, marvelled at how the eggs are sold unrefrigerated, and got most of everything we need for the week.

Came home and ate lunch, and then the boys were keen to swim, so we set off for the nearby town of Westward Ho!, the only town in Britain to be named after a book, and the only town anywhere with an exclamation mark in its name. It's only about ten minutes away, after you extract the Whale from its parking niche. We found a pay-and-display lot, and spilled out onto the giant beach. It's about two kilometres long and 500 metres deep. Lifeguards from the Royal National Lifesaving Institution (RNLI) had set up a pair of yellow-and-red flags, which you were supposed to swim between, and they were on station with their snazzy little RNLI truck. Lots of people were weearing wetsuits, but Galen and Will charged in wearing their regular swim trunks, and had a blast. Kate and Morgan rolled up their pants and watched.

Finally as the boys were turning blue we quit the beach and had an ice cream. Saw the Southwest Coastal Path sign which said "Appledore 3 1/2 mi." and decided we should walk here next time. Will also spotted mini-golf, one of his real passions. We headed home at around 5. Pasties for dinner from John's, with salad. We went for an after-dinner walk along the Quay, and explored the graveyard at St. Mary's church. The boys are eager to buy firewood and build a fire in our cottage, but John's is out of this. Besides, given the rarity of forests in England, firewood must be a precious commodity. It might make more sense to wait and build fires back in Canada.

Travel To Devon

We were up pretty early, like 6 a.m., to finish packing and cleaning. Beautiful sunny day again. Galen and Will watched Zingzillas, a bizarre kids' morning show on the telly, and we were walking out the door just before 8:30, a bright sunny day.

Drove along the now-familiar route through the white buildings of Rottingdean and Saltdean, gulls in the air, and found the Enterpirse car rental place, hidden in a temporary building under the railway viaduct in Brighton. They decided that my indiscretion, the one where I had accidentally rammed a giant flowerpot at our cottage while trying to find out whether the car had a front parking sensor, would cost me £50. Ah well. It was a pretty deep scratch. The guy who drove us to the railway station had moved recently from Poland. He said he'd just been working in Scotland, but that he couldn't understand anything anyone said there. Kate's response: "We have to go there!"

We bought pasties in the station, and Will immediately pounced on the Chicken Tikka Savoury Slice. Kate had coffee! Boarded the 10:19 for London Victoria, The first car we stepped into was just a commuter-type coach and had no luggage racks, and we had three big bags and four knapsacks to stow. We headed into other cars, at Kate's insistence, and found the ideal: a luggage rack and seats right next to them. Settled in for a fast and comfortable ride to Clapham Junction.

There we had to wrestle the bags up and down stairs to another platform, but there was planety of time. Kate bought more pasties, because Will was consuming them as fast as he could lay his hands on them. It's his new love, the chicken pasty. Watched the multi-coloured trains of Southern and Southwest come and go.

The 11:27 to Exter was pretty full, and again not really designed to accommodate people with large bags. We squeezed on board with some trepidation. After searching, Kate and the boys lodged in an air-conditioned car, at the very front of the train, in a set of four seats with a table. Luggage racks throughout the train were full though, so I sat with the two big bags in the cycle storage rack, one car back, for about the first half hour. Then the conductor befriended me, and convinced me that no one was going to run off with our bags. "I've worked 20 years on this railway," he said, "and only seen one bag go missing. And that was because the lady forgot where she put it." But to make matters better, he offered to lock our bags behind a set of sliding doors near the driver's compartment. Another trainman also befriended us and gave us pens branded with "RMT"--which turns out to be the railway workers union. So we had a very comfortable ride to Exeter, about three hours, passing through Salisbury.

At Exeter we did not have to change platforms at all, but the train to Barnstaple was a pitiful affair of two dinky cars that looked like they belonged more in a subway--and it was already full when it pulled in! We rode the whole way standing in the doorwell, squeezed between our bags and other people in a similar situation. When the doors would open we would all shift around to make room, and then create a channel for those getting off. But it was a pretty ride through countryside, up a little river for half and hour, and down another pretty little river that eventually became the River Taw, and led us to Barnstaple. We got off at that little station and smiled, for our train journey was over.

Enterprise sent a taxi to pick us up: a class operation. From our short ride through it, Barnstaple looks like a pretty town with a core of old buildings. We were furnished with a car, but unfortunately it's another Vauxhall Insignia; "free upgrade" is always a bad sign.

We drove out to Appledore and noted that Roads Are Wider In Devon. There are little shoulders, and even gratis lay-by's on the A39, as if road designers thought they would be a good idea AND were able to find land to put them on. Here it's as if there's a littel more land than in Sussex.

Appledore is a village on a hillside. At first glance, all the houses are painted white or pastels: pink, yellow, grey, blue. But when you look more closely, each has also a "waterline" along the bottom, as on a boat, where a dark colour has been painted from the pavement of the street up about 30 cm. They might use a deep blue for a pastel blue house, or deep orange for a pale yellow house. The colour is usually repeated in the trim of the door and windows. On streets that go steeply uphill, the waterline is actually a triangle, thick at the downhill end, thin at the uphill end, so as you look up the street the housefronts appear to be set on a series of triangles rising like steps.

We're in a white home, with black waterline and trim, just one segment of a long row of connected houses on "New Street," which is a narrow alleyway that curves up across a hill over the harbour. Our parking is off a nameless alley, about 30' higher in elevation, that parallels New Street. So when we say we have to descend down our garden to get to the back door, we're going down about two floors! Our parking space is tiny, and our car has already acquired the nickname of The Whale.

The cottage is a cute two-storey place where Galen and Will have a small whitewashed bedroom right next to our small whitewashed bedroom. Our window looks out front and their looks out the back into the garden. There is one great window in our bedroom through which you can see out over the roofs of town, and across the estuary to Instow, the village on the far side.

We walked down into Appledore and discovered that "The Quay" is the street along the waterfront, that there is no water there at low tide, because on this estuary (the Torridge River estuary) at low tide there are extensive mud flats and not much water. We found that all other streets of Appledore are tiny and steep, and that there are little shops along the one called Market Street. We ate dinner in the yard of the Shipgate Hotel, a pub on the Quay, and perused "Johns of Appledore," the general store and post office, open to 9:00, the place where you can get all sorts of groceries and what-have-you. We observed a massive queue at Sylvester's Fish & Chips, so it's either pretty special or well-marketed.

We also found the Appledore Visual Arts Festival will be going on here for two more days. ("4 days, 70 + events, one small riverside village, one big festival") There are films screenings, talks, walks and gallery shows, musicians in the streets, and basically the town is looking its best for this. There is a Best Dressed Doorknocker competition.

Portsmouth Historic Dockyard

In a way, a day of mishaps.

We set out at 8:15 for the Newhaven Town railway station, just two roundabouts away. A crystal clear, sunny, blue day: not a cloud in the sky, the promise of very warm temperatures indeed. We all wore shorts.

Now, Mark had warned us not to try to travel from the Newhaven station: "There's not really any parking," he'd said. Either we didn't believe him or we forgot, but in any case when we got there, although we could drive around it, there was no parking. We'd never seen a station with no parking; but the next station we went to topped that: it didn't exist. We drove a few blocks looking for Newhaven Harbour Station, and although there was a clear chain of signs to follow there, there was no station. Frustrated, and unable to find parking near Newhaven Town station, we decided to drive to Brighton & take the train from there. (The 9:04 from Newhaven was to take us anyway to a 10:30 from Brighton anyway.)

Thirty minutes later we were pulling into the car park at Brighton Station, having followed signage only (no maps!). I got a bit frazzled because the ticket machine refused three of my credit cards and a debit card, and there was a horrendous line for the ticket window. Kate came to my rescue with her credit card, which had a cleaner magnetic stripe, and for £30 we were all four of us on the 9:33 to Havant; change for Portsmouth Harbour.

At first all we were able to find were seats together facing backwards. But it was a very pleasant journey, stopping every few minutes at a different station. At Havant we got out and the train to Portsmouth came along on the same track a few minutes later. It was really crowded, and we had to stand for the three stops to Portsmouth Harbour. Which is an exciting station: right on the water, ferries to Gosport leaving from the side, the HMS Warrior moored just across from it.

We walked first to the Co-op across the street to buy three big padded envelopes, and mail our accumulated booty of the week home. They had what we needed, but it was awkward stuffing and addressing in the tiny shop.

The Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is right next to the rail station, but before we got there Will said he was hungry (it was 11:30), and poor Galen, who had woke up with a sore throat and was now beginning to resemble the walking dead, also needed something. It was frustrating, but just short of the dockyard entrance we stopped at a pub called the Ship & Castle. Actually it was very nice inside: a kids menu, roomy, and almost empty. Kate and I split a salad, and Galen and Will split some chicken nuggets, and I had a ginger beer because that's what you do in pubs. It gave us all a good rest. But let's face it: we have reached exhaustion.

(I got to try salad cream, It's not bad: I take back the aspersions I was casting on it. I also got to try Brown Sauce. It was bad.)

Now we entered the historic dockyard and found it was £55 for the family: to see the Warrior, the Victory, the Mary Rose Museum (minus the hull of the Mary Rose, which has been removed for refurbishment), Action Stations (a kind of recruitment festival put on by Royal Navy for kids, except you pay them to participate), and a Harbour Tour. We got over the sticker shock by reasoning we'd come all this way (across the Atlantic, as well as from Newhaven). Nonetheless the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard was in the end perhaps the only museum we've been a little disappointed in.

We went to see the Victory first, becaue that was at the top of Galen's list (and he looked like he might expire any minute). It was very magnificent, very dark, massive, and very crowded with other visitors. However, a great moment: at the spot marked on the deck by a brass plaque where Nelson fell, shot by a French sniper, Galen asks me to turn on the video camera, and he very dramatically collapses on the deck with a loud THUMP! You'd have thought a dead body had been dropped on the deck. People turned around and gasped. I was killing myself inside, but I kept a steady hand on the camera. Oddly we were not thrown out for our irreverence on the holy site.

We visited Action Stations next, drawn by the lure of "simulators,", but it was really just a big warehouse full of science-museum crap: some of it quite good, it must be said, but nothing that you would see only in Portsmouth. Will was so excited that he walked into a pillar. Poor guy! Good black eye coming up tomorrow.

(It appears that in England spreading excitement about the military comes without the nefarious overtones it would carry in the USA. Small island, must be defended, actual threats out there--that sort of thing. Indeed, even weapons contractors seemed to have a free hand to present and explain their stuff in this exhibit, something that in the US would raise eyebrows and invite cynical commentary.)

Galen was now pretty exhausted (and did he have a fever?) and it was hot and sunny, so we decided to peruse a couple of gift shops and sit down for the Harbour Tour. The gift shops (there are at least three in the dockyard, along with three restaurants, further contributing to the Disneyland-like impression that you have, in the end, really just been lured here to be parted from your cash) were nice, but ultimate just more stuff.

But the Harbour Tour for 3:00 p.m. was now full! So instead we went out on the wharf next to the Warrior, a steel wind & sail warship from 1860. Will and I explored the Warrior while Galen and Kate sat on a bench and watched the fantastic & varied water traffic in the harbour. Ferries going to the Isle of Wight, to Gosport, to the Channel islands, to Brittany, and of course all sizes of military craft. Inside the Warrior (which was vast and far more comfortable than the Victory, and never took put in an actual naval engagement) Will encountered a station for making a paddle-wheel boat from cardboard, paper clips and a rubber band. (Another half-term bonus!) He made one and it was really fun. Just his thing.

Also kept encountering a group of children speaking what might have been Ukrainian, and wearing hats that said "Chernobyl Children's Lifeline."

Tottled to the railway station to catch the 4:29 Southern train to Brighton. Nice ride home. Had forward-facing seats and decent air. Galen seemed to be sleeping on his tray table. At one station I saw a confident Oxfam ad out the window that I'd like to see in Canada: Climate Change is killing people--"Let's sort it here and now." Also saw two great examples of the British use of a plural verb with a collective noun: "When England win, you win!" and "We are an agency that become excitable when..."

Drove home, still not a cloud in the sky. Beautiful blue sea on our right hand. We decided as we approached home to fill the car with petrol, as we have to return it tomorrow morning, so we pulled into the Sainsbury's near our cottage. Guessed correctly on which side the fuel cap was! Filled up with unleaded ("the green one"), and the price, for those of you interested in the price of fuel, was about what we would pay in Canada per litre if you simply substitute the £ for a $. (This is a recurring impression we have: that prices here are the same numbers they would be in Canada, but with a £ instead of a $.)

I go in to pay, and while I'm in there Will comes running in and says, "Dad, I need the key! The car alarm is going off!" With me and the magic key away from it, the car had decided it was in danger, and when Will, who had helped me fuel up, bumped the door on the outside, it slammed on all the door locks (locking Galen and Kate inside) and began honking the horn! Not very snazzy behaviour from an otherwise snazzy car. They were great and kept their heads: they sent Will to get the key from me. It was the best mishap of the day.

Home, dinner of mac and cheese to use up the pasta, Galen lay on the couch and watched British Talent on the telly, which was an education for both him and Will.

Tomorrow we leave to return our car, and take the train: Brighton--Clapham Junction--Exeter--Barnstaple. Not sure when we will be back in Internet land again.

Pevensey Bay, Bodiam Casle, Battle Abbey

Sausages from Middle Farm for breakfast. The day dawned bright and blue and still: promising to be hot. We were intending to drive to Bodiam Castle by the high road, the A 27, but as we pulled out of our driveway, Kate suggested we go along the coast road, through Eastbourne and Bexham, and maybe stop on the beach at Pevensey Bay. It was nice, slow driving. Eastbourne felt like a seaside resort (is it the clear light and gulls wheeling over those yucca-like trees?). Pevensey Bay was several streets of houses parallelling the beach, much like a resort town at the [New] Jersey shore--except everything is built of yellow brick, many of the houses have tile roofs, and the flags flying are either English or the Union Jack. But like its New Jersey counterpart, Pevensey Bay allows access to the beach at the end of each cross street. You emerge at the top of the cobbled high tide zone, with a broad view up and down the coast (all the way to the large unattractive buildings of Hastings far to the east in the haze) and then descend into the sand zone.

Tide was out, the waves were tiny, and people were walking their dogs along the water's edge. (Kate said the dogs were very happy.) The beach was cut every forty yards or so by beefy fences that ran from the upper cobble zone down almost to the water's present location. They looked like erosion control structures: a series of posts, connected by a beam the size of a railway tie. Mostly they were half buried in sand, and gave the beach the look of having lanes or compartments.

We hung out there for a while, Galen and Will wading in as far as their rolled-up pants would allow, and then a bit farther. There was some digging in the sand and the attempt to dam a rivulet that was draining a shallow pool behind the first ride in the sand. Kate and I mostly stood there and absorbed the scene, and looked for boats at sea. A huge cross-like structure was visible on the horizon, like an oil rig but unfamiliar.

Soon we departed for Bodiam Castle, driving up through Pevensey, skirting Hstings and going inland. Bodiam castle is not on a main road: we followed signs into tiny roads that twisted and tured between hedges, where the white dashed line disappeared most of the time, and oncoming traffic would pause so you could both figure out what to do. Suddenly, in the midst of this twisting maze--right after passing "Bodiam Manner School" which looked very posh indeed--there we were at a gate for the castle, with a small sign "National Trust," and we were pulling into a large field with a few cars in it, to park.

But there were more cars pouring in every minute, and by the time I came back from the toilets (always "toilets" in England, never "washrooms" or bathrooms"), the field was half full and cars were still streaming in. It seemed all of England was here for some special event, although it was probably just a beautiful day during Half Term. Families with children were streaming up to the Castle, which, as you can read in a more than one guidebook, is the classic castle, the one children draw: a moat, round towers at the corners, toothed battlements above, its exterior in almost perfect shape.

We picnicked on the grass by the car, and then walked up. The first view of the moat was a little breathtaking--you come over a rise and its right there--quickly followed by Will's discovery of giant carp swimming in it. Around the castle front a man was just about to fire a melon from a trebuchet, explaining in a loud voice to the crowd seated on the sunny lawn how it worked. We got there just in time to see the mechanism tripped and the melon describe an arc out over and into the moat. (He had wisely not aimed at the castle.) We don't know if a carp got hit. It was a Half Term bonus, and the entire show, repleat with a demonstration of how to put on armour, would be repeated hourly.

At the ticket office I asked if our English Heritage membership was worth a discount. "No, you pay double!," laughed the man. English Heritage and National Trust are competitors, I realized, each striving to own all the castles and historic sites in England.

Will and Galen led us up and down every steep spiral staircase in this castle, although of course I'd have gone up and down them if they hadn't. We often on the heels of other visitors, people were everywhere. In one room I looked up the flue of the fireplace to see a man on the parapet several floors above looking down into the chimney. The most magical room in the castle was the well, wher a small circular pool of green water filled the middle of the room, and the sky was visible high above us through the top of the tower.

The boys were wilting, so we went out for an ice cream (the National Trust sells all sorts of special posh-type ice creams) and to watch the demonstration in full. The two men leading it took a volunteer form teh audience, a 16-year old boy, and dressed him in armour, explaiing that at the batle of Agincourt, some of the commanders were 16. They told us about long bows and other nasty weapons, and then fired the trebuchet again. It was pretty fun.

Now we turned the car for home, and went to Battle, which is the town around the battlefield of the Battle of Hastings, and Battle Abbey, built by William the Conqueror after he won the battle. All the shoips of course have Battle in their name: Battle Chemist, Battle Hair styling, Battle Tearoom. Galen pointed out that in World War II, all those shops would have had to cover up or paint over the word 'Battle' on their signs, because you were not allowed to show a town name in public--the better to confuse invaders.

This site was English Heritage, and they were selling ginger wine and special shortbreads to counter the National Trust's ice creams. We watched the short film explaining the context of the battle,walked the beaitful ground of the abbey and along the battle field edge, explored some ruined parts of hte abbey and delighted in the large groups of French high schoolers around us.

Headed home, took a wrong turn at Hailsham, and therefore the back road to Lewes instead of the A27. Detoured into Kingston to find the house Kate's family lived in in 1974. Unfortuately we got completely lost in a maze of twisty narrow roads, and when we got to the A27 felt we were lucky to have made it out. A later look at the map revealed we should have turned left at a small lane called The Avenue.

Home for dinner.

The Weald and Downland Open Air Museum

Yesterday I forgot to mention that we made pancakes for breakfast. It was a triumphant moment because in Sainsbury's Kate and Will had been unable to find baking powder, coming home with only baking soda. I tinkered with the recipe, adding some yoghurt to provide acidity for the baking soda to react with and the results were very good. We may have to make "yoghurt pancakes" at home.

Repeated pancakes again this morning, and then set out in our trusty car ("ZedDog, the Sled Dog", named for his licence plate, ZDG). We were bound for Singleton. This is a village north of Chichester where there is a highly-acclaimed living history centre of old buildings and practices: The Weald and Downland Open Air Museum. (The Weald is the high, sandstone part of north Sussex; the Downland is the chalk hills that run through the south part of the county.)

It was raining, and Chichester is about 30 miles to the west, so we expected it to take some time. But after we passed Lewes the A27 became a four-lane divided highway, and we fairly whizzed along. Driving gets easier and easier: I think I may have got into 6th gear today. Today's excitement was when a car was merging into the highway from the left (picture that: coming in on an on-ramp from the left), he and I both slowed to almost a dead stop, unable to figure out who had right-of-way. I think I did, and confused him by not asserting it. In North American the guiding principle in the highway merge is that the incoming traffic does not have right-of-way, but isn't supposed to have to stop either. You're supposed to negotiate something with them to get them on without inconveniencing yourself too much. Here, the principle seems to be that the incoming traffic has no rights and you can ignore it. That's a little hard for me.

Drive past Arundel Castle, which looked stunning, and we wished we could stop. Noticed that most every lay-by has a food truck parked in it: how civilized! Also we got lost in Chichester, which is nothing to be embarrassed about. Kate was brilliant and got us back on the right route, the A286 north.

It was nice to get out of the car after 90 minutes, into the forest-and-field world of the museum. Right off we found out that there was a scavenger hunt going on. Will was given a little bag and a list of ten things he had to find: something blue, something shiny, something manmade, an interesting leaf, a bit of litter, a piece of chalk, a flower, a feather, a piece of flint, something prickly. Will loved this! As we wandered in and out of Tudor buildings he was reminding us to look for this or that, and in short order he had it all.

Meanwhile, we also found out it was Half Term, which is a week off from school here, so almost every building had some sort of special craft activity going on in it. Galen in turn made a walnut-shell boat, some blackletter stitching, a candle, a brass rubbing, and a bit of rag rug. Half term did not mean the place was crowded though.

We explored along paths through the buildings, which are set in small groups, with trees between them. Some parts of the area are worked as a farm would have been in Tudor times. We saw many half-timber buildings that were built in the fifteenth century (note the blackened walls from the open fire) and then improved in the seventeenth century (invention of the chimney). Lots of roof tiles hung with wooden pegs (which Will and Galen got to practice doing), lots of mortise and tenon joints with pegs. There are animal enclosures for sheep and donkeys, and interpretive signs that explain some of what's going on. Still better are the people working there, who will take the time to explain to you what they're doing. One lady had us washing wooden dishes fifteenth-century style, and we also scrubbed her table with salt to scour it.

It was still raining lightly. Some of the museum people remarked on our keen raingear. It's just, well, raingear. But looking around us we realized that no one else really had serous raingear on. Then we realized that to the English this wasn't even probably proper rain. They were wearing, like, windbreakers.

Ate our picnic lunch beside the duck pond which sported both very cute ducklings, and enormous carp. Which for some reason did not eat the ducklings. Saw a genuine rook perched on a roof. Kate says they have a very sassy attitude that comes from being afraid they're inferior to ravens.

Visited the waterwheel mill, where they still grind a ton of flour a day, watched the immense wooden gear wheels turning, and ate some of their biscuits. Also learned that the chalk-and-flint hills here provided just the right combination of building materials. The chalk can be baked into quicklime, and thence made into cement. So the hills give you everything you need to build the house, and then you go to the adjacent clay valleys to make pottery tiles for the roof.

Departed there around 4:00, and took back roads to avoid Chichester. (Saw a black headed gull on an overpass.) Fetched into Lewes at around 5:00, and parked on South Street for the Bag O' Books bookstore. It's a tiny bookstore on a street corner, but it was even better inside than it had looked through the window on Sunday. Bought a large pile of books. Walked up the high street to a cash machine--Lewes felt different from Sunday: quiet in the rain, but with more eateries than I had noticed the first time. Food is everywhere here. Got fish and chips at South Street Fish Bar; noticed that on their menu was "saveloy," so asked what that was. It turned out to be a bright red hot-dog sort of thing. Hmm. Passed on that. Anybody know if these are good to eat? I may have to try one; some things in life you just can't learn about by reading.

Took it all home--it seems such a quick drive now down to Newhaven. There's a sign on the route that tells you that you're entering "Tarring Nevile," and we always enjoy seeing that.

Bluebell Railway

Drove up to Sheffield Park, north of Lewes, today, to the Bluebell railway. This is a functioning steam railway, operated on a line that was abandoned by the national rail system in the 70's. They have so many engines and cars that they actually operate a scheduled service among the three stations along their line. You buy a ticket good for the whole day, and can ride anything running.

It was a quiet and cool, overcast day, and the drive was one of pleasant winding roads with thick greenery everywhere. Galen remarked that "It looks like Gran's cottage here," meaning southern Ontario. Indeed, the forest here, deciduous, does look a lot like eastern North America. Somehow without mosquitos.

We got to the Bluebell parking lot at about 10:15, and before we had left the car heard the distinctive peep of a steam engine. The boys were so excited they could hardly sit still. When we stepped onto the platform and saw a steam engine (forgive me, I can't tell the design) being coupled to the train and whuffing out huge clouds of steam, they were practically jumping up and down.

We were standing in a station with two platforms, and an overhead bridge that crossed over the tracks. We crossed over to the other platform and found a seat in an actual compartmented carriage like I remember from forty years ago. That's the kind where there's a passageway, and off it a series of little rooms, each with three seats facing three, overhead racks, and a window that drops down so you can really lean out of it. (With a sign under it that says "Do not lean out hte window" of course.) We felt very lucky to get this compartment, since there were only a couple on this train, and we were travelling 3rd class.

Our steam engine began pulling us, and at a nice slow pace we rode 15 minutes up the line to the next station at Horsted Keynes. Out the window (let's face it, one of us had his head leaning out pretty much all the time) we saw lovely countryside: fields, rows of trees, the occasional farm, walking paths. It was ridiculously beautiful. Kate and I reflected on why Britain is able to build new things while preserving the look and feel of its old buildings and its agricultural land, whereas in North America we give people the freedom to do whatever they want on their land, and they build ugly things.

A conductor came into our compartment, but instead of telling us to pull our heads in, gave us the story of how they are trying to exhume the buried line on the east Grmstead, and could we spare a tenner (that's £10) to help pay for dirt removal. We were touched and chipped in. Rode 15 more minutes to Kingscote: same kind of scenery. Turned around and rode back to Horsted Keynes, then back to Kingscote on another train, then back to Horsted Keynes, and finally back to Sheffield Park. Whew! By this time the landscape was becoming familiar.

Will wanted more. But the rest of us were bushed, so we passed through the gift shop and decamped.

On the way home we detoured to "Middle Farm," a large farm shop just east of Lewes. It's right on the side of the A27, and as we pulled off there was a sign saying "Camping Show in progress." Sure enough there was a mass of tents pitched in a field next to the farm, next to the overflow parking. These tents were enormous! Each one was larger than a car. I think this is a new craze here: giant tents.

Middle Farm was very busy, but we did find a place to park, and went into the store. In its many connected low-ceilinged rooms was a rich sampling of what is available within 100 miles of here. Local cheeses (I could not resist some Duddleswell) and meats (pork sausages), produce, fruit juices (pear-ginger! cox apple!).

In the barn out back, where harder rock and roll was playing, there was mead, and ginger wine, and assorted local beers. But the main feature of the room was a series of small barrels, about 30 cm high, arrayed around the room, each with a different fermented cider in it. ("Herefordshire such-and-such", and so on.) Will, who is always a keen observer of what's really going on, pointed out to me that little plastic cups lay in a tray on the counter, and I could taste any of these that I wanted. That sounded great, so took a cup and tapped a little out of a barrel. I guess it was about 14 proof--more or less the strength of wine. (I should have read the handwritten label pasted on the barrel.) I think I sprayed it out by mistake. Kind of bad form.

Back in Newhaven we dropped Kate and Will at Sainsbury's to shop for food, while Galen and I went up to the Fort to buy something he'd seen in the gift shop there on Saturday: a replica set of the papers an RAF man would have had during the war. We managed to get there and back all by ourselves: we didn't hit anything! (Everyday after driving, I sit down and say to myself, "Good work: you didn't hit anything.") Then we picked up Kate and Will at the end. Dinner. Too tired to go for another walk. Rain supposed to come tonight.

Lewes

A fine day, light wind, "sunny breaks," warm. We set out for Lewes, the nearby town where Kate lived for a year when she was 16, and where our friends Mark and Melissa lived before they emigrated to Canada.

It is going to be difficult not to use the word quaint here. From the south you come into town through a tunnel and enter a delightful hodge-podge of old buildings on winding, stone streets that go up and down hills. There are twisting alleyways that lead, via steps, to tucked-away homes with names ("The Lodge," "The Round House"). In the centre of town is a ruined Norman Castle. There is a narrow street named Rotten Row and an alley named Pipe Passage. The human-sized river Ouse runs through the east end of the town; before the arched stone bridge over it was built, the town on the other side, sited under a massive chalk cliff, was named Cliffe.

We arrived at 9:30 on a Sunday morning. Most shops were closed, but they began to open as we walked along the High Street. Near the river, the High Street became a pedestrian mall, which just doubled the charming factor. Things slowly began to get going. On the bridge we could see a plywood castle wall and men and women in old-time costume were waylaying passers-by. It turned out to be Cliffe Independence Day, and we were taken hostage by the Cliffe Bonfire Society, who were raising money, presumably, for their annual bonfire. We heard a local resident react with indignation: "Pay money to walk in the high street?") The entire high street through Cliffe was a carnival, complete with roasting meats and merry-go-round.

We explored down South Street, and found to our consternation that the highly-recommended South Street Fish and Chips was closed for the day. Obviously we would have to return. Fed the boys on sausages from the Bonfire Society brigands and headed up to the Castle.

This was an excellent castle. There's a barbican tower you walk through (indeed a street goes through it), and we could climb the the towers and look out over the town. The spiral stairs were tight twists running up through stone tubes. From the top of the highest tower we looked down, and far below us at the base of the wall we could see a red fox curled up in a tiny circle in the ivy, sleeping away the day in his safe place within the castle precinct.

After we left the castle we walked again down through the mayhem of the Cliffe Independence Day and headed up a tiny street on a public footpath to the Downs. The street became a stairway, ascending steeply thorugh leafy forest and then we emerged out onto, well, not the Downs, but in fact a golf course. Bit of a disappointment, but since it was a public footpath we just played through and kept ascending. Eventually climbed a stile, escaped the fairways and got to roam in sheep meadows. Around us the hills were largely bare of trees, meadow after meadow separated by fences, and on this Bank Holiday Sunday we could other knots of walkers in all directions. There was a long view out over the Ouse valley to other Downs, and south to Newhaven. I wish we could have continued along the ridge to the final hill, Mount Caburn, where there was an ancient hillfort, but we were all feeling run down after driving ourselves hard for many days, so we let ourselves be content with returning by a different path that avoided the golf course. Coming down along the tops of the cliff Kate spotted a kestrel.

We had promised the boys ice cream to get them up the Downs, and so stopped to shop at Waitrose before leaving Lewes. Galen and I waited outside and watched people. After a while we noticed the store had closed (4:00) and the manager was letting people out but not in. Shortly, Kate and Will emerged and said they had no ice cream because at 4:00 there had been an announcement in the store to finish your shopping and check out immediately! The boys were graceful about accepting a delay in the ice cream.

Drove home and put our feet up. Not really. Kate busily made macaroni and cheese for dinner and Morgan unpacked and cleaned up.

Birling Gap and Newhaven Fort

Will has a little aromatherpay anti-nausea wristband we got him at a Holland & Barrett in London. It's got a pungent little ginger-scented sachet in it that he can smell when he feels a bit queasy. ("Where's my sniffer?" he says as he gets on the train.) He wore it on Friday's trip to Brighton, and as we drove to Newhaven, and again today.

First thing this morning we put a load of laundry in the little washer in our low-ceilinged kitchen, a little-front loader that's under the counter near the door. It's remarkably comforting, Kate said, to have the laundry machine in the kitchen. It's right there with you, washing away, instead of far away in some other room. We were thinking we'd hang the clothes out on the laundry line in the cottage's garden before we left. Kate set it for "Eco-wash" and "Energy Saver" and oddly enough almost two hours later we were still watching it go round, our knapsacks all packed, and wondering when we'd get out of here. Yes, we were trapped by a washing machine. Finally it ended,and despite the occasional spit of rain from the grey sky, I hung out the clothes.

First stop, Birling Gap: a place where the chalk cliffs get low enough that you can get down to the beach. It's not necessarily a world-famous place, but our friends Mark and Melissa had said it was special, and we needed a beach day after a week in the city. It only took us about 20 minutes to drive there, turning off the winding, narrow, no-shoulder, "main" road (an "A" road), in a small village called East Dean. You haven't really lived until you've been driving along a narrow trench of a road, a hedge on your left and the white line on your right, and suddenly ahead you see a double-decker bus coming towards you in the other lane.

Just be thankful you have a white line!

At Birling Gap we parked in a yard between two forlorn, lonely buildings by the sea, and a small, three-storey, unlovely steel stair led us out over the beach and down to it. It was spitting rain. Between the ocean before us, and the white cliffs towering over the sea in either direction along the shore, there was the beach: black. We descended the stairs and found the beach underfoot to be nearly 100% flint nodules: rounded and fractured lumps of flint, just as they have fallen out of the eroding cliffs. It was the largest pile of flint I had ever seen. Going closer to the cliffs, I discovered how a white cliff produces a black beach: the flint nodules are embedded in the chalk, like grapefruit-sized bubbles, although only along certain strata. From afar the cliffs look pure white; but near you see the lumps of flint that, after sections of the cliffs collapse and the soft chalk turns quickly to powder, are the only things that remain to make up a beach. They fracture in lovely conchoidal faces, revealing creamy grey with purple, blue and orange tints. It is a flint-knappers dream.

It was a clattery, slip-slidey sort of walk along this beach, and as at Brighton the waves rattled the cobbles as they receded. We found a small cave. We could hardly take a step without finding flints broken into beautiful shapes at our feet, glowing because they were wet with light rain. (Unfortunately a sign at the top clearly said we could take no rocks home with us.) There were slipper shells at every step: hardy little single-sided shells with a partition inside; their small ends fold around like the top of a little hood. There were also unfamiliar spearpoint-shaped, white, oval clamshells--although it didn't seem like they could ever have opened. Our seashore nature guidebook revealed them to be cuttlefish bones.

We found an overhang where some of the rocks were dry, and ate our lunch, unsure whether the cliff was likely to collapse on our heads in 5 minutes or five million years. Later we read the cliffs erode an average of a metre per year, so indeed we were temping fate by sitting under one.

It was apparent the tide was coming in, so we made our way back to the stair, and set out for a cliff-top walk east towards a lighthouse. The tops of the cliffs are not flat, but roll gently up to crests and down to troughs as you proceed along the coast. We ascended out of the Gap on a trail across the green carpet of grass that tops them. There was lots of wind off the sea and no fence.

It was a delightful, rolling, close-to-the-sky kind of walk. I saw swifts flying, and Kate botanized up the wildflowers. Gorse bushes and wildflowers grew everywhere that the treadway was not worn. Rabbit droppings were everywhere: so thick on the ground that there are either monster hordes of rabbits here in the night, or the droppings take years to decay. Perhaps both.

After we got to the lighthouse (the track running on clearly ahead of us down into another gap and then up to Beachy Head) we saw a line of rain coming from the west, covering and concealing first distant Newhaven, then in middle distance the mouth of the Cuckmere River, and finally hitting us as we returned to the car. Horizontal rain. Kate, a lover of Weather, was in her glory.

Bought chips at an outdoor wagon for the boys and took shelter within the public house "The Birling Gap" as they ate them. We shared the room with perhaps thirty other refugee walkers. They were a well-equiped lot, with nordic walking poles, nice rain gear and attractive packs. Oddly, for what was essentially a walk along an immense rolling lawn, most were wearing full leather hiking boots.

Before driving off we sat in the car and used its the manual to get straight about how to use the lights and windshield wipers. Clever car: it has a setting that wipes away the rain faster as you accelerate.

We had read that Newhaven had a local museum, so we drove there, but it was closed. So we headed up to the Newhaven Fort: a WWII fortification in the headland between the town and the open sea. No ruin, this was a fully active military installation sixty years ago, and, unlike fortifications that Canada and the US had on the west coast, had not been allowed to deteriorate. The rain had stopped, and the boys were amped as they crossed a bridge over a moat into this fortress in a hilltop. Just behind the crest of the hill everything had been hollowed out and brick walls built, with rooms dug into the hill on all sides. Ramps led up from a courtyard to the gun emplacements, where the wind was howling! The guns themselves were fixed in place, with all the small bits of the firing mechanisms removed, but a boy could still stand behind one and pretend he was firing it out to sea. Galen and Will explored every tunnel and staircase, went down in the magazines and all over the earthworks. Looking down on Newhaven we had a fine view of the Swinging Bridge opening on the Ouse river; a ship came out and dropped his pilot outside the breakwater. Whitecaps everywhere.

After leaving the Fort, we passed a cricket game in a park on the way back into town. We pulled in and watched for a bit. We saw a guy bowling and a batter by the wickets. We don't really know what was happening. Will was quite interested. We need to find someone who can explain the rules to us.

Last stop was a long, perfect, curving, orange beach we had spotted from the fort: on the east side of the mouth of the river. We drive over to Seaford and walked out from there. This beach was all orange: few flints, lots of rusty rocks. The waves were hitting the beach with such force that tiny pebbles would jump straight up out of the wave.

Returned home to find the laundry very wet. Hung it about the cottage and made dinner. Turned on the storage heaters, which would give us heat 12 hours later.

Down to Sussex

Today we packed up and checked out of the wonderful London youth hostel.We would highly recommend it. Not only is the location great, but even little details were good: the shower, for example, was a real gusher, and always hot.

We walked, at about 9:00, up to St. Paul's and hailed a cab. We got a white cab, covered as many London cabs are with an advertisement: this one for Qatari airlines. But Will was disappointed that we did not get to ride in a black cab.

For our first London cab ride it was pretty unremarkable. Kate and I rode backwards on the jump seats (which have acquired seat belts since I was a kid) and Will and Galen rode in the forward-facing seats. It seemed a reversal from how it was supposed to happen. Sometimes traffic was fast and sometimes slow, but pretty soon we were at Victoria Station and paying £14.

We had two portals before us into Victoria Station (doors is too small a word to describe their size), with literally crowds of people coming and going through them. Choosing the left-hand one, we walked into a vast space roofed with scaffolding around ancient steel beams. People were everywhere: it was far more busy than the proverbial Grand Central Station in New York City. There was a constant flow in all directions the entire time we were there; trains were arriving and departing literally every few minutes, and the public address system almost never stopped making announcements. The floor of the hall is covered in shops and therefore everywhere you look (except straight up) there is advertising. It is the Islamic souk in its Western incarnation: flowers, fish & chips, books, newsagent, and colour, colour, colour. Each shop is its own building within the building. In the middle of the main hall (for we had initially walked into what was merely the east wing of the building) a woman was singing with a sound system (to raise money to fight cancer), yet amid all the action it seemed an almost futile gesture. There was a huge electronic board across the south end of the hall in which all the departing trains in the next half-hour were listed in orange letters, giving destinations and platform

Kate and the boys went to ground in a small corner next to a shop just like all the others ("Nero Coffee") while I joined a long open-air queue (anything not actually within one of the inner buildings feeling therefore outside) for the ticket windows. When I finally reached an agent, he told me through thick glass that seems, no matter how good the microphone, to make it just that much harder to communicate, that there was no 10:21 slow train to Brighton, and suggested the 10:06 express. But I had a schedule that told me there was a 10:21 slow train, and after our nauseating experience with the train from Manchester, I wanted it. He finally confessed that trains for Brighton did leave every 15 minutes. Sure enough, just after ten a train to Brighton at 10:21 was posted on the long electronic board: platform 15.

Now one of the strange things about England is that sometimes unexpectedly you find yourself in a rubbish-bin-free zone, and Victoria station is one of these. Galen had just finished an apple core, and I a rice pudding, and we therefore had some things to throw away. We sent Kate off to find a rubbish bin; she was unsuccessful. Instead of leaving these things on the floor we stubbornly set off for our platform, carrying our bags and holding the rubbish in our free fingers. Now the vast hall gave way to the actual trainsheds, but by the time we had reached the barriers where a man confirms that you have a ticket, we still had seen no rubbish barrel or bin. I asked the guy who checked our tickets, and heroically, after shaking his head, as if embarrassed himself by the lack of an obvious conveneince, and said he'd look after my rubbish himself. A prince among men.

The British have raised to a high art, by the way, the apology for things not going right. It is, interestingly, a component of almost all conversations; a departure point for humour, a necessary part of getting-to-know-you.

The train was very modern (touch-sensitive buttons beside the doors open them so you can board the train) and painted in white and green: "Southern." We found a group of 3 seats facing 3, with a little table; Will and I sat facing forward because we're the one's who get motion sickness; Kate and Galen have iron stomaches and sat facing back. The slow train (it was one) was fun: stopping at Gatwick and East Croydon, and a host of little stops as we came into Brighton. It rarely got going too fast, and when it did it didn't last too long.

And Brighton was a breath of fresh air. Even as we stepped off the train it was cooler, fresher. A strong breeze blowing from the southwest chilled and thrilled us. The station was all blue-and-white painted girders overhead: very airy and spacious, yet small enough that we did not feel lost in a spacedock. We phoned Enterprise; they picked us up; we got our car; we drove down to the seashore in the middle of downtown and parked.

The endless horizon of the sea is compelling after the big city. It was a clear blue day, and there was the sea, catching our eyes down every street until we were standing on the promenade ourselves, having crossed the last crosswalk and walked to the edge of the ramp that leads down to the sand. A few sailboats were offshore, and lots of people were below us on the ochre beach. I had not known this, but Brighton beach is not white, and it is not sand: it is a yellowy-brown colour, which is the colour of the cobbles and pebbles of which it is made. The waves breaking on it make a lovely clattering, rattling sound as millions of pebbles rustle against one another. We walked along it, the boys wading in and screaming at the cold. There were lots of people on the beach, sunbathing, lying about, eating, but we were the only ones actually interacting with the water. The whole promenade is lined with shops and restaurants tucked into the seawall, well above high tide but below the level of the street: fish & chips, oysters, scallops, fresh shell fish, post cards, sassy bumper stickers, clothing, art galleries: everything you might hope to sell or buy in what is England's iconic seaside resort. The hotels and apartment buildings fronting the sea are all creamy white and uniformly four or five stories tall, and the air smells superb. Galen and Will looked for France, but there was nothing out there but endless blue sea. It was sunny and we squinted in that special way you squint at the shore when it's windy, and Kate and I wished we could just hang out all day there, drinking a beer or a coffee, watching people and sampling seafood. At the public washrooms we paid 20p to an attendant, who seemed to be from Russia, and the facilities were very clean.

Drove on down to Newhaven, about 30 minutes along a winding beachy sort of highway. Two lanes, passing through beach community after beach community. Palm-type trees planted here and there, as if to suggest that this was somehow the Mediterranean; crests of beach grass, the shore rising up in the occasional white cliff. Everything built of yellowy brick, the road of course without any shoulder whatsoever. Many pedestrian crossings, but once out of Brighton things moved along rapidly, and soon we were descending into Newhaven and crossing the Ouse, a remarkably small river, the Swinging Bridge no longer than 20 metres perhaps, and wondering how the ferry from Dieppe could get in here. Through two roundabouts and we seemed to be skirting a vast green area filled with sea grass; suddenly Foxhole Farm was on our left, and we were driving up a small lane with the wind beating at our backs-- and we were here. Walls made of flint stones cemented together in mortar. Low ceilings.

We really liked our space age car, a black Renault Megane. It is narrow, and does three great tricks. Its key is a black plastic card, about the size of a playing card, with a few recessed buttons on it. You don't actually have to insert this key into the slot in the dash board in order to push the "Start/stop" button; it just has to be in the car. If you walk away from the car with the key in your pocket, it will beep at you, like "Hey you forgot to lock me!" When you reverse, and you're backing into a parking space with a wall or curb behind you, a beeping sound begins at perhaps a metre from the wall, and increases in frequency as you approach it, going to a solid tone when you're about 15 cm away. It'sradar or something. When you lock it, the side mirrors fold flat against the car. We feel cool in it.

Delighted to be here, we only did one more thing: we went and shopped at the giant Sainsbury's "superstore" (only two roundabouts away). Inside, we could have been in any vast supermarket in North America--except that the food packaging was all different. Which is surprisingly exciting: as if when we're eating raisin bran we're eating something we've never had before, because it;s called Sultana Bran. Dates from Tunisia; peaches from South Africa; cheddar cheese from ... Canada? Good lord. Bought all we might need, came home, ate and went to bed.