Europe Part 3: Literary Tour of English towns

Europe Part 3: Literary Tour of English Towns.
AKA: Bath for Austen, Stratord-upon-Avon for Shakespeare, and Canterbury for Chaucer.

Day 8-July 5. We have rented a car and are driving down to Bath this morning. Mike is very nervous about this! It is weird to be driving on the left and sitting on the right. The traffic in London is terrible and it took nearly an hour just to get out of the city. Now, we are driving through the countryside, which is much better and some very pretty rolling hills along the way...

Bath is a great little city. We arrived around 12:30, checked into our hotel and found a place to park. Then, Mike and Jack went off to a leisurely pizza lunch while I spent an hour at the Jane Austen Centre.

 I know it makes me a nerd, but it is thrilling to see the streets, pump rooms, and churches of her novels and to know I’m walking the same places she would have! So cool. Then we spent another hour touring the Roman Baths, which far exceeded expectations. This is a world heritage site, and very well done with audio guides and interesting exhibits. It’s pretty impressive that this hot springs produces a 1,000,000 liters of water every day, and much of the 2,000 year old plumbing still works. They had amazingly complex systems to pipe in water, heat different areas to different temperatures, etc..

 Then, we went through Bath Abbey, sat in the square while Jack had some honeycomb ice cream (yummy! Why don’t we have this flavor in the US?) and listened to a variety of street musicians, a soprano singing opera first followed by a guy with a guitar singing contemporary hits and doing it well, before taking a walk around the river and town. We ended the day with a good fish and chips British dinner at the Scallop Shell before returning to the hotel.

Day 9-July 6. We arrived in Stratford upon Avon at about 10:00am, so we had most of a day to explore. It’s a pretty small town, with not much to do except learn about Shakespeare. We toured the house he was born in, his house, and his daughter Susanna’s house, as well as going to Holy Trinity Church where he’s buried. The grave is in a prominent place inside the church, but otherwise unremarkable as far as ornamentation. It was interesting for me, but less so to Mike and Jackson.

 In addition, we wandered through a few shops and Jackson bought himself a geode crystal. After dinner (Terrible, unfortunately!), Mike and Jack went off to do some laundry and hang out at the hotel while I went by myself to the Royal Shakespeare Company to see Macbeth. I bought the ticket just this morning. It was a restricted view ticket in a back corner of the theater but all they had. I tried to get tickets 6 weeks ago online and it was sold out, so I’ll take what I can get. The production was interesting with modern costumes and props but all Shakespearean language. I would have preferred traditional costumes perhaps, but the actors were really good. You could tell they really understood the words and could put the right inflection and emotions to them, rather than just having memorized them, which you sometimes get with Shakespeare. I enjoyed it very much.

Day 10-July 7. Today we drove from Stratford to Canterbury, with a stop at Leeds Castle. Leeds Castle is one of the largest in Europe. It was a favorite. The grounds are extensive and beautifully gardened, with geese, ducks, and swans adding to the fun. 

They have a great maze built out of hedges, and we all know how much Jackson likes mazes. 

They also had a falconry exhibit with owls and falcons we could watch in a demonstration. And, they had a playground, which Jack liked. We had lunch and explored outside, then went inside. 

The Castle is very large, and complete with a moat surrounding it. It’s has been a royal seat as well as a private home to Lady Braille and her family for many years. It was fun to see all the furnishings and the different time periods represented. The , we drove on to Canterbury. We arrived fairly late in the afternoon, but had time to walk around the old town and then have some dinner (pizza to Jack’s delight).

Day 11-July 8. In Canterbury,the downtown area is old, and the streets are narrow. We walked around a lot, then visited the Roman Museum to learn about an ancient invasion, the town they built on the site, and to view an excavated town house ruins they discovered below the city. It was an interesting, if small, stop. Then we visited the Canterbury Cathedral, the oldest church in England, and still the Head of the Church of England to this day. They were just finishing the service, so we got to hear their choir sing as well, which was a remarkable bonus. The church holds the remains of several famous kings, Edward the Black Prince, and also Thomas Beckett, famously murdered in the Cathedral at the order of Henry VIII. It’s a beautiful old church with many amazing stone sculptures and stained glass windows. Part of the outside and inside were scaffolded for repairs, but I suppose that’s to be expected with buildings that are 1000 years or older in places. Again, fascinating to see all the layers of history, with graves from the 1300s next to a modern art installation, next to a memorial honoring soldiers who fought in WWI or II, next to a Baptismal font dating from the 1000s AD. 

Then, we had a traditional Roast Sunday lunch at our hotel, complete with beef, roasted potatoes and root vegetables, and even Yorkshire pudding (which I don’t get the big deal about, by the by; it's okay but not exciting). After lunch, we walked out to see the ruins of St. Augustine’s, a large Abbey and monastery that was closed in 1500s when Henry VIII forced all Catholic monasteries to close and took possession as the head of the new Church of England. The site has also uncovered older and additional layers of Norman construction, and the graves of several early Anglo-Saxon kings and a early archbishops. 

After this, we had a light dinner, after our big lunch, and headed back to the hotel. Tomorrow we are heading back to London to return the rental car and catch the train to Paris. Jackson has been impatiently waiting to get to France; he’s excited because they speak another language and mostly because he has a classmate who’s from France and has therefore talked about it to him at school.