A trip down (Amanda’s) memory lane

My love for this country probably started about 1992.  Nearly 20 years before Adam & I moved over.

Having grown up a bit of a military brat, I was very used to moving every 3 to 4 years.  So when my parents told me that we were moving to Plymouth, England from North Carolina they might as well have told me that we were moving just two  hours away or to the moon, I had no concept of how far away England was.  None the less, off we went.  I find it funny the other things I remember.  I can very clearly remember the church we attended, the floorplan of our house, the grocery store down the road that Mother & I would walk to every couple of days – it used to be a Somerfields, but the whole chain has been taken over by CoOp in the last 20 years.  My parents claim that we would walk to the local fish & chip shop nearly every Friday night for dinner.  I have absolutely no memory of this.  I don’t think it actually happened.

In our two years in Plymouth, we also made some great family friends.  When Mother & Daddy where here in November, the Rees’ came to Bristol to visit and were also kind enough to invite  Adam & I to their home in Plymouth to see if I remembered the old neighborhood.  So a couple months later we took them up on the offer.

Our first stop was my old house in Plymstock.  It looks exactly how I remember.  A little bit of ivy down the side of the house. Peachy pink stucco on every duplex down the street – this is military housing at its finest!

Adam & Mr. Rees made me get alot closer to the front of the house than I’d wanted --- hope the current tenants didn’t think we were doing recon work!

We also had a garage down the road a bit.  The car we had was too large for the garage, so it had to pull up alongside the end.

We had a tire swing just around the corner from the house.  I remember it being the furthest that Jonathan & I were allowed to go from the house by ourselves.  The swing apparently has disappeared over the years, but the tie to the tree branch was still there!

After leaving the old neighborhood, we headed up to our old church.  Besides the fresh coat of (rather bright blue) paint, it was just how I’d remembered it.

Just around the corner from the church is a newsagents.  Every Sunday after church, Daddy would give me £2 and I could go buy a Sunday Times paper.  One Sunday I went in and they had sold out of papers.  I was so distraught that I couldn’t buy one and started crying in the shop.  Dad was nearby and assured me (and the shop owner) that everything was okay.  Fast forward a couple of months and again the shop ran out of papers, but as I walked in the shop owner lit up as he pulled a specially saved copy from behind the cash register counter.  I didn’t go in this weekend to see if he might have saved one for me again.  I’m going to guess after 20 years that they may have moved on some.

Besides being the home of the Spencer’s for two year, Plymouth is known by Americans for being the place where the pilgrims left from.  We went down to the Barbican area of Plymouth to the Mayflower steps.  The actual steps the pilgrims left from no longer exist. A granite block bearing the ship’s name marks the approximate site, while a tablet commemorating the voyage was erected alongside in 1891. The portico was added in 1934. Taking a couple of steps through leads to a mini-balcony, built in 2000, which has views out towards the sea.

Despite being extremely cold that day, the sun decided to peek out for a few minutes just as we walked through the Barbican moorings.

Yes, that is a picture with the sun out.  Trust me.

From there we headed over to the Hoe.  In the late 1500’s, the English and the Spanish were having a little disagreement over (as most conflicts in Europe at that time) religion, power and money...wait, maybe that’s the source of most conflicts everywhere.  I digress.  Sir Francis Drake was vice admiral in command of the English fleet when it overcame the Spanish Armada (the Spanish fleet) that was attempting to invade England in 1588. The most famous (but probably completely untrue) anecdote about Drake relates that, prior to the battle, he was playing a game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe. On being warned of the approach of the Spanish fleet, Drake is said to have remarked that there was plenty of time to finish the game and still beat the Spaniards. Winds and currents caused some delay in the launching of the English fleet as the Spanish drew nearer, perhaps prompting a popular myth of Drake's cavalier attitude to the Spanish threat.  No matter the validly of the story, the Hoe is still a beautiful open green space overlooking the limestone cliffs and the open sea.

A prominent landmark on the Hoe is Smeaton's Tower. This is the upper portion of John Smeaton's Eddystone Lighthouse, which was originally built on the Eddystone Rocks (about 9 miles out into the sea) in 1759. It was dismantled in 1877 and moved, stone by stone, to the Hoe where it was re-erected.  It no longer serves a purpose as a lighthouse for navigational purposes, but is quite iconic within the city.

As the evening progressed, Adam and Mr. Rees worked to solve all the world problems as they discussed their way through politics, religion, economics, and even pop culture.  They soon discovered that they both have a love for whiskey.  So they then decided to take a trip through (the drinks of) Scotland together.

Adam enjoyed his tour.

The Rees’ have a beautiful home.  This is the view outside their guest bedroom.

I could wake up to that every morning!

In honor of their American guest, they even found the flags from the 4^th of July party that Mother & Daddy threw when we lived here and put them on display.

We were also kept super warm by the lovely coal burning fireplace.

Sunday morning we visited Dartmoor National Park with it’s Tors (hills topped with an outcropping of rock), bogs, and leats (an artificial aqueduct dug into the ground to supply water to neighboring towns).  The very, very, very narrow road with just enough moss to hide the hard stone walls on either edge (but not enough to cushion you should your car get closer to the wall than you thought it was)!

It was actually so cold that day that water was freezing as it splashed out of the rivers.

One more stop on the memory train.  At 11 & 12, I attended Hooe (pronounce ‘who’) Primary School in year 6 and 7 (5^th & 6^th grade).  We had a quick walk by the school...it’s smaller than I remembered.

Thank you to the Rees’ for a wonderful weekend and allowing me to show Adam where I first fell in love with this country!

Singin' in the Rain

Every once in a while Amanda and I like to take a weekend away from our home in Bristol and explore the bustling metropolis of London. In the almost two years that we have been living in the UK we’ve made a trip into London nearly a dozen times and still have tourist sites left to see.

As has happened with many of our other trips to London, Amanda needed to meet clients in the City, so she left Bristol on the 6:30am train from Bristol Parkway to London Paddington Station.  I dropped her off at the station then headed home to take care of the packing and deliver Daisy and Ginger to their aunties Sue & Kim for the weekend. I caught the afternoon train into London and we met up at the hotel after she was finished with work.

One of the best things about London is the quantity and quality of its theatres. As an added benefit you can purchase discounted tickets the on the day of a show provided of course that seats are available. During Amanda’s lunch break on Friday she stopped by the discount desk and picked up two tickets to Singin’ in the Rain.  Amazingly, Amanda admitted as we were sitting down that she had never seen the Gene Kelly, Donald O’Conner and Debbie Reynolds classic much less a theatrical version. Will wonders never cease?  Anyway, the show itself was pretty good and even included a deluge of water during the title song which pretty well drenched the first few rows. (We were thankfully in row 10, so just outside the splash zone.)

On Saturday, we decided it was time to tour Westminster Abbey.  We arrived shortly after the Abbey opened, bought our tickets and walked up to the information desk to receive our audio guide. Like many other tourist attractions across the UK they provide audio guides in about eight different languages and while most of the time all we have to do is open our mouths to receive the proper guide however this time we didn’t even make it that far before the volunteer manning the station pegged us for American’s. After having lived here for just over 17 months I had begun to feel relatively confident that I no longer looked like an American yet somehow this volunteer new immediately that we were not from around here. When we asked him how he knew he just laughed and said it was easy, you are smiling. It’s now been a few weeks since that encounter and I’m still not sure if I should look at his observation as complement or not.

The audio guide itself was really informative and voiced by the supremely talented Jeremy Irons, truly one of the great acting and vocal talents of our time. It takes about an hour and a half to make your way through the audio guide although you don’t really notice the time thanks to the mass of information streaming your way courtesy of the dulcet tones provided by Mr. Irons. Of the many interesting facts I learned along the way perhaps the most fascinating was the positioning of Henry VIII’s daughters. Elizabeth and Mary Tudor are both entombed in the same monument although Mary was placed below her younger sister. In addition to monuments dedicated to numerous royals there are also copious monuments devoted to some of the great English minds like Chaucer, Churchill, Darwin, Dickens, Joule, Kelvin, Longfellow, Newton, Pope, Scott, Shakespeare and Watt to name but a few. It truly is a staggering place to visit and I am thrilled we got the chance to finally check this box off our list.

Once we finished up at Westminster Abbey it was on to the British Library. In addition to being the permanent home for one of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta the Treasures of the British Library exhibit also contains an original copy of the Guttenberg Bible, one of the first printed copies of Aesop’s Fables, Henry VIII’s prayer log, the Beowulf Manuscript, Shakespeare’s First Folio, numerous original compositions from famous musicians including Mendelssohn, Mozart and Beethoven, as well as countless other religious texts and scientific documents. Two of my personal favorites from the exhibit were some original notes and sketches by Leonardo da Vinci and a Portolan Chart of the Mediterranean & European Coast from 1339. Like so many of the other places we’ve visited over here you really could spend all day wondering through the different exhibits and galleries.

On our way from Westminster to the Library, it started sprinkling...then drizzle...then the downpour started.  Thank goodness we'd seen Singin' in the Rain the night before so we were prepared!

Sunday morning we decided to attend a choral service at St Paul’s Cathedral. Amanda really loves musical services like evensong so whenever we get an opportunity to see a choral service in a historic setting like St Paul’s we try to visit. Thankfully the hotel we stayed at is right on the square across from St Paul’s so it made for a nice short walk and allowed us to sleep in a bit after our long day. The choir sang beautifully as one would expect and the setting is one our favorites in London. It made for a really nice cap to another enjoyable weekend in London.