Foreign Life

The name of our sprawling detached hotel
development is lit up in the hours of darkness,

I feel like we moved to a foreign land and that we are camping in a nice hotel.

We lived on a secluded little acre for almost seventeen years, longer than either of us had lived any other one place. The Sonoran Desert, the Catalina Foothills, and Finger Rock wash became the home that we identified with and San Simeon reflected our identity for friends and family. The house itself with its sunken living room and huge window looking at Finger Rock, its walled backyard with a tower that viewed mountains in all directions, secluded swimming pool, and goldfish pond, its long driveway, eucalyptus trees, sixty saguaro cacti and similar number of palo verde trees, private gully and paths, its raised beds, shade covered garden protected from javalina, rabbit and serpent are all unique, unlike any other property, and all remodeled and fashioned with our own hands. Our two furry children are buried there. It's an acre like no other.

We knew our few neighbors, their properties similarly sprinkled an acre at a time by the Finger Rock wash. From our house, we could hardly see any of theirs. Standing at the south point of our own acre, even our own house was not visible. Of the ten neighbors on San Simeon, only two had lived there longer than we carpetbaggers from Puget Sound. Many were retired, or retired over the time we lived there — like us. I don't think any of us play golf and there are no snowbirds. It's a neighborhood established some fifty years ago. Families had been raised there, but over our years only one home had children.

We had lived in a very unique place so, of course, any other place would be different by definition. We moved only 25 miles away, but it is a completely different world; a foreign country. True, our new home is definitely within the Sonoran Desert and is situated about the same elevation as San Simeon, Dove Mountain folk speak the same languages as those in the Foothills, and the Tortolita Mountains are similarly spectacular with familiar pale Catalina granite and caliche, views, and majestic saguaro cacti, palo verde, mesquite, acacia, ironwood, barrel cacti, cholla, prickly pear opuntia, and desert wildflowers. But Dove Mountain is also very different.

Typical street scene in Dove Mountain: a line of garages with attached living quarters.

Everywhere it's a new development with many unoccupied houses and new areas under construction. Small lots. Huge houses packed next to each other in strips separated by common areas. Intentional builder and covenant-restricted uniformity in appearance, whether colors, fixtures, layouts and landscaping. In our development, Blue Agave II, every house number is uniform and advertises the builder whose name I will not mention. (Say, whose house is this anyway?) Properties look like lines of garages with attached dwellings. Boundary walls (two types: sloped rip-rap over concrete block base and thin red-brown concrete blocks). Flimsy iron gates and fencing. Backyards are left stripped down to the hard soil, barren, dusty, muddy when it rains, and generously sprinkled with half-buried construction debris.

We have lots of neighbors. It's been twenty-three years since I made my home in a small lot neighborhood. All kinds of people: lots of retired couples both permanent and snow birds, young families with kids, professional and military retired. Some folk have dark skin but most with white. Children accompanied by a parent walk past our house to the corner where school buses promptly arrive.

But all folk have something in common: enough money to buy a large, expensive and newly built house, able to spend even more money to finish fixturing it so it's livable, and — in about one in four properties — spend another hundred thousand having a large hole dug in their small backyard to accommodate a swimming pool, ramada and outdoor kitchen.

Our detached hotel on Chaparral Sage will become our home. Like San Simeon, the desert setting is gorgeous and the views stunning. We have discovered walks in the Tortolita Preserve that we can take without having to get inside a car and drive somewhere. And, to be honest, it's interesting to walk the manicured lines of garages with attached living spaces. But right now, I still have feelings like we are camping in a large hotel complex

Tortolita Preserve. A quiet, private walk past a hole in the barbed wire perimeter.
That's Baboquivari in the middle distance just to the left of the solitary saguaro.

These feelings will be forgotten as Dove Mountain becomes all too familiar and the thrill of something foreign fades.

Cotswolds, the Movie

The Cotswolds in a hilly, bucolic area about eighty miles west of London. The wool trade of the 13th and 14th Centuries made the sheep owners of the Cotswolds particularly wealthy. It is the second largest designated "Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty" in England (after the Lakes District) and a popular tourist, vacation, and retirement destination.

Debates surround the origin of the name: whether "sheep hills" (wold meaning hills); or "Cod's hills" (Cod being a personal name).

My preferred version is "Cuda hills", a derivation from Brittonic Cuda, a Mother Goddess worshiped by local Celts in pre-Anglo-Saxon, and probably pre-Roman times.

Medieval wealth is responsible for the many beautiful churches and abbeys in the area, and Nature Herself is the origin of the local yellow limestone which turns honey golden with age and has been extensively used as building material in the Cotswolds.

Thanks to good friends who retired in the area, we elected to stay in Cirencester for three nights to give us plenty of time to visit. We were taken to Malmesbury Abbey (hence the recorded church choir) and Tetbury (where Prince Charlie has a shop) on a Sunday.

The following day, after our Boo Laundrette experience, Shari and I ventured to Stow-on-the-Wold with its two famous old ewe trees that frame the side entrance to St. Edward's Church.

Introducing Cotswolds, the Movie:

York, the Movie

Previously blogged in York, now you can vicariously live the experience of York, the movie, without having to read text -- except for the occasional title.

Life is good. So is York.

Tintern Abbey, the Video

If one picture is worth a thousand words, then what about 29.97 pictures a second for three and a half minutes?

London Fog

Both Shari and I are running low on toothpaste. We each started with a fresh 1.7 ounce tube and we know how to squeeze it out. Time to go home.

London is the opposite of Tucson in many ways — the most obvious being weather, sheer size, congestion, public transportation, a river that flows year-round, and art and buildings dating back centuries. This world city is a great place to complete our one-month blitz of Britain. (Maybe "blitz" isn't the best choice of words.)

The curiously named British Museum.

London. The capital of a former empire where the sun never set. (The joke goes, because God didn't trust them in the dark.) Today you can hear almost any language spoken on the streets and Tube trains. Not just tourists, either. Our hotel is almost entirely staffed by Latvians. There was an African wedding reception in its pub dining room last night. We are located in a Polish neighborhood.  (There's a Polish-Chinese restaurant across the street.) Our server at breakfast is a Gujerati from Kenya.

The British Museum reflects that erstwhile empire. Bits and pieces collected, some say stolen, from all over the world. The Parthenon marbles are the most controversial. Having visited Athens, the Parthenon, and the Acropolis Museum, it is sad to see the marbles out of context. Mind you, the display in London is spacious, but juxtaposed with spectacular relics from Assyria, Egypt, Rome, Africa, China, India, Anatolia, Levant, Japan, the European Continent, it's a bit too much. It's not really a "British" museum.

By comparison, the Tate Britain gallery does focus on British art. There is more than enough to overwhelm. Beautiful, marvellous paintings they are. No wonder Shari wanted to see the Tate again. Ninteen years after her previous visit, there was no disappointment. It was tough to keep from taking photos even though the Tate website has accurate images readily downloadable.

Walking the Thames riverside was a little disappointing. The weather didn't help, but that's the climate here in autumn. Drab industrial piers along the river didn't help, but it is a working river. Homeless sleeping on benches and in camps under bridges didn't help, but London is a big city. Crowds of tourists didn't help, but London deservedly is a prime tourist destination. Odd, even bizarre shaped skyscapers and a ferris wheel dotting the skyline didn't help my appreciation, but that's only my lack of good taste.

What was a little frustrating was the number of buildings shrouded in scaffolding. They included MI5 and almost all of Westminister. Only the clock of poor Big Ben was visible peeking above the scaffolding.

So much for my goal of panoramic shots of The Thames and London. I did get some shots of police protection at No. 10 Downing St., but I wish I had the video camera on record to capture one tourist's reaction to being told there was a crowd there because it was No. 10 Downing. "What's that?" was the reaction.

"That's where the Prime Minister lives," was the explanation.

Stonehenge, Avebury, and St. James

To Yogi Berra is attributed the quote, "Nobody goes there any more. It's too crowded." Actually, it's an old line, but Berra was fond of it.

Our telephoto view of Stonehenge.

If you advance book for Stonehenge (and its website insists it is necessary), the fee to walk around (but not in) Stonehenge is £19. If you take a chance and just show up, it's €21.10. Parking is £5, refundable on the way out if you bought a ticket.

So some fifty dollars for the two of us buys an experience of one of the world's most famous historic sites, a Neolithic stone circle we believe to have been sacred. The modern experience? Park, pay, pay, shuttle bus ride, walk around the outside the circle with a crowd (a bit like the Kaaba). You can get no closer than about 100 feet, and mostly the permitted approach is about 400 feet distant.

Neolithic circles at Avebury.

I understand the need to control hordes of tourists, and I understand the need for the English Heritage Trust to collect money to pay for the cost of preserving not only Stonehenge, but some 400 other buildings, monuments, and sites.

I also understand tourist burn-out. Some tourist sites in Britain are popular and very crowded. Fine. But add one too many expensive entrance fees, one too many pay-and-display parking fees, and tourist burn-out. It hit us at Stonehenge.

It's late September. No one bothered to collect money at the humongous parking lot which was mostly empty when we arrived at opening time, but half-full when we left a couple of hours later. We discovered it was possible to walk the one and a half mile shuttle bus road to the site for free. That's what we did, and the heavens approved our decision. The rain and clouds cleared, resuming only as we drove away. We had a delightful walk through the open countryside.

English Heritage Trust has done a thorough job of keeping freebie lookers at a distance. Fences and two lime green vested young men at the gate kept folks without tickets away. It takes a telephoto lens to see the parade of people walking around a respectful distance from the stone circle.

Upon our return to the large visitor center, we wandered around the recreated examples of Neolithic huts. Inside one hut, three volunteers chatted and showed off recreated Neolithic pottery, thatch, flint tools, and horns. They demonstrated how they ground corn. They were retired men who just did it for the fun. One candidly admitted they would never work there as employees. Apparently, it either wasn't fun or employees weren't well treated. We said we were off to Avebury next. He smiled and approved.

It rained on the 23 mile drive to Avesbury, then cleared up just as we pulled into its English Heritage Trust parking lot. Pay and display. £7. The English woman ahead of us complained. She said she would not tell her husband or he would insist on immediately leaving.

St. James church, Avebury.

Everything else about Avesbury is on the plus side. A World Heritage site that you can touch and feel. Scattered visitors. No entrance fee. Nice cafeteria. (Great sausage rolls and soup of the day.) Freedom to roam around the paddocks littered with sheep doo-doo.

And the village itself, built into one side of the giant Neolithic circle, is also precious. Some thatched roof houses. And St. James church.

It seems that almost every village has an old church. Some, like Avebury, have portions that date back to Norman times. A few, like Avebury, have Saxon portions. It's an amazing experience to wander inside such a church.

Consider this detail from a website:  "Avebury manage[d] to keep its rood screen after Elizabeth I ordered all such screens to be destroyed in 1561[.] Apparently the parishioners disassembled the screen and carefully hid the timbers behind a false wall of lath and plaster against the east wall of the nave. [T]he screen timbers remained hidden until they were found by accident in 1810."

The Avebury rood screen. (from web)

As we left Avesbury, it began raining again. The gods had shined upon us at Stonehenge and at Avesbury.

Inclement Weather

If a forecast like this were to appear for the Sonoran Desert, it would portend floods of Biblical proportions. 90% and 100% chance of rain? All day? For days on end? At monsoon rates, that could be inches per hour.

But in the British Isles, it's only autumn. It's the drizzle and just plain overcast with occasional squalls and sunbreaks that keep everything green. It's the weather where hourly forecasts have little meaning.

View from King Arthur's Cafe.

Yesterday was forecasted to be a 90% rain all day. We got sunbreaks enough to enjoy a light lunch at King Arthur's Cafe, near King Arthur's Car Park and King Arthur's Arms Inn, all in the crowded village that lives off of the almost one-quarter of a million annual visitors to Tintagel Castle.

We got a window seat where we could enjoy Brits with their pet dogs, young families, tatooed and pierced Gothic folks, Arthurian enthusiasts, and German, French and US tourists.

Sunbreaks continued as we visited the English Heritage site, craggy Tintagel Castle ruins on the rugged north Cornwall coast.

Then as the rain set in, it was time to leave.

The ascent, footbridge visible in back.

Visitors to the site, and there were plenty on a rainy Sunday, wore an assortment of different dress. Some in shorts and T-shirts, others in hooded rain parkas.

As the squall set in, people continued filing down the steep path, then up to the footbridge leading to the shale-rocky promintory with its ruined medieval fortifications associated with Arthurian lore.

One woman climbing the narrow steep path that clung to the cliffside (only occasional guard rails) wore Wellington boots. Another flip-flops. Both were headed in, not out.

The footbridge (English Heritage website)

Anatomy of Travel: Planning, Endurance & Serendipity

Beryl Country House, Wells. Our room is the open
window on the top right, where I am writing.

We were having lunch in Stow-on-the-Wold. In a pub, of course. The Bell with its photos of Prince Charles and the queen mum pulling beers at that very same pub. A party of two couples took the table next to ours. We exchanged conversations of where we were from. Even English are tourists in the Cotswolds. The woman talking with us was from Lincoln. She ran a hotel there. She asked where Shari and I had been and we listed places, including York.

"Not Lincoln?" she asked. "Lincoln Cathedral is much larger and more wonderful than York. You should have seen Lincoln," she added with some competitive pride and just a hint of disdain.

Wells Cathedral

Lincoln I had heard of. But how can one see everything? We only have one month. One month! Most vacations are one week. Even if you are a starving student with a backpack bumming around for a summer, or comfortably retired and reasonably healthy making traveling your second career, or living and/or working locally and traveling around each weekend, you still can't see everything in a place like Britain — or Ireland or any other country in Europe, or in the world for that matter.

Yesterday afternoon after visiting Glastonbury and Wells, we were sitting in one of the Victorian appointed lounges of the Beryl Country House (1838, but mercifully renovated and upgraded since). A young couple comes in to serve themselves a drink from the honour bar. We exchanged conversations of where we were from. They were from London. When we described how we had been to Wales, the woman commented, "We've never been to Wales."

Glastonbury Abbey. Arthur's grave is a plaque in the middle of the lawn.

What you end up seeing is limited by what little you know about what to see, endurance, and serendipity.

We had planned to stay on Anglesey Island last night. That is northwest Wales. That is knowing a little of w hat you want to see. Then three days ago we realized that a five and a half hour drive from Anglesey to Cornwall made no sense. That's endurance or, more accurately, reality. Hence we decided to stay at the Beryl Country House. (Actually, we booked another place, then the next morning got an email that they really had no room and had booked us at the Beryl instead. That's serendipity,  but another story.)

We booked three nights in Carmarthen planning to use it as a base for Wales. Cardiff is a must see place in Wales, said Shari's distant Welsh cousin. That's planning. It was one too many cities, churches, castles, narrow streets, and pay-and-display parking lots. That's endurance, or the lack of it. We simply drove past and headed to Somerset in England. That, as it turned out, was serendipity.

Our plan was to see Glastonbury, its Celtic Tor hill, and its ruined abbey, the mythical site of all things King Arthur, and the darling of the New Age set — of which we are sympathetic. The abbey was among the first in Britain and, before Henry VIII pilfered it, was Britain's wealthiest.

Inside Wells Cathedral.

What happened was we drove through Wells first to get our room at the Beryl. We noticed an impressive Gothic church towering over the small town. We marveled at the Beryl House, squashed our feelings of not being worthy, then headed for the first place we could get some lunch. A pub, of course. Our car being parked, we walked the two blocks to that gothic church and realized it and Wells itself were stunning treasures.

But our plan was Glastonbury. We decided to drive the eight miles, see the sights, and maybe have a closer look at Wells afterwards if we had the time and energy.

To be honest, Glastonbury didn't impress us that much. What's left of Glastonbury Abbey is nothing compared to what we had seen and experienced at Tintern Abbey in Wales near the English border. King Arthur's tomb isn't really a sight, just a plaque and a concept. We skipped the Neolithic and now neo-pagan Chalice Well. We drove past the Tor twice looking for its play-and-display parking lot, but noticed the stream of tourists climbing up the trail to get to the top of the rather steep and tall hill.

Back to Wells.

Inside Wells Cathedral.

Again to be honest, I had no idea there was a place in England named Wells. The Wells with which I am familiar with is on the Great Basin Highway where it intersects I-80 in northern Nevada. Shari and I often fueled our cars in Wells during our three-day, 24-hour driving time, 1600 mile migrations between Seattle and Tucson. It's impossible to imagine anything more radically different than Wells in Nevada and Wells in Somerset.

Probably because it was not connected to any abbey, the Wells Cathedral, dedicated to St. Andrew the Apostle, survived Henry VIII's destructive Dissolution of the Monasteries relatively intact. It still has statues in niches on the outside walls. Inside, it is a marvel of light and simple, open shapes.

Our delight with Wells was enhanced by the wedding that had to conclude before we were allowed inside. Imagine cathedral bells ringing as the wedding party emerges from the main entrance, sunshine on them, the cathedral front, and the large expanse of green lawn dotted with picknicking couples, children, and visitors. Imagine medieval bishop's quarters, schools, row houses, and narrow shopping streets and squares crowded with Saturday market stalls.

Rhys ap Thomas, the Tudors, and Connections

Pembroke Castle where Henry Tudor was born.

Whoever ill-affected to the state, shall dare to land in those parts of Wales where I have any employment under your majesty, must resolve with himself to make his entrance and irruption over my belly.

In a nutshell, Rhys ap Thomas promised Richard III that if anyone landed in Wales to attack him, it would have to be over his body. The Wars of the Roses (1455-1487) were still going on. The Welsh nobleman Rhys had confirmed his support for King Richard and, in exchange, he was rewarded with money and the job of defending SW Wales.

Henry Tudor was Richard's rival and enemy. He had fled to France, secured help from the French king, and returned as an invader with a small force of French and Scottish soldiers. They landed in Southwest Wales at Mill Bay, Pembrokeshire.

Mullock Bridge in the countryside of
southwest Wales near Pembroke and the bay where
Henry Tudor's invasion force landed from France.

It was Rhys' job to attack the invaders, but he changed sides and joined Henry instead.

Promises were rather serious matters back in those days, as was the fear of eternal damnation for breaking them. As one story goes, a clever priest offered a solution which Rhys adopted. He stood or sat under a bridge near Mill Bay, Mullock Bridge, as Henry Tudor (likely, his advance guard) rode over the bridge. His promise was fullfilled to the letter, if not the principle.

Rhys, then others, joined Henry and defeated Richard's army at the Battle of Bosworth Field (1485). Richard was killed - the last English monarch to die in battle. Some thirty years of dynastic warfare were decisively ended. Henry become Henry VII, the first Tudor king and the father of the better known Henry VIII and the grandfather of Elizabeth I.

The tomb of Siir Rhys ap Thomas in St. Peter's Church,
Carmanthen. Henry VII knighted and
rewarded Rhys with Carew Castle, and Rhys is
a bit of a hero in these parts.

Had Rhys not switched sides, Shakespeare would not have written Richard the Third, glorifying the Tudors for the sake of Elizabeth I and demeaning Richard. "A horse. A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" The English Reformation may never have happened, and a Catholic regime may have surpressed the remarkable creativity that we know today as the Elizabethan period.

Here's the interesting rub. Rhys is credited, according to the eyewitness who wrote a poem about the feat, of being the man who killed Richard III on the battlefield of Bosworth.

The name Rhys and its variants Rees, Reese, Ris, Rice, and Reece are common enough in Wales that there is no assurance Rhys ap ("son of") Thomas is Shari's blood ancestor. Shari's mother's maiden name is Rees and her ancestors came from Felindre in Wales, north of Carmarthen. But certainly, there is no harm in pondering and basking in the possibility.

History Becomes Alive

Reading history interests me, but actually being and seeing gives a much greater depth of color and experience.

Some times it is little things that bring history to life, like the small museum in Cirencester, the Corinium Museum. Cirencester in the beautiful Cotswolds was Corinium in the Roman days — over three centuries of Roman days. It was a provincial capital. The well laid out museum features Roman artifacts and large floor mosaics unearthed locally, as well as Saxon and medieval finds and remains. But what most intrigued me under the subject of "History Becomes Alive" was a museum wall with information about the English Civil War (1642-1651).

Off and on several times, I have read about the cavaliers versus the roundheads; the Royalists versus the Parlimentarians. Cromwell and an austere form of religion win and become dictators. The display on the wall in Corinium Museum shows how the people suffered from both sides. Leave aside the direct horrors of warfare and sieges. Think about damage to farms and property, theft to feed the armies, and forced billeting of soldiers. One young man kept a diary in which he recorded the hardships. It was quoted and printed on that wall.

That Civil War also left its mark on Dunnottar Castle. It was blockaded and besieged by Cromwell for months in his effort to take the Scottish crown jewels (the Honors) and destroy them.

Malmesbury Abbey,. What the Tudors left standing
still serves as a magnifiscent church

Then there is Henry VIII, his need for money, heirs and gratification, and Elizabeth I, and her need to surpress Catholic opposition. In the process, monasteries and abbeys were confiscated, sold off, and torn down, and churches stripped and defaced. The obvious scars today are all the many exterior wall naves on the many remaining cathedrals and churches in England. The statues are missing. Plaques on some historic houses describe how some of their stones were pilfered from the demolished monasteries.

We visited Culloden battlefield (1745). Today it is an open, grassy field with three red flags marking the English army positions and three blue flags marking where the Scottish Jacobites stood. Some two thousand mostly Scottish clansmen died or were wounded in that final decisive defeat of Scottish independence. For what? A mixture of religion, clan loyalty, and the vein arrogance of the twenty-six year old young Stuart pretender, the Italian raised and French supported "Bonnie Prince" Charlie. He fled the battlefield when the going got tough, leaving the clansmen to their fates.

Historical anecdotes: The Queen Mum
pulls a beer at The Bell at Stowe pub,
Stowe-on-the-Wold, Cotswolds.

The battlefield has its ghosts, but visiting castles in Britain bring the brutality home. Every one has its prison. Even churches have histories of being used as prisons. Jacobite prisoners were crowded in the dungeon rooms of Carlisle Castle without food or water. The castle brochures point out the worn stone where prisoners licked water dripping into the dungeon.

On a less violent theme, the Corinium Museum in Cirencester has a wall devoted to the wool trade that made the Cotswolds wealthy in the Middle Ages — until the invention of the cotton gin radically changed the economics of clothing. Sheep in the Cotswolds produced the wool that was exported to Flanders and Northern Italy where it was woven into cloth. This wall featured one man born a commoner who became ridiculously wealthy as a wool merchant, bought himself a noble title, and lived to the ripe old age of a hundred and one. He died only because he fell off a horse.

I wish I had taken a photo of that wall. I cannot find any reference to that merchant on the internet. Yet such anecdotes preserved in local histories provide the details that bring history alive -- at least for me.

Post Script:  Searching the Corinium Museum website I found the merchant's portrait and name, then this basic information on a BBC website. (God bless the BBC.)

John Coxwell was a self made man who made his money from the wool trade in the Cotswolds and rose from the ranks of the lower middle classes to that of the gentry. In the 14th and 15th centuries the trade in Cotswold wool was on an international scale

John was in his early twenties when the Abbey at Cirencester was dissolved. Twenty years later, when Elizabeth I sold off the Abbey estates, he purchased a significant amount of land using the money he had made from trading wool. Eventually he owned over 40 properties in Cirencester. In 1563 he purchased part of the manor of Siddington, ten years later he bought the manor of Ablington

John was 101 when he died after falling off his horse at Lechlade!

British Roads

Dunnottar Castle, just south of Stonehaven

Accomodating automobiles, as we know them today, is a seriously centuries too late afterthought in Britain. These roads are well suited for ox carts and horse drawn carriages. Not so much for automobiles.

We are spoiled in Tucson.

Leave aside driving on the left side, the roundabouts, the hieroglyphic striping on the roads, the signage ("dual carriageway", "give way", and "crawler lane"). Those can be managed.

What is terrifying are the narrow roads and no shoulders.

We were following what we in the US would regard as a tiny RV. It was as wide as the country highway lane. The speed limits are 60 or 70 miles per hour. Imagine oncoming traffic, say, a truck ("lorry") or bus. It's hard not to wince as it passes a few inches away from your driver side rear vision mirror.

No shoulders. Only occasional turn-outs. The countryside is gorgeous, but there's no place to stop. And where there is a pull-out, eight or nine times out of ten, any view is hidden by foliage or a wall. You can't win.

Bicycling should be out of the question. Even footpaths are rare and, if they exist, they too are narrow. It's funny to see rural bus stops with no sidewalk for pedestrians to get to them.

Dundee

And that's just the country roads. Imagine double decker busses routinely driving their routes in medieval city streets. Imagine street parking that takes up the better part of the driving lane. Oncoming traffic has to take turns to pass each other. I'm often not sure if I am behind parked cars or standstill traffic.

Then there is parking, something we take for granted in Tucson. Here, every little village has a pay and display lot from which the council earns money. £1-2 pounds for an hour or two. Visiting a historical site? Royal Collection Trust? National Trust for Scotland? Pay and display.

All those country scenes in BBC shows where the car drives in a broad village space, simply pulls over and parks in front of its intended destination, not another car in sight? All staged.

Not my photo, but typical.

We chose places to stay knowing we would need parking for our rental car. So far the most awkward was the one-car wide alley in Stonehaven with a ninety degree left turn into a car-wide alley that leads to a three, maybe four car lot in back of the B&B. Scraped the left rear fender in my ten minute back and forth that should qualify me for docking a shuttle into the space station.

I should add that I love the roundabouts and, once you get familiar with the system, the highways and directions are well marked (street signs, much less so) - but only because we have GPS and Google maps.

Treasure those wide open country spaces for automobiles at home.

Post script. As I composed this post, Shari is watching some local TV - a program devoted to parking tickets, traffic congestion, and tight squeezes.

Edinburgh and Verdo

Royal Mile (part).

Cosmopolitan. That's one of the first words that come to mind. It's obvious from its restaurants, population, and visitors. Seattle is another word that comes to mind on account of the weather and the black mold-stained stone buildings. Europe is another because of its stone buildings, churches, castle, palace, narrow, old city streets that go back centuries, and a history and identity that goes beyond medieval. But mostly, it is proudly Scottish. Edinburgh.

The city isn't that big in terms of population or area, being hemmed in by some steep rocky outcrops. I suspect weeks and months of exploring would not begin to exhaust its sights or experiences. Still, walking the Royal Mile and visits to Holyrood Palace and Edinburgh Castle are pretty special experiences.

Edinburgh Castle (west side).

There is some personal history here. Alexander Christian Dingwall, Shari's fourth great grandfather, was the Scottish crown keeper in the 1830's. We saw the Scottish crown jewels and the Stone of Destiny (Stone of Scone). At one point, Dingwall lived in 2 Canning Street Lane, just down the hill on the west side of the castle. We walked down there.

Of course, in a foreign place, when you find your way somewhere, it becomes welcome familiarity the second time around. Breakfast twice at the Abbey because it was good and it's just a few blocks up. Twice, beers and snacks at the Royal Mile Tavern because, well, it's good and in the middle of the the Royal Mile.

And two dinners at Verdo because it's up the street, walking by it we smelled angelic wood fire grill smoke, and it serves the best Turkish food either Shari or I have ever eaten anywhere. Turns out the owner is a Kurd from Kahta in eastern Turkey where Shari's dad worked and we have visited. So if you like Turkish cooking, I can safely write the best is the Kurdish restaurant Verdo in Edinburgh.

Traveling Confusion II

The good news is that it worked out well and easily, but for an hour or two, I had my doubts.

There comes a time with each rental car when it's necessary to find the fuel tank cap (which side? how to open?) and figure out whether the gas station pumps are self-serve, prepay, or take credit cards. After a bit of motorway driving and route finding from York to Penrith, I couldn't even find the gas station in the freeway rest area without making a wrong turn. A U-turn around the restaurant and general rest area parking lot, silently muttering "left side, left side", and down the other side, and there's the BP sign.

I had to ask the woman at the gas station shop counter how to pay. Refreshingly simple. Pump, then come inside to pay.

I went back outside and, of the three available nozzles at the island where I stopped, I chose the green one. The other two were black and grey.

Now in the US, we have various grades of gasoline nozzles and the one green nozzle for diesel. I simply chose the green nozzle and started pumping. As the fuel poured in the tank, I saw the black and grey nozzles were labeled diesel and diesel something. I checked the label on the nozzle I was pumping. Unleaded.

I stopped pumping. Our rental is diesel. Not knowing anything specific about the risks, other than it's not really a good thing, I completed the top up with diesel.

Fortunately, we pulled into the gas station primarily for WC purposes. We had almost a half tank when we pulled in.

Fortunately, gas is lighter than diesel, so when I drove another hundred miles to get to our room in Roslin, we were still running on diesel. Dumb luck.

We settled in, had lunch, toured the chapel, returned to our room, and I remembered that it might be a good idea to search the internet and learn a little about mixing the fuels.

It's actually a very, very bad thing to do. And since I couldn't blame anyone but my own stupidity, our comprehensive insurance might not pay for, say, replacing the engine.

We searched the internet for nearby mechanics. It was Saturday night. Everything is closed until Monday morning. We thought we'd risk driving another ten miles Sunday morning to get to our pre-booked Edinburgh guest house and then hope for the best.

Shari to the rescue. Call the rental car number. Use the £10 burner phone we got in Windsor.

The other thing about pouring gasoline in a diesel car is that it's a pretty common occurence. Within 45 minutes, the AA Fuel Assist van showed up. Another 35 minutes, the very nice young Scottish man (he'd been to Las Vegas) had drained our full but contaminated tank and carburetor and put in £10 worth of diesel to get us to the next gas station.

Our comprehensive insurance pays for it.

Rosslyn Chapel, Roslin, Scotland

Rosslyn Chapel

The church is extravagantly decorated with carved stone outside and inside. The village of Roslin was created for the stone masons, carpenters and blacksmiths required to create the structure. Columns and lintels decorated with vines, green men (heads in greenery), allegories (seven sins, seven virtues), geometric designs, dragons (probably pagan Norse influence), and animals. The chapel is as much a pagan celebration of nature as it is a Christian dedication to St. Matthew.

The niches are empty. More evidence of the destructive purges wrought by Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. It has had to be repaired and reconstructed to become the tourist mecca that it is today. Despite the entrances fees, docents, and strict prohibition of photography inside, it still hosts church services. Church of Scotland.

No wonder the chapel inspired Queen Victoria and 19th Century poets and authors. And, of course, the Templar connection in the Da Vinci Code novel made even more famous by the Tom Hanks movie. Which is utter fiction, as is the story invented about the Apprentice Column. But to see this chapel is to understand how it has inspired the imagination.

Rosslyn Chapel

Thanks to Shari who knew of the fame of the Roslin Chapel, we included a night in tiny Roslin in our itinerary. It's a Saturday and the folks here are adept at organizing events to attract people from nearby Edinburgh and all over. The village was crowded with familes, young kids with face decorations, and couples young and old. Some children's carnival was underway. The one restaurant already has brochures on every table advertising its 2019 Christmas season and exhorting early reservations. "Breakfast with Santa."

Decent sunshine and warm weather allowed the outside pub area to be filled with beer drinking, snacking, T-shirted and shorted folks. Not everyone wore summer clothes (certainly not us), but most. Locals, I suspect. Inside the pub, families with dogs were noisily talking over the speakers blaring some folk-sounding songs. Too noisy for us.

Odd thing. Bitters and ales in Windsor and York were served only a little below room temperature. I reckon that way, if you nurse a pint or more over an hour's worth of local gossip, it doesn't make much difference. Or maybe it's just the custom. Cross into Scotland and I find my first IPA. It's a very light IPA by US microbrew standards, but what is surprising is that it's served nicely chilled.

And I am pleased to report our room is spacious, nicely appointed, and comfortable. A corner room with views over the tiny park with its war memorial and the beer garden.

York

The gate by the York Minster.

York is an obvious tourist destination in England. I just had no inkling of why. It is simply stunningly amazing.

For one, it's a pretty small town; less than a quarter million. For another, much of the medieval city walls and each gate are still standing. Then there is its Minster, a gigantic gothic cathedral much too large to squeeze into a camera lens.

Inside the walls is a warren of old cobblestone streets devoted to pedestrian traffic and lined with restaurants, pubs, pastry & coffee shops, high end boutiques and department stores, businesses, hotels, tourist knick-knack stores, butchers, cheese mongers, ghost and Viking shows, municipal buildings, market squares, used book stalls, Hogwart shops and kids with magic wands, medieval churches, street musicians and theatres -- to name a few.

The narrow streets and alleys are crowded with tourists; most from Britain, some from the Continent, some from the USA, and plenty of east Asians. No shortage of locals, either. One parade of Malaysians, the women wearing headscarves, was lead by two middle aged women holding a selfie stick on which two (not one) smart phones recorded the entire group strolling about. (I hesitate to think how seasick I would get having to watch the playback.)

York, the wall walk.

We spent a couple of hours inside the old walled city yesterday and return there today. This morning, as I am framing video shots at the gate we walk through, the one closest to the Minster, Shari finds stairs leading up the wall. We discover the walk on top of the walls. Gorgeous views over private gardens, through huge trees, and peering over roofs, the towers of the massive Minster.

We wander inside one elegant department store. There's a fashion show under way upstairs in between racks of merchandise. Tall, long-legged models in high heels and disarming smiles are doing their runway thing as the commentator with a microphone explains the various features of the clothes they are wearing. A woman asks us whether we would like a glass of prosecco. We notice the folks sitting in folding chairs on either side of the makeshift runway are holding champagne glasses. We politely declined. We had just come from a delightful bakery where we drank cappuccinos.

York Minster

In one open area a street musician is singing show tunes accompanied by his karaoke boom box. The man is professional grade. I video record a song. Videographers are always desperate for a soundtrack. The pleasant sounds of people chatting in the streets should also serve nicely.

Before we enjoy our bowls of coconut lentil soup at the Cafe Concerto by the Minster, I spring for the £10.50 fee (seniors over sixty) to wander inside the cathedral. It is incredibly imposing on the outside, even with its myriads of exterior niches missing their statues. The stonework carving is intricate. The interior spces are equally huge and detailed. Incredibly high vaults and stained glass windows make the visitor look up in awe.

Traveling is work, but a day spent in York makes it all worthwhile.

Traveling Confusion

Arriving and driving at a foreign place can be confusing. Then there is Heathrow which is in a mega-confusion category of its own..

I was hoping to drive the few miles to Datchet on a back road from the Heathrow rental car madness. On the dashboard screen, the rental folks progammed in some route on an M-XX. "Oh it's easy. I went to school there. It's a short, easy way on the motorway," assured our friendly young Sikh Europcar desk clerk.

I took a wrong turn just trying to get out of the parking lot, then ended up on the wrong side of the road after my U-turn. Stressed? You betcha.

Our Kia for the month behind our York pub inn,
the Old Grey Mare.

A couple more wrong turns, a couple more disastrous U-turns, a missed roundabout direction and a missed motorway exit trying to interpret the dashboard voice, and we find our hotel after driving by it twice. It took me about five minutes and three tries to squeeze the car into the teeny, tiny marked parking space in back.

But here's the confusion. I had assumed the Brits had converted to metric. Our first morning, we tackled the one and a half mile drive to Windsor.  I am mindful of speed limits and I notice the big numbers on the speedometer are mph and the teeny ones that I can't read without reading glasses are km. For about a day, I was thinking I need to complain to Europcar. How can they rent a Kia with right hand drive and mph on the speedometer?! I was getting indignant.

Full day two was the four-hour motorway drive to York. Brits have speed cameras on their freeways and tickets by mail. I got to make sure whether to use the tiny marks on the speedometer (i'm wondering, looking in the rear vision mirror, "Why are there so many cars tailgating me?") or the big ones. Then I just try to keep up with traffic. After about a half an hour on the motorway, I notice mileage signs list place name, a distance number, and an "m". Not a " km" anywhere.

Then there are electrical devices. Like the electric kettle in our Datchet room. Doesn't work. Fumble with it. Play with its switch. Nothing. Each wall plug in Britain has its own switch. We play with them. Nothing. We are about to complain to the front desk when it occurs to us to follow the cord from the kettle. It's not plugged in.

Our shower this morning in York depended upon an instant water heater mounted in the shower cubicle. Heck. We'd seen them in Thailand. We know how they work. We play with different combinations of the two dials and one switch. Nothing. Not even water, much less hot water. Shari is about to put on some clothes and ask for help from the folks downstairs.

There's this pull chain outside the shower stall. We assumed it was an emergency cord for when you fall down and break a hip. We had seen them before in nice hotels. Of course, our assumption was completely unwarranted. This was no nice hotel, no one frail could possibly climb the two narrow, steep staircases to get to our room, and it is impossible for anyone to fall down in that tiny shower cubicle about the size of a coffin.

I look at the small plastic box from which the pull cord dangles. In rough, faded, permanent ink lettering, someone had printed, "SHOWER".

A good pull, a click, and fumbling with the switch and two dials produce wonderful hot water.

Datchet

Datchet from our hotel room.
The tower of St. Mary the Virgin is visible
behind the Royal Stag.

Datchet is a village on the Thames a mile and a half from Windsor. Stuff around the Thames is old. The river is life, a barrier, and a highway.

Datchet has its roots in Celtic times, if not earlier. It used to have a ferry to take kings and travelers on the road from London (north side) to Windsor Castle (south side). If they weren't taking a boat or the train.

Queen Victoria protecting Windsor Castle
from tourist busses.

Datchet is the location of the hotel we booked online for our first two nights in Britain so we could visit Windsor. It's the Manor Hotel. The desk clerk told us it is three hundred years old. Maybe people were smaller back then because our corner room was small. Like the vaudeville joke, the room was so small even the rats were hunchbacked.

It rained last night. Shari woke me up when she gasped, then cursed. Drops on her face. We had left the windows open. But the drops came from the ceiling onto the bedstand next to her and splashed on her face.

The night clerk feined surprise and explained that they had had no rain for a while. That did not explain the mold on the ceiling, or the pretty stainless steel jug standing on the floor in a doorway where we went for breakfast. That is in the middle of the hotel building. The roof is two levels up. The jug was catching about half of the drips from the ceiling.

Three hundred years old, you say? i believe it.

We got a new room this morning. Much bigger. This hotel advertises its facilities for weddings. I think we got the wedding room. It's not really a suite, but it's almost three times bigger than our first room. Which says much more about the first room than the second.

We still have our view of the little village center with its church steeple peering out above a giant tree by its entrance. The church is surrounded on all three sides by weathered gravestones. No landscaping. Just graves that, far as I can tell, go back to the early 1800's.

After our visit to Windsor Castle, I had to visit that church. It is named St. Mary the Virgin. It is a charming place, not just because of its age and Gothic style, but its human scale (compared to Windsor Castle), and the obvious fact that it is very much a working church. Folding chairs set up for meetings and prayer groups. Collection plate still had coins in it, out in the open. Bulletin boards, children's drawings. A box with donated reading glasses. Beautiful stained glass windows from the early 1800's. And a plaque with names and dates of its early rectors and vicars. Earliest date? 1239.

If a graveyard surrounds three sides, what is on the fourth? The Royal Stag. look it up on the web. The pub dates back to the 15th Century when it was an ale house. We headed there for dinner. I had its signature dish: beef and ale pie on mashed potatoes. Great. The carrot coriander soup was excellent, as were Shari's ribs.

And the pub itself? Imagine a community living room.

Eger Stars

Its fascinating to be immersed in another’s world; another’s fantasy world. The images, characters, costumes, and customs linger in the mind, if only for a short time, like a dream.

A good movie can draw me in. Each movie and TV program is someone's creation of a re-playable dream. Most are silly endless chase scenes, unnecessarily violent, unduly salacious, and/or simply boring. I prefer to go to bed and create my own dreams. But some movies draw me in, typically period pieces, foreign settings, intelligent dialogue, and gorgeous cinematography.

Nowadays we watch movies on a television with all the distractions of domestic life. When we were young, a trip to the movie theater was special: vivid colors projected onto a huge screen in a darkened theater supported by a sound system that moved across the walls. I remember receiving printed programs, even assigned seating, to showings of Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music, and the Walt Disney Sydney premiere of Darby O’Gill and the Little People. Remember the after matinee surprise of emerging from the theater to see sunshine illuminating a familiar world that, for an instant, seemed very strange?

The fact that we were younger then is relevant. We are more impressionable before our imaginations became prejudiced with the familiarity of ordinary reality.

Think of reading books. They too are someone's creation of a dream, another world. Reading books is uncanny. What is it about reading that inherently triggers our imagination? They are only printed letters forming words that the eye reads and the mind silently interprets as sounds. There is no soundtrack and no moving images. Illustrations play a minor role compared to cinematography. Yet as abstract as the printed word is, and although reading requires more effort than passively watching moving images accompanied by sound, books are more engrossing. Images, characters, customs, even costumes and scenery, all conjured up with twenty-six outlined shapes symbolizing sounds, linger in the mind.

All art does that. Music, the most abstract and powerful form of human creation, painting, sculpture, architecture, jewelry, gardening, cooking, even straightening up the house are expressions of creativity and opportunities to be drawn into a different world.

But it's a book that is now lingering in my mind and competing with the ordinary around me. Actually, it's not just a book. It's a triple or quadruple whammy of a classic novel, a period piece, and an iconic Hungarian story in Hungarian, a language intimately familiar to me from childhood which, anymore, I use talking to myself or the dog, or composing emails to my cousins in Hungary.

I am laboriously translating Egri Csillagok (Stars of Eger) by Géza Gárdonyi and originally published in 1901. It begins in 1533 and ends in 1552 with a small Hungarian force defending the fortress of Eger from a large army of Ottoman Turk besiegers. It's required reading for a Hungarian education.

I have a bad habit with reading, I read quickly in order to get the plot. When I was in high school, I read Jane Eyre in one day; War and Peace in three. I rarely slow down to appreciate style or description. Which is why I do not read Hungarian. It’s a language I know from simple conversation. I was never schooled in it. I'm impatient. Sentence structure is different, the relationships of words are embedded in suffixes, strokes and dots over vowels change pronunciation and meanings, and my vocabulary is about third grade, at best.

Fortunately, many years ago my Uncle Zoltán gifted me with a two-volume Hungarian-English dictionary, each volume some twelve hundred pages of eight point font. It is invaluable. I relied upon it extensively to translate my father's memoirs. Since then, Google Translate has become most helpful, but one has to be suspicious and cross-check with a real dictionary. Still, Translate is a time saver for me because it helps with spelling and I know enough Hungarian to recognize when Translate is off base. I have a great story of my cousin's email greeting to Shari, kezit csókolom (“I kiss your hand”) translated as “I handcuff you.” In fact, I just plugged in kezit csokolom (no accent over the “o”) and got “hands with chocolate” in return. Well, if you know a little Hungarian, you would never confuse csokoládé (chocolate) with csókol (kiss), Hershy’s notwithstanding.

I tried reading Egri Csillagok in Hungarian decades ago and gave up after a dozen pages, and even then I barely got the gist of what was going on. I am too impatient to look up two or three words per sentence, then spend time figuring out how they are related: which word is subject, what is the action and what the object, and who belongs to whom. There was no English translation at that time.

As I approach my golden years of retirement, I need hobbies. Why not give Egri Csillagok another try? I looked for an English translation. All that is available are used, hardcover editions running thirty or more dollars a copy. The only available ebook was in Hungarian. I got it. My mind clouded over trying to read and understand. I realized that to read it, I had to take the time and the trouble to write down an English translation. Why not translate the entire book? I managed to translate my father’s writing, I have my dictionary and Translate, and I boast about using my Hungarian skills two years ago when I was in Budapest and visiting cousins in Hungary.

So off an on for the last fortnight I have been translating Egri Csillagok into English. Actually, it’s been more than off-and-on because when I am “on” it's very intense. I am immersed in Hungarian text for many hours at a time, figuring out the meanings of literary words, even medieval Hungarian words and archaic Hungarian expressions. Fortunately, Gárdonyi's prose is elegantly simple, often terse, but that still leaves plenty to decipher.

I was about a tenth of the way through when I decided to splurge and buy the hardcover English translation. I was apprehensive. For several days after the book arrived, I didn't open it, nor did I work with the Hungarian ebook. I was afraid that reading it in English would be too easy and would detract form my self-imposed discipline. In turn, I was afraid that the translation would take too long and have little value if there was already a good one. But I had already collected twenty or more Hungarian words highlighted in yellow for which I could find no translation. So I turned to the English book.

Fortunately, it’s a flawed translation. Although the Hungarian is mostly all there and translated, Mr. George Cushing felt it necessary to contribute his inventions to Gárdonyi's novel. At first I thought that maybe the Hungarian ebook I had purchased cheap from Walmart and Kobo had been dumbed down. I found another ebook version on a Hungarian library website and downloaded it. It is identical to the Walmart-Kobo version. Son of a gun. In addition to the pastime pleasure of translating an interesting Hungarian story, my translation would not only be more faithful to the original, it could be made available as an ebook.

I use Cushing’s version as resource to translate the occasional word (which I cross-check with my English-Hungarian dictionary volume) and, in the odd sentence, to occasionally check for relationships of who is doing what to whom.

What is amazing to me is becoming more familiar with reading Hungarian. My vocabulary isn’t increasing appreciably, at least not so far. I find myself looking up zarándók (pilgrim) again and again, but maybe with repetition and time, words and meanings will attach themselves in my mind. But it has become much easier for me to recognize and read familiar words whose sounds I know but whose spellings are unfamiliar with accented vowels and odd combinations of consonants.

Most amazing of all, I find myself immersed in a Hungary of the 16th Century with wagons, horses, swords and clumsy guns, castles and fortified village houses, children skinny dipping, peasant villages and paprikás stews cooking in cauldrons over fires, dusty, rutted cart trails, brutal janissaries and marauding akindji raiders, vitéz (heroic, Hungarian, of course) fighters, Catholic, Protestant and Moslem adversaries, and intrigues and names familiar from Hungarian history and geography.

It’s a fascinating world. The images, characters, costumes, customs and Hungarian words linger sweetly in my mind.