Jewell 2015 European Travels

Caught up with Emily in Dubai. She was fairly happy to have actually made her flight. Apparently there was some rail chaos on the line between Victoria Station in London and Gatwick Airport, after two seperate trains broke down. The express trains were all cancelled and it was mayhem on the line as London commuters and airline passengers alike competed for space on available trains. It took her nearly two hours to get to the airport, rather than 30 minutes. Fortunately she had allowed plenty of time and the path through check in and security took no time.

We all made it home safely. Emily got back to Melbourne about 7:30am this morning. We landed in Brisbane just after 6am and finally made it back to the Sunshine Coast around 9am. I don’t think anyone slept more than an hour or two on the final leg from Dubai, so no doubt we will make up for that this evening.

 

 
Trip was great. Not much more to add than what I have already written over the past 5 weeks or so. Took about 2,000 photos, half of them at the RAF Museum at Hendon. Months of fun to be had cataloging and sorting them all. All the trials and tribulations don’t seem so bad already. I might need to re-read the blog occasionally to remind me.

Some general observations on the trip that I haven’t already made:

• Don’t worry about what the duty free alcohol limits are if you are flying into Italy (or Rome to be precise). They won’t do more than a cursory check of your passport, much less ask questions about anything else. I could have walked in with a bazooka for all the attention I was paid.
• The horror stories you have heard about coffee on the Continent are true. I gave up drinking it, as I couldn’t bear to be charged 6€ for a small lukewarm cup of froth. If you like short blacks you will fare better. Big chains like Starbucks are your only hope.
• Driving on the RHS of the road isn’t that hard, you adapt in about a day. Driving anywhere in France or Belgium is a challenge, simply because of narrow roads, narrow lanes, parked cars, bizarre road/intersection layouts and crazy drivers. England was easier, only because the drivers were a lot less crazy. The other challenges were still there.
• You can find decent pizzas in Italy, but you have to look. Most restaurants place the toppings  without chopping them up, e.g. whole slices of speck (we will never forget speck). This might be traditional but it makes for a terrible pizza. Buying by the slice from alleyway vendors guarantees that the ingredients are chopped up and well distributed. Much nicer.
• People in France really do walk down the street with a baguette under their arm. We did it too!
• If you don’t like crowds or queues then you will be disappointed by all the main tourist attractions. Refreshingly, some of the less popular but highly interesting sights like Foxton Locks are as quiet as a mouse.
• Food at restaurants, cafes and pubs can be quite expensive. If you buy your own groceries then food is remarkably cheap, much cheaper than in Australia.
• If you enjoy a beer, Europe is the place for you. Apart from the variety, you can buy it at bottle shops (naturally), supermarkets, cafes, newsagents, souvenir shops, in fact anywhere that has a drinks fridge. It seems to be perfectly natural to consume it at any time of day. 
• You can buy Australian wine in French supermarkets for under 10€. We didn’t, we bought French wine, which tastes fine and can be had for as little as 5€.
• If public safety concerns you, then Europe will leave you frazzled. The average pedestrian shows very little concern for their own safety and I would love to know what the accident statistics are. I  wonder if this laissez faire attitude carries over to other areas?

That’s it. Hope it was interesting. Thanks to everyone who assisted in any way on the home front while we were away. 

Steve J.

We are currently sitting patiently in Terminal 3 at Heathrow waiting for our flight to open. Only 24 hours or so of bum-numbing travelling until we return to normal.

We waved goodbye to Emily at 5 o’clock in central London as she headed off to catch a train to Gatwick and we headed for Heathrow. Emily’s flight leaves around 9pm and we depart at 10pm. Funnily enough we will see her again briefly at Dubai before we finally depart for Melbourne and Brisbane respectively. 

 

 
We slept in a bit this morning after our late night/early morning. It was a shame to abandon our country manor house at all. We had a quick look around Market Harborough before heading to Bedford.

 

 
  
Bedford involved a brief stopover to catch up with Rob Simpson, another face from the past. Rob was a flat mate of my sister in the early 1980s while she was living in the UK. Michelle and I met Rob when he came out to Australia in 1985 and we have been corresponding since. We last caught up when Michelle and I were in the UK in 1989. The amazing thing is that none of us has changed. How do we do it?

 

 
Leaving Bedford we headed to Heathrow to park up the car and luggage while we did a last minute errand in London and waved Emily off. A fairly simple drive turned into a bit of a nightmare when we experienced one of the infamous ‘M1 parking lot’ moments.

Okay. This is really it. I will do one more post when I get home, just to round out the story, plus I have some more odd vehicle pictures to post. 

Until then, bye, Steve J.

That’s it. We’re home from the rugby, it’s finished. It’s after midnight, which means we fly home today, so the trip is all over.

Because it’s 12:30am this blog is also over (for now). I will try and update today’s (yesterday’s) blog tomorrow (today).

Good morning. Quick roundup of yesterday.

First up we drove down to Milton Keynes to suss out where the stadium is in relation to an English pub for dinner and parking. Found the stadium, not too sure about the others, all depends on whether or not we can park in a shopping centre car park adjacent to the stadium. Enough of that, let’s get to Dibley (scene of ‘The Vicar of Dibley’).

There is no such place as Dibley, it’s just a figment of Dawn French’s imagination. It has to be filmed somewhere though and it turns out it is filmed in a little village named Turville, near Oxford. Interesting trip, through a hundred other little villages and down some more very narrow hedge-lined roads. Turville has an impressive filmography, Google it.

 

 
We arrived at midday, so into the Bull an Butcher for lunch, then a tour of the village. Lunch took longer than the tour. Turville is as small as Dibley makes out to be in the TV series. Worth the trip though, just to see it.

 

 
 

 
After lunch it was another brief family reunion, this time with Michelle’s uncle Peter at Bicester (pronounced Bister we discovered – easy to tell the tourists). We last saw Peter about 22 years ago. Still picked him as soon as we saw him.

 

 
Back to Milton Keynes for the rugby. Lucky we left plenty of time as we had an extensive tour of the city by the time we missed a couple of turns and fruitlessly followed Park and Ride signs. In the finish we fluked a park near the train station, right next to the shuttle bus to the ground. 

This seemed too easy, the shuttle bus will drop us back about 20 metres from the car after the game. It turned out that was too easy, it dropped us around the corner. This would have been no trouble in daylight, at 11pm it all looked rather different and it took us 20 minutes to find the car, even though it was probably no more than 200 metres away.

 

 
The game was very good, seats were great and out of the rain. The rain marred the handling a bit. Uruguay played very well, despite being about half the size of the Fijians, man for man. Uruguay finished the game with 14 men after their halfback was red carded. In a bizarre twist, he was awarded man of the match!

 

 
Driving the 40 miles back to Gumley in the dark on unfamiliar roads, with rain and fog for added interest, was not one of the tour highlights. Especially as the car headlights are about as bright as a birthday cake candle. Not to worry, arrived home at 12:10am.

You are now up to date. We are about to start a final pack up ready for the last leg of the trip.

Bye, Steve J.

The weather has finally turned English, dreary and overcast all day, bit of drizzle. That’s better. The namby pamby weather we have been enjoying is hardly the ‘real’ English experience.

 

Discovered Foxton Locks about a mile down the road, so spent the morning looking them over. Quite an engineering feat (and therefore rather interesting). I even operated a lock gate. Not too many people can say they’ve done that, and I probably wasn’t supposed to so don’t tell too many people.

Fascinating watching the canal boats run the gauntlet of the locks. There are ten locks to negotiate in the staircase and this only takes 45 minutes. There is even a passing lane halfway up so that a boat can be going down while one is climbing up. I tried to post a short video, but that just won’t work.

Went for a drive around Kibworth Harcourt and Kibworth Beauchamp at lunchtime. This is where the BBC documentary ‘A Story of England’ was filmed. I don’t know if it ever made TV in Australia, if it did then I didn’t see it. However, I have the DVD and have read about a third of the book, so might finally finish them both when I get back. The drive only took about 15 minutes and wasn’t earth shattering. Make a note – if you plan on doing something similar, finish reading the book first so that you have some idea of what you are looking at. No photos.

Emily and I drove into Leicester this afternoon to check out the Newark Museum and rugby exhibition. Museum was interesting, exhibition less so. Walking around the old Leicester Castle revealed another collection of interesting buildings and streetscapes.

 

The drive home turned up the Debdale canal dock and weak bridge (their words, not mine). I thought a canal dock might have been for loading and unloading goods in days gone by, however it turns out to be like a caravan park for canal boats, there were about forty moored in there. There is really no shortage of interesting offbeat things to discover provided you take the time to poke about.

 

Off to Dibley tomorrow, to see the vicar. Also our last game of rugby at Milton Keynes tomorrow night – Fiji vs Uruguay. What, no more rugby? Bugger it, I’m coming home.
Cheers, Steve J.

Quiet day, drove from Monmouth to Leicester first up. Autumn is taking hold here, foggy most of the way so I can’t tell you what the country looks like – I didn’t see much of it.
Once at Leicester we sought out a pub to have a traditional roast lunch. This had been on the gastronomic itinerary for a while and unfortunately turned out to be a fair old fizzle. The meal was okay, sort of, but the veggies were clearly frozen and the roast beef slices were from a packet. Gravy was probably from a bottle. Not at all what we had in mind.

Skip forward to the rugby, Argentina versus Tonga. Sent the girls shopping while I enjoyed the game. They came across some sort of Brazilian dance thing while scouring the Leicester city centre, see photo below. Damn, I missed that!

  
Leicester is a small stadium. It holds 32,000 and today’s crowd was 29,000+, so fairly full. Despite the 45-16 score line the match was in the balance with 10 minutes to go. Some very good tries scored. In the end Tonga ran out of puff and threw too many speculative passes. Good game though and seat right on halfway.

Okay, finished for the day and off to find our final accommodation of the trip. The Manor House is a 4-bedroom Victorian house in the village of Gumley, just south of Leicester. The place is terrific. Air B&B has been a good way of sourcing accommodation. We can really recommend it.

 

 
Okay, that’s enough.

Steve J.

Sorry. Due to the need to watch the Australia – England match I haven’t had time to do a proper blog post.

When I do it will include:

• English breakfast in Monmouth
• Cardiff Castle
• Visiting Michelle’s uncle in Cardiff 
• Watching Australia beat England and celebrating with our host

There may even be a couple of photos.

The real blog.

We got away relatively early (it’s still dark at 7am) and ducked into Monmouth to have an English breakfast at an English pub. We will overlook the fact that we were in Wales, so none of that can really be true. It was good, black pudding and all, although I was the only one who would eat the black pudding.

Then down to Cardiff to have a look at the castle. Very interesting it is too. The grounds are huge. Unfortunately a previous owner demolished many of the internal buildings. Bloody vandals some of these barons. Since it is smack in the middle of the city the castle has become a bit of a Mecca for rugby fans. Thanks to some clever work with some foam Cardiff Castle has become the backdrop for thousands of tourist photos.

After lunch we tracked down Michelle’s grandparent’s house to relive some childhood memories, then over to her great uncle Gordon’s place for a quick catchup.

Gordon recently turned 90 and is going fairly well. We last saw Gordon when he came over to Australia in 1994. A cup of tea and a chat were over almost before they started. Gordon is a great character and great fun.

 

That was it for the day, home to watch the Australia vs England rugby match. What a great game and great result. The game had just finished when our host at the farm, David, knocked on the door with a couple of beers to celebrate. Being Welsh he is happy when anyone beats England.

Off to Leicester on the morrow.

Cheers, Steve J.

First up today was a visit to Abergavenny. It wasn’t one of our ‘must dos’ for the trip, it was picked as a destination as it was just down the road from where we are staying. For the record, we didn’t see a red dog, running free or otherwise, but the weather was fine. Google the song lyrics…

The route to Abergavenny was largely a repeat of the country lanes of last night, with the major difference that it was daylight. The lanes were certainly no wider than we remembered them, as you can see. Fortunately these tracks only made up the first few miles, and we only had to reverse once due to a car coming the other way.

Abergavenny is a market town, so we looked over the markets and bought some stuff we had to have. We also viewed the local castle ruins. There are castles every few hundred metres in Wales, or so it would seem. They are at least every 10 miles.

 

Okay, done with Abergavenny, onto Monmouth. Another Welsh town with a castle, although best known as the birthplace of King Henry V. It also claims a distinction for its medieval gatehouse bridge, the only one in Britain.

 

That’s it, home again about 5pm without any mishaps. That’s what we like to see, boring travelogues.

See you tomorrow. Steve J.

Someone got a bit bored in the back seat.

Just another ordinary day, nothing unusual to report. We wish! Today was a combination of interesting,  frustrating, exciting and exasperating. Read on.

Before leaving Salisbury this morning we had a brief look around Salisbury Cathedral. We didn’t go in, just did a lap around the cloisters and marvelled at the height of the spire (tallest in England apparently). You can see it from a very long way away. This was interesting.

   

   
 

 
Then it was off to Cardiff. The plan was to arrive around lunchtime, have something to eat and look around the city before I went off to the rugby. It was a good plan, except that (as noted in yesterday’s blog) it takes a jolly long time to get anywhere. We stopped in Newport for lunch, as it was 1:30pm and we hadn’t even made it to Cardiff. This was frustrating.

After lunch we rejoined the traffic for a stop-start crawl into Cardiff. The last 10 miles took about an hour and a half. No chance of a car park within cooee of the city centre or Millenium Stadium. We eventually spotted a Tesco car park that wasn’t full, so slipped in there and walked down to the stadium.

The match was great and so was my seat. 71,500-odd spectators and most of them Welshmen. Fiji gave them a good scare and were in it to the end despite the 23-13 final score. This was exciting, and just as well – the ticket cost me £175.

The fun started when we left Cardiff to find our accommodation, about 33 miles north at Monmouth. We didn’t have an actual address, just directions from Monmouth. Good, it’s dark (9pm by this stage) and we have no real idea where we’re going. I decided that we should use the farm postcode and the GPS to try and track it down, despite a warning from our host that the GPS “gets people lost trying to find this place”.

The GPS decided it would be a good idea to turn off well before Monmouth and go cross country. The result was an hour of touring narrow country lanes in the dark. These are described as ‘single lane’ tracks. They are not kidding. Some of the lanes were that narrow that the car was brushing the hedges on both sides. This was exasperating.

Eventually we abandoned the GPS and headed for Monmouth so we could reset and follow the directions we were given. Even this was tricky as there is a lot of difference between ‘turning left after the school’ during daylight and after dark. You can’t find the school in the dark!

  

 
We did make it. The girls should recover in a day or two and the farm cottage is a ripper, fortunately. We have 3 nights here before moving onto Leicester.

Tomorrow we resume normal service with a boring travelogue.

Cheers, Steve J.

Update:

After reviewing the maps last night I decided that we must have made it to within a stone’s throw of the farm before we turned around and reset the trip from Monmouth. I was right, our turnaround point was 150 metres up the road! The signposting (typical example below) didn’t help much.

  

Last day in Salisbury. Last days are coming thick and fast now, with only a week to go before we are on an aeroplane back to Australia. Depressing.

We visited Stonehenge’s little brother today, the Avebury stone circles. You might need to look that one up on Google, as it has much better overall views of the circles than I could hope to provide. The site is less spectacular than Stonehenge to view on the ground but is every bit as interesting given the size of the site and the number of stones. Apparently it’s also much older. 

For your edification, Stonehenge isn’t a henge. A henge has the ditch on the inside and the mound on the outside. Avebury is a henge. Stonehenge has its ditch on the outside and mound on the inside. The world is full of fascinating contradictions, isn’t it?

 

 
Okay, let’s get to Bath. Only 32 miles and an hour later we are in Bath. Like me you have probably heard stories about how little people travelled in the ‘old days’ and how most people “never travelled more than 20 miles from their home their whole lives”. I now know why. It takes you most of your life to travel 20 miles. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love these little narrow windy roads and lanes. To me it’s a novelty. Just don’t expect to get too far, too fast. A 100-mile drive is not a walk in the park, it’s about three hours on a good day (ignore the obvious contradiction with the previous paragraph, that was hyperbole). That three hours is full on in terms of required concentration, number of gear changes and need for brakes.

But back to Bath. What did we do? We looked at the Roman baths, what else. Another very good experience, with a very well designed exhibition. The original thermal spring that supplied the baths in Roman times is still running today and still supplying the same baths. Still warm too. Not a lot else to say, they are baths after all.

 

 
Tomorrow we head for Wales and the next rugby game. Wales take on Fiji at Millenium Stadium at 4:45pm tomorrow and I’m hoping for a closer game than the corresponding fixture in 2011. I was in Hamilton, New Zealand for that one and poor old Fiji were on the wrong end of a 50-point thrashing.

All for now, Steve J.

Okay. So we are in Salisbury. Where else would we go besides Stonehenge when in Salisbury? Nowhere, so we went there. 

The monument people do a pretty good job with their interpretive centres, making the whole thing an experience, rather than a wander around a bunch of rocks. It is a rather imposing collection of very large rocks and not surprising that it is a popular spot with tourists. 

 

 
The weather has been excellent on this leg of the trip. It rained the first day we arrived in London and has been fine since. Perfect for the outdoorsy stuff.

More old broken stuff after Stonehenge, with a trip to Old Sarum, the original site of Salisbury before someone decided to move closer to the river and build a cathedral there. Old Sarum never recovered and Salisbury never looked back.

 

 
Late lunch, saunter around a market, collect the washing – has to be done even on holidays – and back to the farm to regroup. Filled in an hour with a stroll down a country lane looking at the quaint cottages, picked some blackberries and reflected on life (just ate the blackberries really, but reflecting on life sounds cool). 

 

 
That was pretty much how the day went. Emily and I went out on a late sortie to view the regimental badges carved into the hillside (hard to explain, see the picture).

  
Tomorrow, Avebury and Bath. 

Until then, cheers. Steve J.

P.S. Added some photos to yesterday’s post.