[photos to be added]
Rained a bit over night but bright sun with scattered clouds all day. Our breakfast companion was a businessman up from London--makes the trip every week for a few days. He and his family are planning a trip to the West Coast in late August-early September--fly into San Francisco, drive down to Carmel along the coast, then inland to Yosemite and Death Valley, then down to Disneyland and San Diego. A lovely trip for much of the year, but perhaps not in August! Our hostess was perfectly done up in tight and artfully distressed and patched blue jeans, sheer white blouse,and deep tan, bubbling at the prospect of taking thee next two days off to go relax at a spa in York. I asked who would look after the puppies for her, as she clearly doted on them and worried about them. Her business partner was going to take care of them. I suggested maybe Ruby, the puppies' weary mother, might enjoy a spa respite as well, which Di thought was an amusingly good idea, and we discussed which spa treatments would benefit Ruby most.
From Osmotherly, we drove north and west, through the Pennines--low, moorland mountains--to Long Meg and her Daughters. I had worried that I would regret a second trip to Long Meg, as it is so often hard to re-experience the magic of a place once visited. It did feel different--more hurried and busier than in my memory, in part because the neighboring farmer was haying--6 men with big machinery chewing through the fields and packing down a mountain of green hay large enough for two giant tractors to drive about on top of at the same time. But there was enough magic there to draw me still, and I am glad we went.
Then south and further west, for a quick drive through a bit of the Lake District, haunt of Wordsworth and his fellow Romantic poets. En route, we stopped in Penrith just long enough for me to ship a box of toffees and fudge off to the Health Service Walk-in Centre staff and pick up a box as a hostess gift for Jill. The proprietor of the shop wasn't aware that it was listed in a Lonely Planet article on 20 gourmet specialty foods in Britain, so I sent him the link.
The shifter and I are still at odds; I continue to cycle through my small and unimaginative repertoire of four letter words, and Pop continues to grip the map, white-knuckled. Got rather lost (due to a confusing roundabout) trying to find downtown Penrith and the Toffee Shop. The roundabouts can get positively baroque in their complexity: some are quite simple and subtle, so that you hardly notice you've passed through one (as in at a three-way intersection in a quiet village), but others can be two or even three adjacent circles strung together, with two or three or even four lanes, multiple traffic signals on the periphery and within the roundabout, and painted lane designations to funnel vehicles into the proper position for shooting off onto the desired route. Woe betide the soul that doesn't know precisely which route is wanted! It reminds me a bit of the Los Angeles freeways, where the entrances and exits are so closely packed and come and go from both the right and the left, across many lanes of traffic, so that we referred to them as "braided lanes."
We didn't do the Lake District anything like justice, just drove straight through from Keswick to Kendal and eye-balling the mountains without stopping except to use a wayside WC. The mountains at the northern end of the drive were spectacular, and I would like to have stopped and hiked, but the central section was less rugged and a bit overrun with tourists for my tastes. Then onto the M6--4, then 6, and briefly up to 10 lanes of divided highway--down to Lymm, near Manchester/Liverpool. The smaller highways--the A and B routes--have their stresses--narrow bridges, view-obliterating hedgerows, sharp and winding turns, farm vehicles, horse crossings, cryptic and absent markings, but they are far more interesting than the large M motorways, which are pretty much indistinguishable from their US counterparts. But the M6 did get us where we needed to go quickly and efficiently.
Somehow, I had gotten it into my head that Pop's acquaintance in Lymm had been a colleague at DESY, but it turns out that they had been at Cornell together--Erwin a postdoc when Pop was a grad student. Sue and Erwin were in Ithaca 1962-65, so I was a newborn when they met. We had a bit of difficulty finding their house, hidden behind hedges and another house and a maze of construction barriers--the local gas pipes are reaching the end of their useful lifespan and, apparently, starting to rupture here and there, so their street and driveway are partially blocked and torn up to replace the old metal pipes with new plastic ones. Pop and Erwin reminisced and caught up on physics news and colleagues, but Sue made it quite clear that didn't interest her much, so I asked to see her garden, as she had been hacking at the shubbery when we arrived. So we poked about and discussed the birds and plants and the the neighbor cat and the toads in the little pond, and also a bit about the house, which was built in 1904 and still has Edwardian quirks about it. Then another physics colleague arrived and we strolled into the village for roast beef and Yorkshire pudding all around at the local tapas bar (don't ask me why a place that calls itself a tapas bar is serving such traditional Spanish staples as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding). More good conversation about accents and history and healthcare systems, plus war and gun control and Reagan and Thatcher and Obama and Sue and Erwin and John and Pop's assorted adventures in Ireland and Wales and Switzerland and Russia. Then home again the long way round through the village and along the canal, lined with long, narrow canal boats (used now as pleasure craft, though they once carried coal and other goods in the days before the railways--apparently Britain, unlike the US, didn't abandon most of its canal system when the railroads came along, and it is still possible to navigate the system).
No comments:
Post a Comment