England

 PH and I just returned from a trip to England!  It was a personal trip, a chance to meet a member of my family that until about six years ago I didn't know existed. That's how it works when you go looking for ancestors. Sometimes you get lucky and find one that's living and even luckier when you can meet. But that's all for another post.  We were there for a wonderful two weeks - everything worked perfectly, even the weather.

Some highlights:

 Liberty of London!  We headed straight for the sewing section and oh, my. Immediately PH found a Husband Chair and let me loose. 

 I really thought I had died and gone to quilter heaven.  I've read posts about lawn and that's the problem with buying fabric online - you want to feel it.  Well, this stuff was like dipping my hands into a bowl of whipped cream.

 I wanted all of it.  Every single bit of it. But at $26 a meter compared to our $12.95 a yard, I had to be choosy.  It was sensory overkill.  I couldn't decide.  I was panicked.  This was just our first foray after arriving. I couldn't spend our entire budget on fabric. One of the very helpful and kind clerks said yes, I could take photos and then showed me the section of fabric that is exclusive to them.  She said others sell Liberty fabrics but no one but them sells the exclusives.  I don't know how, but I bought just 1/2 meter of four fabrics. Can you believe that?  PH also told me to go out to the other room and get a package of fats. And a pair of those cute little scissors that are made in Sheffield. 

 What a doll. He didn't rush me and he paid!!

 We went to the Globe Theater, a rebuild of Shakespeare's theater.  This was a highlight for us. The theater is open to the elements.  There is no roof and they don't cancel a performance for rain. You bought the ticket so you decide if you want to get wet.  The middle section, the cheap(er) seats are for standing.  You stand for the three hour performance and are exposed to the open air.  We are old.  We bought seats but they are little more than church pew wooden.  You can rent a cushion to sit on and we did.  We bought our advance tickets (a must) on the third tier so we were under the overhang and protected from whatever the weather gave us.  In this case it was rain. Yes, it did rain and yes, even the actors are exposed to the weather.  We were undercover in our warm jackets and the play, A Winter's Tale, was great. Shakespeare is very easy to understand if you watch it performed.

 We visited Oxford

 We ate in very old pubs.  I mean come on, Columbus wasn't even born when this place opened up.

 I won't apologize for being a Doc Martin fan and I'm also not groupie enough to think we would see a filming segment, but from watching the show I could see that part of the charm of the program is the setting.  So, we drove to Cornwall and went to Port Isaac and put it in the top 4 of our experiences for the whole trip.  It's too hard to rank them so we just clumped our top four at number one.

 If you know anything about the program you probably notice that when filming at this house they never actually go IN the house.  There is a farmer's barn up the road that has the stage set for indoor scenes.  What we see in the program is the front door open from outside or inside.  If inside, they are at the barn set.  You can go online and look this house up and see what it really looks like.  It is a rental unit so if you are rich enough you can rent this place for a week (or more.) and pretend.  This house is called Fern Cottage.

 This is the part that got to PH in the end.  This is a two lane road coming in to Port Isaac and sometimes the roads are even narrower.  Two lanes of traffic.  I think as he's aged, PH isn't quite as daring or adventurous as he used to be.  After the trip here he wanted to stay for two reasons  1) it's gorgeous and 2) he wanted to NOT be driving.  So we stayed in Port Isaac for two nights, 1.5 days.
The streets are steep.  Very, very, very steep.

 This is part of the ruin of Tintagel, the legendary place where King Arthur was conceived.  Now, I know that this castle was built many hundreds of years after Arthur so he couldn't have been conceived here but there is a Dark Ages ruin beneath these ruins and so the legend is alive.  It isn't proven that he exists but I told Brian, my relative, that I believe in Arthur.  He is my Santa Claus. I believe.
Everywhere here in Cornwall is very steep and we walked everywhere we went. Everywhere.  Here, the paths and tracks and roads were so steep I told PH it was a good thing our shoes were enclosed so we didn't slip right out of them.  By this time in the trip I think our muscle memory was kicking in because while it was steep and long and curving, we didn't care.
While we walked the towns we stopped in we met people who were walking from town to town.  At a bench here we settled down to enjoy the view of the coast and castle juxtaposition and shared that bench with a man who is in the process of walking the entire Cornwall coast. When he has a day or two off work, he walks.

 We spent a day in Windsor

 But this is what I wanted.  I wanted the rolling English hills separated by hedgerows and stone walls not barbed wire.  I wanted stone buildings and grazing sheep. 

 We didn't see any corn and precious few cows.  We saw green, green, green and fat, fluffy sheep. We marveled at the height and thickness of the hedgerows and field upon field of sheep. Old, old, old little towns built on Roman ruins, with streets too narrow for two way traffic but they do it anyway.  We ate in pubs with low ceilings, dark beams holding up uneven walls. We stayed in B & Bs hosted by friendly, helpful people who helped us change our itinerary almost daily as they guided us to interesting places to see. We stayed in a Georgian manor house built in the 1600s and felt pampered.
We met a member of my family, met his family, he is a class act.
We had a perfect trip but there's no place like home.