Before we embarked on our trip, we arranged for an all-day tour to: Leeds Castle, White Cliffs of Dover, Canterbury, and Greenwich.
How do I describe our wonderfully lively guide David? Can you imagine a 61-year old tousled Oxford man,who wears tweeds and scarfs and speaks in the slow cadence of an educated British man? Yet our David had a bit of rapscallion in him, too, as you will find out.
We gathered, 8 am at Victoria station and embarked on our trip. I didn't want to miss anything, so I pulled out my travel journal and began taking notes. He loved it and constantly sought me out to tease. Some of the interesting things I wrote down:
After the wave of bombings in WWII, only 4 buildings were left standing around Victoria Station: Victoria Station, a chapel, a bank, and a pub. 550 firebombers completely destroyed the financial district.
There is a scrolled monument commemorating the 104 women who chained themselves to the Parliment building on 29 December 1914 for the right to vote.
Class in London is obvious by two things: length of words and the age of a car. The lower the class, the shorter the words and the newer the cars. The queen, on her birthday was sent a new rolls royce. She returned it with a note, saying her 1972 rolls still worked great--of course, since it is the queen we are talking about, it would have taken her too long to say it, so it was best to write it.
Leeds Castle was what David described as a "Lady's Castle". It was beautiful: thousands of acres, full of peacocks, and rare birds, rolling hills, and groves of trees. This is the castle that Henry V brought Catherine, his French wife, where he promised to teach her all the English she needed to know: say, 'I love you'. Now say it 100 times." Catherine of Aragon came here after Henry VIII was a wretch and divorced her. It was acquired by Lady Bailey (she came from the wealthy oil family, the Whitneys) to turn into a weekend home!
Yes, that is a moat you see.
Lady Bailey had an obscene amount of money and she was a collector. The house has several life-time original portraits of Henry VIII, and others. This is an original bust of Elizabeth, said to be very much a likeness.
Here is a likeness of Queen Mary or "Bloody Mary."
And here is Henry VIII--our chubby bully.
The house was beautiful--full of winding staircases, draperies, furniture and artifacts. She had a shark-skinned desk, said to be valued at 500,000$ in today's market. But, my favorite part was her library: a room, floor to ceiling, filled with first-edition books, beautiful, beautiful books!
Interested in first edition George Eliots? Here you go.
Oh, what about first-edition Dickens? We got those, too.
We left and it was gently raining.
We walked over to her maze and found our way to the middle.
I felt a bit like a princess as I stood in the middle of the maze and looked out. She constructed an underground grotto, dark and moss covered, with a secret entrance and exit to leave the maze.
Onward to the White Cliffs of Dover. As mentioned, David was a bit of a rapscallion at heart. On the drive over, he constantly pestered me about swimming in the waters of Dover--the coldest in all of Great Britain (including the most northern) due to an arctic current that runs straight down from the pole and gathers at Dover. No sooner had we reached the beach that he stripped down to his tighty white skivvies and dove head-first into the billowy waves! There was a moment of sincere admiration but mostly absolute discomfort at his expense. As I turned to take this picture of the cliffs, David emerged from the water and wrapped his arms around me to pull me in--yes an old man is wet underpants grabbed me! Others from the group saved me at the last moment. Phew! People began to tease me about David having a crush on me. Seems I have been looking at the wrong age group, people. 60+ is where my future companion resides, apparently. I am a hit among the geriatrics. :)
Look at those clouds aren't they majestic?
We left for Canterbury Cathedral.
One of the beautiful window not blow out by WWII bombing.
If you look carefully, you can see where the floor has been worn down by all the pilgrims who would come to visit Thomas Becket's shrine. As far back as the window, people would proceed on their knees around the shrine, for health, forgiveness, etc. I stood at the gate almost a mile away where Henry II began his crawl to Thomas Becket's shrine for accidentally inspiring his guards to kill Thomas by his exclamation, "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" This is where history meets the road people. It's magic. In Henry VIII's purge of catholicism, he had horses trample down the shrine. What a pity. Add it to my list of grievances against Henry.
Yeah, that's Edward the III. the Black Prince.
We ended up at Greenwich for the final leg of the tour. They didn't allow pictures, but we saw so many cool things--the clock that tells the world what time it really is. Did you know that Oxford insists on keeping its own time? They are 8 minutes faster than Greenwich. The only alcove in the entire world that refuses to acknowledge Greenwich time. We saw other things, too, like the original H1, H2, H3, and H4! We saw Halley's camera. So, so cool.
The dents are from shrapnel.
This is the center of the world and the standard for all time.
This is Tower Bridge from the boat ride up the Thames. Oh, it was magical, and worth the hearty hug from David at the end exclaiming, "My favorite!"
