Father’s Day card from European trip* with Chris

Caro Papa,
Among the odd customs they have here in Grande Bretagne is having Father's Day in June instead of September, so I thought I'd take advantage & send you this card. You’ll have two this year!

This trip has taken us straight out of London. After 1 night in St Paul’s old Choristors’ School (now a Yoof ‘Ostel) we stayed down in Belgravia, between Victoria & Pimlico stations.  Had to travel clear across town by tube & taxi on a Sunday morning [luckily, since it was less crowded] to meet the tour. Thus only a £4 taxi ride from Kings Cross-St Pancras station [which is now one giant thing] to the coach, then it drove back down past Victoria to go out of London! Victoria Station's now a hub like Central in Sydney, with ‘country’ trains, tube trains, a coach station & city buses.) We've booked a room in the Belgrave House Hotel, 30 Belgrave Road, London WC1X4QN (no, I have no idea how they worked out their postcodes, but if I were in, say, West Central (WC) I would have objected at the time) for when we return to London between June 22 & 28. This is quite basic but not grotty & will, we decided, not only be less stressful & awkward than the Youth Hostels in Central London, but cheaper!  The numbering in Belgrave Rd is in the notorious London style, with a separately-numbered Square interrupting the sequence. (Just passed a sign for a motor museum off the main road on the way to Yeovil — near Marston Manor, but none are on tour itinerary unless they are (unlisted) attractions in the bigger towns we go to for lunch or at night.)

The organised tours can be frustratingly constrained at times, but this is price paid for having all your accommodation, transport, quite a bit of food, luggage handling & some sightseeing all arranged & pre-paid.  Thus: have just spent a scant half-hour at Stonehenge with my camera in one hand, an audio guide in the other, clamped to an ear, trying to appreciate the mystical beauty & mystery of the hills & stones while not bumping into other people similarly engaged & also not trip over the 15" high rope guides. Saw Avebury in much better circumstances the (long, light) evening before.  [Cricksleaze 1 3/4] — there's a name! {Roadsigns continue throughout.} They seem to use litres & grams, but still have miles on roadsigns. Chris says the speedometers have both mph & kph. Sounds confusing. We've seen petrol prices like 67.9 pence/litre — just about double Oz rate given £1=$AU2.25. It's a bit depressing now we've gone from getting ~1200 lire/$AU1 in Italy and 4.45FF/$AU1 in France. There's a £1 coin slightly smaller & thicker than the $1 one (being a guest, I won't make a joke about that).

Speaking of depressing, we've had more rain here than elsewhere & today there's some mist & fog, but it's not all that cold & often there's a little sprinkly shower for 10 minutes, then it clears up for 30 minutes, &c [Luppit 2]. My motto has become 'always take both the sunhat and  the jacket when leaving the coach for more than 5 minutes.

We spent 2 nights & a day in London after the ferry crossing (landing at Light Grey Cliffs of Dover) & drive through Kent (Garden of England).  On arrival walked around Trafalgar Square & went to Evening Concert by Candlelight at St Martin's in the Fields (£6) [Whimple] [Ottery St Mary]. Spent so long next morning posting your 2nd batch of two boxes of books (took only 1 1/2 hours, in Italy took 2 1/2) & arranging accommodation that instead of trying to cram British Museum in, we got on a topless double decker bus tour.  Well-used these can be a very good deal — a ticket is valid 24 hours & they run several different routes, all every 15-30 minutes and you can get off & on when you like & change routes.  We stopped at Westminster Abbey & Piccadilly Circus (then walked to Leicester Square & Covent Garden, where Kiri te Kanewa was on that night in Rigoletto (but we had to get up early — see first paragraph) [Duckes Alm House on the corner of South Wanford & somewhere]. Took photos of various monuments you'd have seen in 1956 so you could compare your recall of London with today. [Dunchideole] [Bovey Tracey]  Did you know there are some caves called Wookey Hole, by the River Axe, near Cheddar Gorge in the Mendip Hills?  Have now travelled across Salisbury Plain.

[On first day of tour ducked up to Oxford with our bags. A lot of the Colleges, e.g. Bailliol, & the Bodelian Library, Ashmolean Museum, even Carfax Tower — which has a lovely view & would add to my spiral staircase photo collection — were closed, but I had lunch (sandwich, sitting on park bench) next to the Ship Inn & Chris & I toured Trinity, where they mark the rowing winners' wall with chalk each year & you can see the old ones fading away.  [Sticklepath]

Having stayed at scenic historic Swindon (ahem; well the hotel was nice & had a FULL COOKED BREAKFAST (no chips)) we're headed west & consuming Devon [T...... St Mary]. Many cows. More sheep.  Hedges. Green fields.  Oak, sycamore, beech, cow parsley, nettles, holly, ivy. Rolling green hills, fields, hedges, trees, drystone walls, thatched cottages with roses & foxgloves, rustic stone farm buildings, more bloody rolling green fields & hedges, cows, sheep & rustic thatched farm labourers.  And the English complain about the Australian landscape being too monotonous! [Nichols Nywett] Red sandstone in Exeter (& red soil).  In Dartmoor stopped at Widecombe-in-the-Moor where a lady was taking her 4 dogs for a walk in their stroller.  The man in the general store explained how cider (7% alcohol) helped reduce the effect of the clotted cream (97% fat), so we had some of both & he also sold me the stamp for this. They had ice cream cones with clotted cream on top, but [Downey St Mary] unless I have quite light lunches & stick to the spring (or refilled from the tap) water, those breakfasts will undo all the good work of the Continental ones & I'll have to let out all the clothes I've taken in. Went back to see the Tors & got stuck behind a herd of sows on the road.

Ah, country life, with the hedges, rolling stone green walls & fields of thatched rusty sheep. [Eggesford] [Witheridge] The rhododendrons here all turned purple & went wild.  They even have “lamb” warning signs —  perhaps they eat the rhododendrons & turn savage? Actually, because the coach is high, we can see over many of the rustic hedges to the fields of rolling green cows (the ones that ate the rhododendrons — it must be that because the new Minister for Health (or was it Agriculture?) said they'd eliminated BSE). Perhaps I should have only had 1/2 of cider & not a full pint, but wanted to get full anti-cholesterol effect …
*Trip to Italy, France, UK/Ireland in May-June, 1997
My only trip overseas; Chris had seen New Zealand