I began writing this shortly before we left Britain, but then life caught up, and in the chaos of returning to the US, it got set aside. As I write these words now, it has been nearly a month and a half since we landed in the US and a month since we returned to Albuquerque.  Life has been…  Very good, but very busy since the return.  But the memories of Britain and Europe are still strong, and part of our hearts still live there, I think.

So now I flip back through my notes and the feel and scents of Scotland return to me.  I will do my best to transcribe some of them, but there’s a great deal to say, so this may take more than one post and some time to get out.  (Not aided, I know, by my incurable verbosity.)  Think of it as a slow-motion discovery for each of you — you’ll never know when another bit of it will pop up.  But I’ll do my best to at least finish up Scotland before, oh, say, Christmas…

One of the final tour targets for the great Rati-Lane British Isles tours was Scotland. We’d been hoping to hit all of the major regions/countries of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), but we still missed Ireland.  Ah well — good reason to return at some point.  ;-)

We had to decide on something, and we had really needed a work-free vacation, so we packed our bags and headed North.  A lot happens in a week of intense vacationing, so there’s quite a bit to report.  We’ll start with:

Edinburgh

Day 1 (Fri): Travel

Bus to Manor House station, Piccadilly Line to King’s Cross, National Express train up through England, past the now-crumbling line of Hadrian’s wall, and into Scotland.  Caledonia: land of the lochs and mountains and the flamboyant and tough northern barbarians who threw back Rome’s might.

For Americans’ reference, while the British Isles are small in a global sense, the distances are still large in a practical sense, and Scotland is very big and very spacious indeed.  Really big.  I mean, it’s small when you put it down next to, say, Alaska or the Ukraine, but it’s big to travel across.  King’s Cross to Edinburgh is just about 400 miles (about 650 km) and took rouhly five hours.  That’s roughly the distance from Boston to Baltimore or Louisville to Atlanta or Santa Fe to Denver.

We pulled in to Edinburgh about 8:00 PM and plunked down the cash to taxi to our B&B.  (Refer back to trading money for stress when travelling.)  We caught a late supper at an upscale Thai place near B&B row, and then crashed.

Day 2 (Sat): Edinburgh

Up, not terribly early (vacation!  Score!) and off to explore the city.

Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and seat of Kings.  It is built along (and spilling off of) a ridge of basalt spanning between two ancient volcanic outcrops, and the scene feels startlingly like something out of a Tolkien novel, or perhaps George R. R. Martin. At one end of the ridge, Edinburgh Castle dominates the skyline.  The “Golden Mile” spills down the ridge away from it, lined with gray Georgian stone buildings.  At the foot of the ridge lies the new Scottish Parliament building and Holyrood Palace, home of kings-in-exile and home-away-from-home for more modern monarchs.  Finally, the ridge lifts up again into Holyrood Park to end at Arthur’s Seat, the other stone mass, open and airy counterpoint to the brooding fortress of its sister pluton.

Our B&B was on, essentially, B&B row, which is pretty much right across from Holyrood park.  So the first thing was walking through the park on the way to town. It was lovely in an ornately-sculpted, eighteenth-century sort of way. Our path took us below Arthur’s Seat (which we resolved to climb… tomorrow) and into the base of the town.

View of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

Then into town, entering near Holyrood Palace and the Parliament building.  We’d seen a sufficiency of palaces at that point, so we glanced in bemusement at the Scot’s brand new, £400 million (!) parliament building.  I guess when you get your independent parliament back after almost 3 centuries of suppression, it’s a cause for architectural exuberance.  Parts of the (in)famous building are really neat (e.g., the native stone facing with samples graven with various quotes and poetry), but other bits were just odd.  It is something of an architectural marvel, in that postmodern chaos-of-architectural-motifs sort of way.  Given its self-consciously avant-garde design and its order-of-magnitude budget overrun, it is, unsurprisingly, a source of some contention among Edinburgh locals.

View of office windows in the Scottish Parliament building

Side wall and fence of the Scottish parliament building

Front face of the Scottish Parliament building

We chose not to tour the Parliament building, but did marvel a bit at the exterior (with some confusion, as we first mistook the bizarrely-grated windows facing onto alleys as signs of a deluded office building).  I was taken, however, with the stretch along the Mile itself, which is faced with different Scottish stone and graven with Scottish verses in English and Gaelic.

From there, we walked up the Golden Mile.  Here we discovered a bit of a tactical mistake.  Remember that ridge of rock between the two promontories that I mentioned?  The city lies along the ridge between the two, but it slopes down from the Castle to the Holyrood Palace, which meant that we were walking the whole mile uphill.  Whups.  Still, it was a fun walk and there were great things to see along the way.  Like street bagpipers…

Street musician in Edinburgh

Our favorite street bagpiper in Edinburgh. Check out the tennis shoes.

(Remember kids: Bagpipes were designed to be heard on battlefields.  These guys were playing a good half mile apart.)

And blue police call boxes…

A true blue police call box. Inoperative, unfortunately. Or maybe that's just what The Doctor wants you to think...

And Adam Smith, trade goods in hand…

Adam Smith, the economist of nations.

And my man, Hume!

Hume's da man!

Along the way, we encountered hordes of tourist shops, ranging from kitsch to high-end.  We popped in to a woolen-goods shop, where Susan picked up a lovely Fair Isle sweater and we grabbed a sun-catcher for our friend Cat (who put up with entirely too much shit from our cats).  Further along, Susan invested in her new hobby of Scotch exploration, snagging an (apparently) lovely bottle of 18-year old Scotch (whose name is not presently at hand — oops).

Finally, we reached the imposing Edinburgh Castle, fortress and last refuge of kings and queens for centuries.  From this site, for over a thousand years, Scottish war chieftans and lords and kings had sallied forth to give battle to everyone from Vikings to English to other Scots.  (And, to hear the brief history blurbs in the Castle tell it, largely to get their asses kicked.)  Here, the infant Mary Queen of Scots holed up from her terrifying uncle, Henry VIII, and here too she herself later gave birth to James VI, future king of Scotland and England.  The Castle was the centerpiece of the Scottish struggles for sovereignty and independence from England for centuries.

(Part of) Edinburgh Castle

The intimidating bulk of the fortress, perched on its promontory of black basalt.

At this point, we were famished, so we made a bee-line for the chic castle cafe.  We were surprised to discover that it was actually good — a big change of pace for tourist monument eateries. (Of which we have sampled our share and then some at this point.)  We had a lovely lunch.  A decadent mushroom bisque to start; then I had haggis, neeps, and tatties (haggis with turnips and potatoes), plated in a surprisingly upscale presentation.  Susan had salmon (Scottish, of course), with lime sauce.  And we split a fantastic slice of Victoria Sponge Cake for dessert.

Contrary to popular opinion, haggis is actually not only edible, but in fact quite tasty.

On to the castle.  We toured the Scottish Crown Jewels.  (Older, by a considerable margin, than the English, but a tad bit less pretentious.  But only a tad.)  The great hall, home, now, of piles and piles of weapons, and, says the audio guide, a fantastically preserved original beam ceiling (and lots of Victorian fanciful interior decor).  Dungeons and walkways and battlements and courtyards.  The Scottish War Memorial.

But we’d done plenty of castle touristing at this point and were a bit burned out, so after only a couple of hours, we called it a day on the vasty pile of stones and headed back down the Mile.

We were a bit at a loss for evening plans, but this turned out to be the week of the Edinburgh film festival, and we hoped to get a piece of that action.  After some tired-tourist dithering, we boldly set off across the wilds of Edinburgh, in search of an art theatre.  After some slight bus mishaps, we pulled in to the theatre we sought just in time to catch the early evening round of animated shorts.

This was a bizarre, but entrancing series of indie animation bits, varying in length from about two to fifteen minutes.  Angst was definitely the theme of the evening.  A blind, old widow, searching for eyes in jars of buttons in her lonely hut in the woods, and the owl-spirit of death who comes to bring her sight and surcease.  The tale of the man who sits at the top of the great cliff to count people in animal costumes who come to cast themselves off the cliff.  The counterpointed stories of three everyday people and their reactions to close encounters with death.  A wordless musical tale of the child who wakes to follow the tooth fairy back to her subterranean home.

Heads abuzz and evening falling, we left the theatre in seach of supper.  Walking back in the direction of our B&B, we ran across “La Bagatelle”, a low-key, but fabulous French restaurant, where we had a stunning and surprising meal.  The appetizers, in particular, were strikingly unusual: Salad with sautéed chicken livers and raspberries, and terrine of pork with apricot jelly.  Then Susan had a fabulous chicken supreme with asparagus velouete, while I enjoyed pork cutlet with truffle sauce.  Altogether, it was one of the best meals we’d had since… Well, France.

Back to the B&B and crashed out, to be ready to take on…

Day 3 (Sun): Edinburgh, reprised

We hopped up to head back to Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat.  In spite of the imposingness of the butte, the climb was not bad — the greatest challenge was finding the correct trail up the side.  From the top, we attained an unparalleled view of Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth.  (Linguistic aside: Firth is a Scots word meaning “inlet” or “estuary”.  It’s originally from Norse, and is related to “fjord”, which gives some sense of just how prominently the Vikings figure in the history of Scotland.)  Among other features, we could get a much better view of the entirity of the Scottish Parliament building.  They tell us that the aerial view is important to fully appreciate the architectural design of the building.  We appreciated that it still looked rather like a jumble sale from above.

Probably the most photographed vista in the Edinburgh area

Susan enjoying the sunshine atop Arthur's Seat

The direction marker atop the Seat

After taking the air on the Seat, we headed back down, leisurely. Took a turn through a ruined chapel at the base of the Seat…

Ancient chapel just above Holyrood Palace. Susan does her part to stave off entropy.

And then headed back to the Mile.  There was a great deal more of Edinburgh to see, of course, but we weren’t going to be able to catch all of it, regardless.  So our goal for the day were the Vault tours.

The Vaults are a series of chambers located beneath the three major bridges of Edinburgh.  Not bridges over water, but bridges over the valley: they span out from the top of the central rock ridge to either side, meeting the hills that rise beyond the glacier-valleys that straddle the ridge.  Over the centuries, buildings arose along the tops of the bridges and up against the bridge arches, leaving vaulted spaces beneath the streets of Edinburgh.  For a time, these vaults were active as store rooms for pubs and restaurants, spare meeting space, homes for the otherwise homeless, and haunts of murderers and thieves.  In the early nineteenth century, they were condemned and closed because of water leakage and lack of sanitation, and it was only in the past decaded that some of them were re-opened to tourists.

The gloom of the Edinburgh Vaults, lit by Susan's sunny disposition.

Seventeenth century wine racks, echoes of long-forgotten pubs, wine shops, and gathering spots for Edinburgh's famed intelligentsia.

Our guide was a local history student, picking up a few quid by guiding curious tourists through the ill-lighted vaults and telling them tales of the people who lived and worked there and even an occasional creepy-crawley story.  Unfortunately for him, he had no other customers than us that afternoon, so we hounded him mercilessly with questions and requests for elaboration.  I could tell that he was torn between his history geek-ness and his canned spiel.  I think he was happy enough to see us off at the end of the tour.

From the Vaults, we went in search of the Museum of Musical Instruments (a branch of the U. of Edinburgh School of Music, as I understand).  While searching, we were amused to rest our feet near the Tron Pub (considerably older than the Tron that geeks usually think of!).  Sadly, no pix of Tron…  We did find the museum, which focused mostly on keyboard instruments, so we didn’t find any notable violas for Susan to drool over.  We were, however, treated to some fabulous harpsichord playing by a fellow who was working his way through the collection.

We still had a great deal of Scotland ahead of us, so we headed back early to the B&B to catch a nap and then an early Italian dinner. (The high point was the tagliatelle with salmon and white wine cream sauce; the calimari was acceptable, but not as good as that in Madrid. Oh well.)

We crashed early again, in preparation to fly off to the Orkneys in the morning.  But that’s another post, for another day…

(Warning: long and lots of pics behind the cut.)

Susan relaxing with our friend, Paddington Bear, as we head out for Wales from -- where else? -- Paddington Station.

After months of living in the Big City and doing lots of the city-side tourist bits, we felt a strong need to get out into the country side and see a bit of trees and grass.  Susan, our travel researcher, had found a compelling entry on the Pembrokeshire Coast Trail in Wales, so with our trusty packs and hiking boots, we set off for the west.

Sadly, we’re here without all our camping gear, so we weren’t really set up to overnight on the trail.  (And I’m not sure if there’s place for it out there anyway…)  Fortunately, a bit of web research turned up a B&B that turned out to be a startlingly good find.

I could narrate it all blow-by-blow, but I figure the pictures speak more than a thousand words.  [Roughly, they each speak about 22k words on a 32-bit architecture, using jpeg encoding at a quality level of about 5.]

Day 0: Transit

Lovely bedroom in the comfy B&B in Pembroke Dock

The train from London to Pembroke Dock is quite a trek — about 5 hours, with a brief change in Swansea — so we were glad to get into the B&B, where our hosts fed us a fabulous dinner, gave us some orientation on the local land, and sent us off to a plush bed.

Day 1: Manorbier to Bosherston

We set off in the mid-morning.  One logistical problem we hadn’t accounted for is that we had (deliberately) arrived slightly before “summer” and the real tourist season kicked off.  While that meant that we didn’t have much competition for the trail, it also meant that most of the busses weren’t running, so it was hard to get places (like trailheads).  Fortunately, our B&B hosts were super-helpful and got us on the trail.

The PCT is really long — we were only walking a tiny fraction of it (about 10 miles this day).  Our segment of the trail started at Manorbier and Manorbier Castle:

Gate tower of Manorbier Castle

We actually beat the staff to the castle in the morning, so we had to wait a bit for them to open.  But only a few minutes, and we did get in to tour the ramparts and some of the old rooms:

Manorbier Castle, overlooking the courtyard; St George's Channel in the background.

Great hall, now somewhat the worse for time and weather.

Susan and the Sea, seen from the ramparts of the castle

We knew that we had a bit of trek, though, so we didn’t linger long at the castle (much as we dearly love old piles of rock and history).  Soon enough, we were on the trail!

The trail begins for real. Be sure not to fall off the cliffs and die. And be sure not to do something incomprehensible in Welsh, either.

The US doesn’t have gorse, but it’s all through British literature, so we were excited to find some (and in bloom, no less).  We discovered that, while it is beautiful, it is also wiry, coarse, and stabby.  Better looked at than trekked through.  Fortunately, the trail is well worn and easy to follow (aside from a couple of sheep trails that distracted us off the main trail and almost over a cliff).

Gorse!

Bucolic farmland.

About 1 mile in to the trail:

Looking back the way we'd come. Manorbier is back there, I swear.

Beautiful beaches.

Paths through pastoral farmland and sheepfolds.

Sheep! And lambs. Spring is in the air!

More beautiful beaches.

Somewhere around here we stopped for lunch at a local pub.  The nice thing about hiking out here is that the small villages are close enough together that you can almost always find a place to eat about the time you’re ready to eat.

A tulgey wood.

I’ve skipped some time here, but a couple hours after lunch, we were able to get a very nice tea at a small tea house overlooking a beach.

Rugged cliffs and sea caves.

Spurs of land. (Yes, I walked out to the end of that.)

And horses with colts. (Did I mention spring?)

At the end of the day, we wearily and somewhat awkwardly made our way back to the B&B for another fabulous dinner and rest.

Day 2: Saundersfoot to Tenby

Because the first day had a moderately long hike, we took this day easier, aiming for a 4 mile hike, ending in the town of Tenby, a medieval town that the Victorians refashioned into a seaside resort town.  While the hiking on the first day was almost entirely in the open, this segment of the coast trail was much more heavily wooded:

Susan in the dappled sunlight of the trees shading the coastal trail.

Lovely forest land.

Looking back the way we'd come. We started on the other side of the spur of land in the distance.

A striking grotto. (More of the omnipresent gorse in the foreground.)

Arriving at the town of Tenby.

We had a very nice late lunch/early supper in Tenby and took a few minutes to tour a Tudor-era merchant’s house.  Then caught a train back to the B&B for an early and relaxing evening.

Day 3: Pembroke and Return

We had a late return train on our last day in Wales, so we had some time in the morning.  After another luxurious breakfast and bidding farewell to our hosts, we caught a morning train up to Pembroke, where we got to tour the Pembroke castle.  This is a larger castle than the one at Manorbier, but dates to the same era.  They’re both late Norman, during the conquest of Wales.  The Normans swept through, smashing resistance and building a ring of 29 (IIRC) castles to hold the territory.  The Pembroke castle was one of the more significant ones out on the Welsh peninsula, apparently, and was in the keeping of an Earl, I think.  Reading a lot of the history text gave a picture of just how rough an era it was, back in the day.  For example, when this Earl had a tiff with one of his peers about a piece of property, what was the recourse?  Courts?  Parliment?  The King?  No, the Earl just grabbed his opponent and tossed him in the Pembroke Castle dungeon for seven years, until the chap was broken in body and spirit.  Yeah.  Nice guys, those.  And a nice era, when the royalty were warlords, answerable only to those with more might.  It’s nice to live in an age that’s a bit more civilized.

In any case, the castle was fascinating:

Panorama inside one of the watch towers of the gatehouse. (Apologies for the crappy compositing.)

One thing that I found particularly thought-provoking was the historically-plausible mock-up feast that they had laid in one of the tower rooms:

Dining hall, with mocked-up Thirteenth Century feast.

This is c. 1250 AD or so.  Note the decorated pottery flagon in the foreground.  This was the valuable, show-off piece of tableware.  Check it out: these are among the richest and most powerful people in the British Isles at this time, and one of the prized possessions is this flagon, imported all the way from France.  A far cry from the gold plates that we think of the royalty dining on, isn’t it?  That had to wait about three hundred years, until after the discovery of the New World and the plundering of its gold reserves.  In the meantime, pottery like this had become widespread, its manufacture and trade driving economic and cultural development across Europe.  It really struck me with a sense of the tides of history: this object that was the prized possession of nobility in the Thirteenth Century, two hundred years later would sit on the tables of middle-class, and two hundred years after that would be commonplace in lower-class taverns.

A garderobe (i.e., medieval toilet) behind the dining hall.

A maze of twisty passages, all alike.

I was also struck by the sense of age and the ravages of entropy on the place.  To date, we had largely toured either well-preserved castles, palaces, and fortresses (such as the Tower of London, Versailles, the Palacio Real in Madrid, and so on) or else castles that had gone almost entirely to ruin.  This castle was somewhere in the middle — it was clearly being cared for, and had been preserved somewhat, but it was also clear that the tourist pounds out here in the far corner of Wales were just not enough to maintain it at the glory that places like the Tower of London can afford.  Oddly, the contrast of the well-maintained and the aging highlighted the sense of age and history even more forcefully to me than I have felt in completely abandoned fortresses.  Something about the sense of fighting the tides of time and the encroachment of the environment highlighted the futility of our battles for eternity much more than do the graceful decay of ruins abandoned altogether to time’s millstone.  I was particularly struck by the keep — once the defensible heart of the fortress and storehouse of most precious goods:

The keep -- once the best-defended part of the castle. Now hollow and aging.

Now, inside, you find just the hollow shell, with post-holes for beams showing where once floors were.  Now, birds roost in the windows of nobility and their calls echo through this lonely space.

Interior of the keep.

An interesting find that the staff pointed us to was the cave below the castle:

Cave in the cliff beneath the castle. Home of swallows, swallow dung, cold stores, and smugglers. For scale reference, that's Susan at the back there.

A decaying Norman window.

The gatehouse, seen from the battlements opposite.

The town of Pembroke, seen across the inlet that defends the Castle.

As we trekked across the sun-washed stone battlements, my eye was caught by a flowering moss growing from the limestone.  I was entranced by the juxtaposition of the ancient and the ephemeral, and the knowledge that ultimately time and the inexorable tide of life, would win against even the hardness of the stone.  This thing, all things devours…

Flowers growing from the rock of the battlements.

There is little to say after Pembroke Castle.  We had a delicious light lunch at a small church-run café in Pembroke, enjoying our home-made, locally-sourced, eco-friendly soup and sandwhiches while we read the posters calling us to submit prayer requests (“We guarantee that at least three people will invoke your prayer every day for two weeks.”)  The irreverent part of me wondered what they would do if I submitted a request for a prayer for the end of prayer requests…

We caught an earlier train than we had planned and made it back to London in the early evening, with time to relax after travel and savor our experiences before work the next day.

Magdalen College Tower in Oxford

Wednesday, the four of us (me, Terran, Mom and Dad) piled into an Evan Evans Tour Company bus for a day-long tour of Oxford, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Warwick Castle.  High-density bus tours aren’t our usual mode of signtseeing — Terran and I have found that we’d actually rather see fewer places in-depth than glance at lots of them — but it seemed like this one hit places we hadn’t thought to go, and it seemed like it would be fun to see what a bus tour is like.

Courtyard of Balliol College in Oxford

Reactions are mixed.  For one thing, getting there better be half the fun because you spend half your day on the bus.  Like anything road dependent, it’s hard to know how bad traffic will be, which makes it impossible to accurately guess when you’ll get home.  We were fairly lucky this time, though.

The walking tour of Oxford was perfunctory at best and left us feeling a bit grumpy about the prospects for the rest of the day.  We were there a shorter time than it took us to get there from London by bus.  The tour took us through the streets to the fronts of some famous buildings and shared a lot of interesting tidbits from Oxford’s long history, but it didn’t include the *inside* of any buildings or even into any of the college courtyards.  Such tours were possible — we saw signs for interior tours of the Bodleian Library, in which Terran and I are very interested, and some other more in-depth walking tours as we strolled the steets.  We can go back to do these, and we’d already planned to, but my folks were stuck with a surface overview so shallow that it wasn’t clear whether it was worthwhile to have gone at all.  We took a few lovely pictures, at least.

Me, Mom, and Dad at Shakespeare's Birthplace

We boarded the bus with a lot of trepidation after Oxford and continued to Stratford-upon-Avon.  Terran and I had heard it was a pretty kitchy place with little to see, so we’d considered this stop to be of least importance.  We turned out to be wrong.  S-u-A turned out to be charming and educational.  The Shakespeare Birthplace home is authentically restored and features guides in every room to describe what daily life was like for the upper middle class of the time.  We learned a lot.  Actors in costume roamed the birthplace and the main drag of the town, breaking into spontaneous drama of scenes from random plays.  And there were flowers in the gardens blooming everywhere, which helped keep my mood high.

We also learned a lot of the known details of Shakespeare’s life that renders him far less mysterious than the collection of urban legends I had heard.  The path of his life is actually well understood and not even so insane for his day: he worked in London as a playwright for twenty years, returning about three times per year to visit his family.  His wife and children lived with his parents.  When he made enough to retire, he retired fairly young and built a comfortable manor house in S-u-A that he and his wife lived in until he died.  The retirement house was unfortunately torn down by a crotchety owner who got sick of pilgrim Shakespeare fans knocking on his door in hopes of getting a look-round.  Seems like a truly bizarre way to react — most people would have just sold the place to someone who actually wanted to run a tourist attraction.  At least, this is what the tour guide told us, and I’m sure every word is meticulously researched. :)

The tour continued through the rolling hills of the Cotswold agricultural region,

Warwick Castle

again filling us with history while we drove.  The area was lovely, and getting there started to actually be half of the fun.  Since we have no car and would rather avoid driving, we’d never have been able to see the Cotswolds in this way.

Warwick Castle was another pleasant surprise.  It’s the ancient fortress of Earl Warwick the Kingmaker, power-player of the Wars of the Roses, that was sold to the Madame Tussauds Company of wax museum fame in the 1970s to much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the locals.  The company turned it into a tourist museum with a surprising amount more taste than their wax museum chain.

Warwick Castle grounds from the battlements

Bits of it were kitchy — the grounds looked and felt very much like an SCA event — but it was overall very well done.  We toured two wax exhibits: a recreation of a weekend social party in 1898 and one on preparing for battle during the Wars of the Roses.  So, Victorian and Medieval.  Then we took a speedy and heart pumping stair-climbing tour of the battlements.  In our usual slow style, we could have spent a day there, but we had a rollicking good time in two hours.

We pulled back into the city around 6:30, tired but in good spirits, and we had enough time for a comfortable dinner and a pint at our local pub, The Salisbury.

Early spring flowers at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew

We woke Sunday morning to a beautiful blue sky and decided that we absolutely had to get out of the house and explore a bit.  Of course, given the vagaries of the weather and the time it took to figure out what we actually wanted to do with the day, by the time we actually arrived at Kew, it was gray and overcast.  Only slightly daunted, we stuck with it, and were rewarded.

We didn’t see much of the town of Kew itself between the train station and the Gardens, but what we saw seemed lovely in that postcard-perfect modern-gentrified-Victoriania sort of way.  Well, I suppose that if anybody has a right to Victoriania nostalgia, it would have to be the Londoners…

The Gardens themselves are…  Amazing.  Defying description.  They are vast for one thing.  We allowed ourselves most of the afternoon, but that turned out to be only enough to barely scratch the surface.

Shortly after arriving, the threatening gray (grey, here, I suppose) clouds opened up and deluged on us.  Complete with thunder and everything — much more violent weather than they usually expect for here.  So we sought refuge in a handy one of the six significant greenhouses on the grounds.

The tropical house itself is one of those Victorian monuments to elaboration, complete with filigreed wrought-iron spiral staircases leading to a catwalk that carries you through the canopy of the tropical trees:

Spiral stair to the catwalk

Susan in the canopy of the indoor tropical jungle

Overlooking the jungle

We discovered that there was even a small aquarium in the basement of the building — a strange find for a gardens.  Though they did have a lot of information on aquatic plants.

Fortunately, London really is the land of “wait 5 minutes and the weather will change” and by the time we had had our fill of the tropical house, the weather had cleared and we got some of the blue sky we had been seeking.

The Gardens really are immense and I don’t have time to describe our entire trip, let alone the Gardens as a whole (most of which we didn’t actually see).  But, really, it was mostly just an excuse to wander around on a lovely early spring afternoon and enjoy the first flowers and and the budding trees.  So pictures will probably tell the story better than I could anyway:

Entrance to the water lily pavilion

No water lilies in the pavilion this time of year, but there was a display of spring orchids on

Snow drops! Possibly the most popular flower there, in early March.

The rock garden

A treetop walkway -- one of our favorite features of the Gardens

View from the walkway. It was beautiful in March -- I'm sure it will be breathtaking once all the leaves come in.

Greek and Mediterranean garden

A sample of the myriad of small flowers that randomly dotted the lawns

[1] Er. I guess it’s actually two weekends ago now, as I finish writing this post. Oops.

The Duomo in Florence

So, this trip was a bit of an experiment.  I’m telecommuting full-time now, for obvious reasons.  Terran had a conference to attend in Pisa, Italy.  The hotel offered WiFi internet.  I could work from the hotel and attend some of the conference social events as his guest.  And, best of all, a mutual friend and colleague of Terran’s — Kiri — would be there to present the research that she and Terran are both working on right now.  So, there was the promise of extra company.

All of this worked out swimmingly except for the work part.  The WiFi in the rooms turned out to be broken most of the time, and the hotel staff was either uninterested or unequipped to do anything about it.  There was functioning WiFi in the lobby, and I ended up doing most of the work that required Internet there.  It was a hassle, but the rest of the trip was so delightful that I’m willing to try it again.  This problem of hotels promising more amenities than they are actually prepared to provide is real, though, and it would stink to get stuck someplace for a week where I really CAN’T work.

Me and Kiri with Machiavelli

At any rate, I arrived almost a day before Terran (of course his flight was delayed, causing him to miss a connection in Rome).  I met up with Kiri and a local friend of hers and got a lovely tour around Pisa.  The following day, which was the day before the conference actually started, we took the train to Florence and spent the day wandering around the city streets, peering into shop windows, oogling statues, and touring the Duomo cathedral.

After that, the conference started, and we snatched hours in the evening or bits of time away from work to see the sights around Pisa itself.

It turns out that the famous Leaning Tower is both more and less than you would expect.  On one hand, it reall does lean a lot.  On the other hand, the dedicated pictures tend to make it look much taller than it is.  It’s the bell tower of the Pisa cathedral, and stands a story or two taller than the church itself.  It’s part of a really amazing plaza called the Piazza dei Miracoli or Plaza of the Miracle, along with the church, the baptistry and tombs.

This photograph is from the opposite side of the plaza from the Leaning Tower, which makes it look much smaller than it is, but you ought to be able to see the lean anyway.  You can’t really see the tombs, which are to the left of the baptistry in the foreground.

The baptistry has truly amazing acoustic qualities.  Every half hour on the half hour, a voice student comes in to

Piazza dei Miracoli

demonstrate it.  We listened to her sing a three-note chord with herself because the chamber echoed back the notes she sang for what seemed like forever.  It was amazing.

So the rest of the story is that I was able to get guest passes to most of the fun social events attached to the conference.  The biggest event was an afternoon trip to neighboring Luca, an ancient walled city, where we were treated to a guided tour and then some time on our own to explore.  After night fell, Kiri was able to lead us to a geocache that featured a meditation labyrinth carved into the entrance to an old church.

Now, I’m enjoying wrapping the text around the images, which is something I haven’t played at before, but I actually don’t have enough text left to separate them :). So I’m just going to give you a list of pictures and captions.

Meditation labyrinth in Luca

View from the top of the Leaning Tower

Fibonacci's tomb! (Plaza dei Miracoli)

Church of Santa Maria della Spina

View of Pisa from the bridge over the river

And that was our trip!