Shock of Recognition

                                                                           

Usually I dash past Facebook ads but a picture stopped me cold--I know that place!  There at the corner of the building in the foreground, I once washed the mud and sheep poop off my boots, using a brush (hanging on the wall) provided for walkers such as ourselves so that we didn't track crud into the lovely establishments of the village. 

The place is the Old Mill in Lower Slaughter. In 2006 we were on a self-guided walking tour in the Cotswolds--one of the best trips ever.

The first picture is grabbed from a page on Cotswold touring. The second was taken by John, of me, cleaning those boots.

  

                             And a third, also from John's files.

                                                  

It's wonderful how that quick glance brought back those very special couple of weeks.

The Great Adventure - Part One

This is a passport photo. Forty three years ago, John and I set off on our Great Adventure -- three months traveling and camping in Europe. I wrote about it  HERE a while back...

 In the course of my closet clean up in search for a missing earring, I discovered several boxes of photos -- some from said Great Adventure. Not so many as I'd like -- most of our photos are on slides -- but enough to bring back  so many memories. .

Our Sears tent -- had we only known how sophisticated European camping gear was! We looked like the poor relations...

I found postcards we'd sent my grandparents  . . .

 

So many memories -- Devon's apple orchards in bloom, Stonehenge -- back then you could walk amongst the Standing Stones, clotted cream . . .

Salisbury Cathedral, Maiden Castle -- which turned out to be an Iron Age hill fort -- a great tiered mound with sheep all over it, pubs -- I fell in love with shandy, an unlikely combination of fizzy lemonade and beer, Scotch eggs and Cornish pasties and picnicking on the cliffs of the Dorset coast...

We toured Greenwich  and Hampton Court, me, seeing it though a haze of historical novels and English history -- and when we began watching the Showtime series THE TUDORS last night, I fell in love with England all over again.

 

Chasing Steeples

 As we were watching a DVD of Inspector Morse last night (alas, we've run through all the Foyle's War episodes,) I found myself thinking of our last trip to England -- a walking tour in the Cotswolds in 2006.  We made our way along well-marked public paths through fields and woods and almost always, as we approached the next village, we would sight the steeple of the largest and oldest church.

 We managed to visit a few stately homes and even statelier gardens but my favorite parts were less grand ... the pastures (humming 'Sheep May Safely Graze') . . .

 

and the tidy vegetable gardens.

 The houses set me dreaming . . . how charming to live in a cottage with a thatched roof!

Or, in this house below, which I saw only at a distance. It was perhaps my favorite, isolated as few others were.

 But a quick perusal of the ads offering houses for sale let us know that not in this lifetime could we ever afford property in the Cotswolds.

Not even a fixer-upper.

Elite Motors in Tooting -Sepia Saturday

It's Martin's (Square Sunshine) fault.  Back on May 1, he posted a picture of a motorcycle for Sepia Saturday and I responded by telling him of my Great Adventure that began at Elite Motors in Tooting (near London.) And he sent me a link to the first picture -- that's Elite Motors as I remember it. Not exactly sepia but about forty years ago.

It was mid-May and my husband  and I flew to London via Icelandic Air (the cheapest way to get there) and made our way to Tooting where we took delivery of out brand new BSA 650 Thunderbolt, purchased through an export scheme which meant we didn't have to pay the tax if we took it out of the country in a certain amount of time.

Imagine the bike below with side carrier boxes over the rear wheels, a knapack on the handle bars, a duffle bag containing all our camping gear, and two people in scruffy, low tech garments. (We were so envious of the leathers the 'real' bikers wore.)

As we made our cautious way through London traffic, a rowdy bunch shouted at us "Where's your 'arley Daividson?" and asked if we were on our way to the Isle of Man.

The following three months were heavenly. We  headed south toward Devon and learned about caravan camps, clotted cream, pasties, shandy, baked beans on toast, and the innumerable differences in our common language.

We walked through Stonehenge in the early morning, before the tour buses arrived; we camped at a farm where the apple blossoms fell on our tent; we stood in a bluebell wood one night while bats flittered about our heads . . .

I'd already been an Anglophile, thanks to P.G.Wodehouse, P.L. Travers, C.S.Lewis, Kenneth Graham, J.R.R. Tolkien. T.H. White, Elizabeth Goudge, and many, many other authors whose England I'd absorbed. And it  would have suited me fine to spend the whole three months we'd allotted in touring my spiritual home. 


But we had determined to see as much of Europe as time and budget allowed. (Yes, we had a copy of Europe on Five Dollars a Day. And by camping and eating in restaurants only rarely, we came close.) 

In three months time, we managed to visit quite a few places --

Spain  where the sparkling wine at an amazing 25 cents a bottle in one camp was a joy contrasted with the eerie sight of the a lone Guardia Civil with his machine gun in the middle of nowhere. And France, where I fell in love with Marie Antoinette's Petite Hameau and we lingered for days in the charming town of Loche -- home of Agnes Sorel (and her wardrobe malfunction.) Oh, the fresh baguettes! And the excellent butter and cheese! Who needed restaurants?

It was the trip of a life time -- on to Italy (Venice Rome and Florence), Austria (Salzburg and the salt mine at Hallein but not Vienna, alas, Merisi), Switzerland, Germany (Munich and the Black Forest,)Belgium (probably the friendliest of the countries we visited.) Holland (and how amazed we were at the diversity of the people there and the food from exotic lands) and so back to England.

We returned to Tooting where the nice folks at Elite (we loved the fact that the mechanics wore ties and long white coats like doctors) took the bike and arranged for it to be shipped to us in the States.  Where, a few years later, we sold it for more than we'd paid for it -- the trip and the deal of a lifetime.

Where are my pictures of this odyssey? On slides . . . somewhere. But in my head they're clearer than any slide could ever be. Thanks, Martin, for reminding me of the Great Adventure!

(For more Sepia Saturday posts from all over, go HERE.