Wednesday-Saturday: Oxford, the Cotswolds, London, and home

Wednesday, October 11
We spent the day visiting various sites in Oxford, the Ashmolean Museum, several Colleges, and some of the shops. The Ashmilean contains the treasures collected by Oxford University over the years, including many wonderful paintings and prints as well as decorative art. Unfirtunately much was off display since they are renovating the building. We walked past the famous Martyers Monument, the site where Mary burned the Archbishop of Canterbury ans others who didn't agree wth the return to Catholocism. It turned out that she had set up her court in Oxfrd and ruled from here until overthrown by her sister Elizabeth. Across the street from the monument is the equally famous Hotel Randolf, featured in several Inspector Morse stories by Colin Dexter.

We have visited a number of the Colleges and they are all different. Some are small and appear to be a bit threadbare; others are very showy and evidently quite wealthy. It has been aid that you could walk all the way from Oxford to London (over 60 miles) and remain on land owned by New College. Here's a view of one of the College quads from the tower of St. Mary's church.

Oxford is quite a wealthy city with many very nice shops. We especially enjoyed visiting the many bookstores and childrens shops in town. The Covered Market has a wonderful selection of meats, cheeses, and other goods and is well worth a visit if you are here.

Thursday, October 12
After walking about Oxford a bit more in the morning, we picked up a rental car and Doug drove us out into the Cotswolds. This is an area of rolling green hills that is famous as a wollen center. The villages were among the wealthiest in England in the 15th century based on the wool trade. The villages are still very quaint and interesting with cream colored limestone buildings and many colorfoul flowers. We enjoyed a traditional British Cream Tea late in the afternoon. We drove back past Blenheim Palace, but it was too late in the day to stop, so we put that off until the next day.

Friday, October 13
We returned to Blenheim Palace in the morning and took a walk through one of the back gates on one of the many footpaths that criss-cross England. The path goes through the Palace grounds, but you can't really wander off it at will. Nevertheless it gave us wonderful access to these grounds and their many spectacular views. The Palace itself is owned by the Queen and granted to the Duke of Marlboro as a residence; but the Queen still owns it. The first impression was made by the incredible numbers of pheasants that were everywhere in and about the grounds. We couldn't walk 10 yards without flushing several birds and their calling was very evident. We crossed several fences and walked around a lake that had been constructed on the grounds well over 150 years ago. The trees and other plantings were very natural and created a bucolic atmposphere. There was a bridge carrying the main roadway into the palace and this made a very attractive sight. The palace itself is rather large and, since we had already visited a number of palaces this year, we decided to pass it up. According to Doug, it's nothing really special anyway.

After retracing our steps, we traveled back to the town of Bladon, right at the entrance to the Palace. It was here, in the village church that Winston Churchill is buried in a family site. Actually, Churchill was born in Blenheim and grew up there. One of his uncles was the Duke and he had all the benefits of this fabulous residence. Nevertheless, the church and his grave are very simple and easily accessible.

We returned to Oxford and will be packing up our clothes and belongings for the trip home. We plan to spend the day Saturday in London - we still need to visit the British Museum, British Library, and Tower of London. Then we'll spend the night at a hotel near the airport so we can catch our morning flight home on Sunday.

Sunday-Tuesday: Paris and Stratford-on-Avon

Sunday, October 8
We took an early morning bus from Oxford, changed to the Tube at Baker Street , and arrived at Waterloo Station more than an hour early for our Eurostar train trip to Paris at 9 am. The train trip was much like one on an airplane in that security and check-in were quite rigorous and we boarded the train only 15 minutes before it left. The seating was only slightly more comfortable than an airliner with wider seats placed too close together to allow for comfortable legroom. The Chunnel train trip wasn't much different from other train trips except for the 20 minutes in the tunnel. The railbed was smooth enough in France to travel at a high rate of speed allowing us to cover the trip in under three hours. We arrived in Paris shortly before 1 pm local time and found our way via Metro to our hotel.

After checking in and freshening up, we headed out in the beautiful Paris sunshine to the Orsay, the museum of art from 1870-1950. Naturally they have a wonderful collection of Impressionist art (almost as good as that of the Art Institute of Chicago, but we didn't mention that fact). The museum itself is a beautiful old Railroad station and attached hotel that were saved from demolition in mid-20th century for conversion to this museum. We spent the better part of the afternoon in the Orsay, then crossed the Seine to the Tuileries Park where we enjoyed strolling with the crowds. After a nice dinner back in the area near our hotel, we walked to the Eiffel Tower to see it all lit up and rode up to the second levelto view the city by night- a very romantic sight.

Monday, October 9
We awoke to a slightly more cloudy day and set off for Notre Dame and areas in the center of the city. Notre Dame is beautifully situated next to the river with spectacular carvings and gargoyles. The windows are very beautiful from inside and the church has a deeply religious feel to it, much different from the national monument feel of Westminster Abbey. It felt much more like the Cathedral in Prague. After viewing the cathedral, we alked back across the river to the left bank and walked into the Latin Quarter to see the area near the Sorbonne, one of the oldest European Universities. Then we crossed back over the Seine to go to Saint Chapelle, the church built by Louis XIII as his private worship center. This is probably the most impressive and beautiful collection of stained glass windows that you could imagine. There are over 1100 different biblical and historical images in the slender, very tall windows of this church.

After catching a quick lunch along the way, we next went to the Louvre and spent the rest of the afternoon there. The museum itself is in a huge palace with the famous pyramid in the front central courtyard. This provides entrance through security to the ticket area and eventually into the museum. We only spent a brief time in the Greek and Egyptian sections before moveing through 17th Century French art over the the Northern European - German and Dutch artists. We didn't even scratch the surface and missed the Mona Lisa but this visit whet our appetite for future visits to the museum. We had a brief but wonderful trip to Par

is, our first and came away with the impression that this is a city we'd really like to return to in the future. The people were very friendly and gracious, the food is wonderful, and the sights are amazing. We made our way back to Oxford, arriving there tired but with many fine memories of our brief trip to Paris.

Tuesday, October 10

We left in the midmorning for Stratford-on-Avon, probably only 50 miles or so from Oxford. This is a very charming town with much of interest, especially relative to Shakespeare. We visited the Anne Hathaway cottage, where Shakespeare's wife ahd grown up. This charming cottage is the canonical version of an English cottage and its image appears on many items. We then traveled to the Mary Arden House, the home of Shakespeare's mother's family. Both of these homes were of 14th century timber frame construction with stick and wattle walls. Interestingly, they were originally large open structures without fireplaces and chimneys, where fires were built in the center of the rooms. Later, fireplaces and chimneys were added and this allowed them to add a second floor to the house with sleeping space above. We then rode back into town to visit the Shakespeare museum and birthplace. His father had been a middle-class craftsman and business person and Shakespeare had received a standard, good schooling, but he went off on his own after marrying at 18 and developed the theatre company in London. He returned to Stratford after gaining considerable fame and fortune and lived to 52 years; what amazing accomplishments he had in his relatively short life. This visit really made Wm. Shakespeare a lot more real for both of us.

We finished the day by meeting up with Barbara and Doug for a performance of Julius Caesar at the Royal Shakespeare Company theatre. We sat in the front row and heard and saw everything extremely well. The company has great actors and we were able to follow the familiar story very well. The blood came very close to splattering us in the gory parts and we were almost showered by actors spit as they enunciated each word extremely carefully. What an experience. We retrned to Oxford late this night by train.

Thursday - Saturday: London and Oxford

Thursday October 5
We arrived at London Gatwick at about 9:30 after an uneventful flight. We took a train into the city arriving at Victoria station where we began our sightseeing for the day. We started by walking to the the Kenisington area where there are many nice shops, etc. After a quick sandwich we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum where we came upon a very interesting exhibition of Leonardo Da Vinci's work. The curators had organized the exhibit around a series of Da Vinci's notebooks in an attempt to show his thought processes. While much of what they stated is conjectural, the exhibit was quite interesting. We saw some of the other exhibit areas in this vast museum and especially enjoyed the displays of British (and other) silver. By mid-afternoon we had pretty well run out of gas and decided it was time to begin our journey to Oxford, so we returned by Tube to Victoria station and caught a bus to Oxford.

We arrived at Barbara Faires' flat at about 6 pm and had an enjoyable evening before turning in relatively early for the night. We had so far mastered the Train system (at least from Gatwick), the Tube, and bus transit from London to Oxford and felt we were ready for just about any type of travel.

Friday, October 6
It was back into London after a refreshing sleep. Barbara's flat is about a 10 min. walk from the bus station, and its about 1 1/2 hours to London (Victoria Station) by bus. This morning we headed over to Westminster area where we came up out of the Tube station just as Big Ben was striking 11. The weather was still a bit rainy, but we forged onward to view Parliament and to see Westminster Abbey. The latter is a very amazing site with memorials of tombs for many of Great Britain's important leaders - political, religious, scientific, and in the arts. It was interesting that Mary I and Elizabeth I (catholic and protestant, resp.) half-sisters, both daughters of Henry VIII are buried side-by-side in the same tomb. Elizabeth was clearly the winner, since she is the one with an effigy on top of the tomb.

We then headed over to the National Gallery, walking along St. James Park where we were caught is a sudden downpour without a taxi in sight. We arrived at the National Gallery just as the sun was peaking through and the rest of the day was very pleasant. We followed Rick Steve's tour of this museum as described in his book "Mona Winks." This took us from medieval art through the Rennaisance, Baroque, and into the Impressionist eras. The collection in this museum is amazing and we enjoyed the afternoon spent there very much.

We made our way back to the Victoria Station area for a pub dinner at the "Jugged Hare" and the play "Wicked". We each had meat pies (with chips and "veggies"); Sue's was ham and chicken with Bechemel sauce and Phil had "Poachers Pie" consisting of boar, venison, hare, and pheasant in a beer gravy. Both were very good. We then walked back to the Apollo Theatre for the performance of "Wicked" by the Broadway cast. Karin and Kristen had bought the tickets for Susan's birthday and I went along for the ride. The play was very well done and we enjoyed the treatment of this "pre-quel" to the Wizard of Oz. We didn't recognize the cast, but the rest of the audience certainly knew the leads and cheered wildly each time they sang. This was a very enjoyable, light musical and we'd encourage you all to see it if you can. We caught the 10:30 bus back to Oxford and were back at Barbara's by midnight - a very full day.

Saturday, October 7
We spent the day seeing Oxford, first visiting the High Street and shopping district, then walking about some of the Colleges, and finishing in the afternoon with a visit to the Botanical Garden before attending Evensong at Christ Church Cathedral. The students are just returning for the term, but since classes haven't begun, the streets are crowded during the day with shoppers and in the evening with partyers. Some highpoints of the day were the visit to Wadham College to see the Penrose tiling and the visit to the History of Science museum. The Wadham patio is tiled using a Penrose tiling consisitng of a nonrepeating covering using two tiles. The History of Science museum contains many interesting exhibits of astronomical and measurement devices, but perhaps the most interesting item on display was a blackboard that Albert Einstein had used while giving a series of lectures at Oxford in 1931. It still contains his derivation of an equation describing the rate of expansion of the universe.

We visited the Oxford Botanical garden, which was interesting in its own right, but which also was hosting a Fall botanicals festival complete with Morris Men (dancers), lamb and mint burgers, and ginger beer. At about 6 pm we walked over to Christ Church for the Evensong service. The church is a very tall and narrow Gothic Cathedral. We sat in the "choir," i.e. the benches that run along the central aisle and the Cathedral Choir did the responses, psalms, and an anthem. It was a beautiful service. We then walked back to Barbara's flat for supper.