UK2011 Some Reflections

There’s a lot to absorb in a long trip to another country. After being on the move nearly every day for 6 weeks, I find the days start to blur into each other and I start having trouble remembering what castle or church or garden or walk we saw on what day.

So first, the pictures:

London, that we visited at the beginning and end of the trip.

South England, including Cornwall, Devon and a day in Oxford.

Wales, with lovely coastlines, castles and gardens.

The Yorkshire Dales and North Yorkshire.

Scotland, from Berwick-Upon-Tweed to Thurso.

I probably goes without saying, but this entire area has just so much history. Every old abbey or church we saw was started in the 1200s or thereabouts. It’s also quite astounding what was built, by hand, with stone. Magnificent buildings, viaducts, bridges, endless stone walls.

The UK is a remarkably small place. By my quick search, it’s only slightly more than 25% the size of British Columbia (243610 km2 vs 944735 km2). Into that small space are packed about 62 million people (BC has about 4 million). So take twice the population of Canada and put them into an area ¼ the size of some of our larger ( and mostly empty) provinces.

Much of what is written about British cuisine is probably true. Indian curries have become the new “national ethnic cuisine”. Pub meals tend to the steak and ale pies, fish and chips, bangers and mash. A “tuna salad” we had once was basically a tin of tuna upended on some greens. Grocery stores stock an impressive selection of “ready meals” and “takeaway” shops are popular. Canned beans and canned peas seem to show up in surprising places.

Like most civilized places in the world, it is possible to buy wine for your meal in all grocery stores. We found quite nice reds for ₤3 to ₤4. In fact, I’d list wines as among the “good deals” in the UK. Other “good deals” would be chocolate milk (about ₤1 per litre), Boursin cheese (a French import) on special for ₤1 each (these cost about $5 or more in Canada) and bananas, for some reason.

Campgrounds all have showers and flush toilets but they don’t have picnic tables and very few have any kind of kitchen facilities (unlike New Zealand where campgrounds all had full kitchens with stoves, microwaves, kettles….). The weather was stellar almost the entire time we were there and so we managed to tent for about 32 nights.

Most of our gas (petrol) cost around ₤1.40 per litre. This works out to about C$2.30 per litre. Our rental car managed to deliver us between 45-50 miles per gallon, Imperial gallons, I assume. We managed to rack up over 4500 miles in 35 days of driving.

Speaking of units of measurement….the Brits are even more mired in a mixture of metric and “Imperial” units than us Canadians. Distances on the highway are still in miles. Fuel is sold in litres. Milk was available in pints and litres (pints???). Temperatures were given in both Celsius and Fahrenheit on local radio stations. I heard someone discussing their weight in stones.

Radio Stations…. In the USA, we almost NEVER listen to local stations because they all seem to have the worst programming imaginable, with a diet of fundamentalist religious nonsense, talk show crap and over-hyped rock. In the UK, on the other hand, there was always a Classical music station available and we began to enjoy some BBC Radio 2 and Radio 3 programs. As I write this I'm streaming a Radio 2 morning show with a quite amusing Scottish host.

Scotland was probably my favourite part of the UK, mostly because of the scenery, the remoteness and how uncrowded it was. The northern coast was truly wonderful. Wales was very refreshing after the crowds of Cornwall and Devon. It was also interesting to attempt pronouncing Welsh place names. Good luck with that! Abbey and castle ruins were everywhere and excellent estate gardens were in full bloom.

Travel. Gotta love it.

Oncoming Vehicles in Middle of Road

This is a warning sign that nicely summarizes driving in the UK.

Aside from the challenges of driving on the left in a right-hand drive vehicle, drivers new to the UK must contend with a number of challenges:

First, there is lots of traffic. You almost never have stretches of highway to yourself. There are usually other cars around and most of them seen to be right behind you, materializing from nowhere!

Roads can be very narrow. In some cases, this means the width of a back alley in most cities or towns in Canada. Even if the road is nominally 2 lane, houses and other buildings are built right out to the edge of the street (obviously before the advent of minimum setback rules) and on-street parking is common, so any hope of having 2 lanes evaporates quickly. One gets adept at weaving in and out, giving way to oncoming traffic and powering ahead when an oncoming vehicle pulls over and flashes it’s lights to indicate that they’re letting you go first. There are long stretches of road in Scotland and rural England/Wales that are basically single lane roads with "passing places".

In some areas, stone walls and/or hedgerows can be at least 6 feet high so driving down a narrow road or lane can be more like driving along a tunnel with the hedges or stone walls making it impossible to see anything to either side.

In general, drivers should abandon any ideas they might have of simply pulling over if there is a need to consult a map, take a picture or generally collect oneself. There is seldom any place to pull over. Usually, your only option is to keep going.

Many "intersections" in the UK are handled by "roundabouts", the (in)famous traffic circle. These have been tried in North America but mostly abandoned in favour of traffic lights. In the UK, they are everywhere. Once you get the hang of them, they are fine. In fact, they have one advantage, especially when there are several road directions all converging at one roundabout and when you really don't have any idea which one to take. With the roundabout, you just keep going round and round until you finally figure it out and then bail out at the appropriate exit.

We did drive on stretches of "motorway" or "dual carriageway", but we tended to avoid such roads in favour of the country lanes and smaller highways through more interesting terrain.

In any case, the roads were better and somewhat less winding than New Zealand's and we survived without a scratch on the rental car, a measure of success, I suppose.

Eh?

In addition to adjusting to some of the accents we encountered in the UK, there was the language in Wales. This little corner of the UK has been undergoing a resurgence in the popularity of the Welsh language. Every road sign we saw was in both English and Welsh.

This poster was seen in a small forestry park on the island of Anglesea. There was an English version, but it wasn't nearly as interesting.

We didn't learn too much about how to pronounce words in Welsh, although after I got home I did find a website that went into many of the finer details. It goes without saying that many words aren't pronounced the way you'd expect.

More on Getting Really Lost

Apparently my last post caught some attention because I was quickly accused of being insensitive and arrogant. Surely not someone who knows me.... :-)

I will say at the outset that the story that prompted my post was a tragedy, but I stick to my comments. In fact, I'll go further. There are many other examples where people have relied completely on technology and have suffered the consequences. Around where I live, some snowmobilers have died in avalanches because they behaved as though they were invincible with their powerful machines, avi beacons and avi lungs. Some young hockey players play a very physical game thinking their equipment will protect them, but concussions are on the rise. And people get misdirected and/or lost because they relied entirely on their GPS units.

GPS devices may be marketed as failsafe tools to keep you from getting lost, but experience shows otherwise. It's not insensitive to point this out in the wake of another tragedy and we need to learn some lesson from such events.

I've done a certain amount of traveling on icefields, in the woods and in other, crowded, foreign countries. I always have a map or road atlas of some kind. I almost never use a GPS, although I do have one and have used them on icefield traverses, but NEVER by themselves. This would be a VERY BIG MISTAKE. Besides, maps give you a "big picture" of where you are in relation to other places, something a GPS does not do. One does not need special skills to use a basic road map, although I will admit traveling with a topo map and using a compass takes some practice. It would be a big mistake to go into the woods or cross a featureless icefield and rely only on a GPS.

I will also say that I don't think I've ever been lost. By this I mean in a situation where I was not able to "find" myself and had to wait for someone to rescue me. I have been temporarily confused about exactly where I was and have hiked or driven off in the wrong direction for a short time, but these have been temporary setbacks and it wasn't a GPS that saved me. It was an awareness of where I was in the big picture of the terrain. Watching for terrain features, noting where the sun was, using a compass occasionally, using a map....there are numerous techniques for keeping yourself found.

Unfortunately, too many people think that technology like GPS units make old tools like maps redundant. They are wrong and sadly, some pay the price.

How to Get REALLY Lost

On our way home we heard the story of the couple who managed to get lost in the USA backcountry using their GPS. One report of the story appeared here. The Urban Dictionary was quoted as saying that GPS is used by people who have no idea where they are.... Exactly. The source of the problem in a nutshell. We rely on all this technology and have basically given up making the effort to know where we are. GPS can be a big help occasionally, but it isn't a substitute for using some old-fashioned kinds of equipment: a map, a compass and your head.

UK 2011 - The Final Days

With only 2 full days remaining in the UK Tour 2011, we are almost able to accept that there are really only a couple of things that we can realistically cram into that time.

So, on Sunday, we took the tube part-way to London and then a bus to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. These gardens are more than just patches of shrubs and bushes but have been important botanically in the collecting and growing of representative plant species from around the world. Scientists from Kew are also involved in conservation efforts for endangered plants and ecosystems in several areas of the world.

I remember hearing about Kew back when I was in Biology classes in the early 1970s, so it was nice to finally see the gardens in person.

It took us several hours to wander around exploring Rhododendron Dell, the Azeleas, a couple of large Victorian “glass houses” containing ferns, water lilies and more. It’s a great park-like place and the only down side were the large jets on landing approach to Heathrow passing overhead every minute.

Monday dawned sunny and bright so the main agenda item for the day was to find the James Caird. For those who aren’t up on your early Antarctic explorers, the James Caird was the small boat used by Ernest Shackleton and 5 other crew members to escape when their ship, the Endeavour, was crushed by ice. They sailed this boat 800 miles (1500 km) across the Antarctic Ocean to South Georgia Island where they then had to make a 36-hour trek over mountains and glaciated terrain to the whaling station of Stromness. Then, they had to take a ship back to rescue the rest of the crew (22 of them, I believe) who were nearing starvation on Elephant Island. Not one member of the crew was lost. It’s an amazing story and well worth reading if such things interest you.

Anyhow, the James Caird is now resting at Dulwich College, a private school that Shackleton attended back in the late 1880s. We made our convoluted way to the College (founded in the 1600s by a contemporary of Shakespeare, admits students aged 7 to 18, charges ₤500/term, 3 terms/year, where students wear white shirts, ties and suit jackets…), got our visitors’ passes and spent some time reading the various displays. Very interesting.

The remaining part of the day was spent on the tube, walking across London Bridge, past St James Cathedral, past where Dr Johnson’s house once was on Fleet Street, past the Royal Law Courts and back to our hotel near Heathrow.

Supper at a nearby pub (see comments in a coming post on British cuisine) and getting ready for our flight on Tuesday finished off the day. I have to say that London’s transit system is quite amazing and definitely the ONLY way to get around within the M25 ring road. London, it’s been nice. Very, very busy, but nice.

Heading South

Tuesday was mostly a driving day as we wandered around the backroads, various peninsulas and bays in western Scotland. Extricating ourselves from that part of Scotland wasn’t a quick or direct process. We stopped briefly in Stirling – there was a very large monument to some famous Scottish guy – it’s another history thing, I understand….

Once out of Stirling, it was mostly “dual carriageways” past and south of Edinburgh. We did a repeat night at a nice campsite near the Tweed River and Berwick, at least partly because we knew the place had a microwave so we could have some hot food for a change.

Some distance south of Berwick, we hiked to the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, located on a small point of land along the coast. Further south was Alnwick Castle, used for some Hogwarts scenes in the first two episodes of Harry Potter. The town itself was another in a long series of quaint English villages, always worth a walk around, so we did.

For another three hours, we drove on busy dual carriageways further south past several medium-sized cities to arrive near Whitby, a small town on the East Coast, noted for it’s connection to Captain Cook, who was born nearby and whose ships were built in Whitby. Our camping for the night was in possibly the first “forest” we’ve been in since we left home. Camping in a pine forest – it was so Canadian!

What followed, in order, I think, was a 3-hour walk along part of the Cleveland Way between Whitby and Robin Hood Bay. Nice enough, but not as nice as other coastal walks we’ve done. Then some driving to get us close to York. Camping with some light showers overnight. In to York first thing in the morning and a couple of hours exploring York Minster – excellent guided tour. Then a 4 ½ hour drive on busy motorways to get us a few miles from Oxford with only 30 minutes sitting in traffic gridlock because of an accident somewhere. Free parking on the outskirts of Oxford with a walk into town center. Exploring Oxford: Museum of the History of Science, Museum of Natural History and various colleges of the University of Oxford. Drive to the Heathrow area, unpack the car at the hotel and figure out how to get the rental car back and then figure out how to get back to the hotel. Only took 2 hours….

Our time here is now definitely at the short end.

The Long Road Home

After nearly 6 weeks in the UK, by May 10 it was time to go home. Thoughts of gardening, splitting wood for next winter and home-cooked meals had started intruding into our holiday bliss. So, after a morning walk around a small neighbourhood near the hotel and across the M4, we packed up and made our way to Heathrow.

Having spent a couple of days figuring out some of the ins and outs of the local bus system, this part was dead easy. Rather than take the Hotel Hoppa bus at ₤4.50 each, we walked a block with our packs to catch the 140 transit bus and used our Oyster cards for the 10-minute ride to Heathrow's Central Bus Station for ₤1.20. We’d been taking this bus for 2 days because it was the easiest way to join the London Underground for our trips into the City.

There were no queues (er… line-ups) at the airport, so check-in was quick, although the Air Canada counter person didn’t know what to do with the Air Canada plastic bag that we’d saved from Edmonton to put our packs in, so I had to do that for her. Likewise, security wasn’t crowded, so by noon, we were airside with nothing to do but wait. Well, eat, shop and wait.

Pushback from the terminal was right on time, there was a short delay waiting for our turn on the runway, and we were off. Unfortunately, although the day was nice enough, there were clouds, and we couldn’t see much of the English countryside. At one point, we were pretty sure we could see the area north of Liverpool and maybe the Isle of Man, but Scotland was buried under cloud. And so it remained for a few hours until western Greenland, when views appeared.

Western Greenland, definitely a land of snow, ice, and glaciers running down to the sea. Not long after, we passed over Baffin Island. Even from 37000 ft we could see the terrain features. Having left at 3:15 pm, we basically chased the sun west so it was 5 pm when we landed in Edmonton where the weather was sunny and warm. All the snow we had seen 6 weeks earlier was gone. Leaves weren’t out, but, hey, it was only May 10 in Alberta….

The drive home the next day was uneventful, if long. The summer road maintenance season was in full swing and we were stopped a few times. We took the route through Kootenay National Park to Cranbrook, Creston and Kootenay Pass, avoiding the ferry because we’d heard of 2-hour waits. The big bonus? Clear skies the whole trip. Not “just” sunshine, but clear air. No haze. Not a cloud in the sky. Warm. What a welcome home. As usual, once we passed Balfour and headed up the Lake, roads were quiet and the scenery went from merely mountain “nice” to magnificent. It was good to be back.

More on the Climate Change Wars

De Smog Blog posted an interesting article on American views on climate change. It illustrates, once again, why we are in trouble and unlikely to find any compromise on this issue - translation: nothing will really get done on this matter....

Scotland - The North

We left Edinburgh on another blue sky day. The drive north was uneventful and quite scenic. The A9 follows the coast pretty well and there were nice views out along the shore. Inland were hills covered in heathers, all brown at this season, but soon to be blooming.

It was quite surprising, given our previous experience further south, how fast we were able to get up nearly to the top of Scotland. In about 3 hours, we drove from Edinburgh to Inverness and in another 2 ½ hours we were in Wick, where we found a nice campground for the night. Arriving in Wick initiated a brief discussion about how to pronounce the name of this small town. One option would be “Wick” and the other could be “ick”. We think that dropping the “w” is a propensity of the English (note: Keswick is pronounced Kessick”….) but we’re not sure what they do in “Auld Reekie”. We’re not sure if we should ask someone or not ;-)

The campgorund was a 10-minute walk from town along the Wick River. It’s all very pretty.

In the morning, we had a relatively short drive to the northern-most part of mainland Scotland – John O’Groats. It was early in the morning and we were the first ones there walking around, enjoying the views of the sea stacks along the coast.

We decided to see if a quick trip to the Orkneys would work, so we hustled the few miles over to Thurso and it’s port of Scrabster and found we had time to get a campsite, set up camp and get somewhat organized. The ferry ride was about 90 minutes, from Scrabster to Stromness, passing the Old Man of Hoy. We had about 90 minutes to walk around Stromness before boarding the ferry for the return trip. Our campsite had a great view out over the bay and off to the islands only a few miles away. I should mention that we also had time in the morning to see some of the Royal Wedding festivities. The woman who ran the campground was originally from Amarillo, TX, so we all had a good chuckle at the pomp and ceremony of the wedding.

The next day, we drove along the north part of Scotland towards the west. Most scenic with the highland heather fields coming down almost to the sea. Some of the nicest beaches we’ve seen on this trip were along this coast as well.

The next day’s travel was more inland, along lochs and streams. By Sunday night, we had passed by Ben Nevis (a bad case of shin splints negated any chance of hiking to the top of that one…) and on to a beautiful campground on the shores of Loch Levin, just outside of Glencoe. It’s almost sounding repetitious to mention it, but the weather, once again, was sunny, clear and warm.

We’re on the countdown to leaving so we’re trying to fit in the last few essentials. The next day’s travels will likely be down to the Mull of Kintyre. Tuesday we head back south into England and the last few days of our visit.