vacances

PfRC will be taking a much needed sabbatical for calmer shores. Stay tuned, same time, same station, for ongoing adventures. Thanks for visiting and adieux nos amis!

antication or computer says no

Though am I certain that more frequent- (and more sadly, first-time) fliers have far worst horror stories with far more invested and every once and a while we all need the rough reminder why it is that we have a splendid little caravan to ramble about in and have mostly forsaken the air-carriers for what they are (great-attractors of dormant Icelandic volcanos and terrorism), it was really sobering to experience one’s weekend holiday plans so transformed into their opposite.
Albeit air-travel might only be about reassurance (since there’s little else outside of the engine-room and shipyard that one can do) and the industry ought to attract such people with a native talent for customer-service, or at minimum—deflection, I cannot really blame the ground crew, since their silence and distain were clearly products of the received kind, fearful of losing their jobs if they went off script, it was extremely challenging not to be in the here and now when information was withheld about incremental flight delays until it was too late to find alternative transportation on one’s own.
This crowded and copy-cat market of discount providers has brought a lot of amateurs to the field, and I do assign blame to the business model whose overhead is on the knife’s edge and any cost-cutting measure, opacity and intimidation being foremost because they’re free, will be deployed. Admitting culpability is an expensive prospect, though the rioting mob of declined vacationers both coming and going either for business or pleasure whose simple request were rebuffed was incorrigible. Security was called in as angry fliers breached the counter and took pictures of the staff, distracting them while another captured what was on their computer screens. No goon-squad dispersed the lingering throngs but the host airport did not do much to correct the conduct of this under-performer. I would recommend doing research in one’s carrier’s track-record except that these issues are far too common-place, whether it be a discounter or a private jet. This was the first time that security-theatre was not the most harrowing part of flying, and for the privilege of being born aloft, for the time it took, we well could have driven there. Besides the employees themselves, I feel especially sorry for those who couldn’t have.

alphanumeric or space-time coordinates

I never quite got the hang of UK postcodes, but I suppose any other system and structure might appear just as baffling to an outsider, and perhaps numerical proximities aren’t the most efficient way of parceling up land.
Though I don’t think that we missed out on seeing anything that we we intended to because of this oversight or lack of faith and confidence in our rather unreliable navigator (for taking the choicer, scenic routes from time to time), but getting a little frustrated that many attractions did not have well-defined street addresses, we tried plugging in the postcode coordinates finally which bore us straight to the location. I didn’t think the SATNAV (Navi) would understand those. It made me think of an ambitious project that I had read about a few weeks prior that aimed to standardise all localities globally by dividing the world map into some fifty trillion three square metre plots, each assigned simple and memorable three word designations, in a multilingual context. This project is headquartered in London, incidentally, and has the geo-locator future.human.foster, which I feel to outsiders is possibly more accessible than W1A 1AA. Explore the map and find out your home address in three words.

carry on, constable

There’s something remarkably indulgent about having the campus of well looked after ruins to oneself, imagining how history marched on and then by an inaccessible accord, time stopped and there was a general agreement to stave off both progress and decay. On our trip across England, we experienced this many times over, and the Restormel Castle outside of Lostwithel in Cornwall really typified the romance. This circular fortress was built in the times just after the Norman Conquest and bastions like these transformed and solidified the occupation and displacement and civilised the art of warfare, turning unsheltered carnage and plunder into something more strategic and potentially less violent.
Exchanged several times between the high sheriff of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort (of Crusade fame and infamy), eventually it was ceded to the crown, under Henry III, the residence boasted plumbing (some innovation eight hundred years ago—reaching back to Roman times) and profited off of the local tin trade. Another sight was the Old Sherborne Castle in Dorset (an intact castle is just up the road).
Queen Elizabeth I relinquished this twelfth century estate to Sir Walter Raleigh after the courtier, poet, historian and explorer became enamoured with it, whilst returning from an expedition to the New World and landing at nearby Portsmouth. Raleigh, between searching for El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Gold, was instrumental in the English colonising of North America and popularised tobacco and potatoes in the Old World. An unsanctioned marriage and political intrigues, which may have beckoned the Spanish Armada (over incursions into lands claimed by that crown), led to Raleigh’s unfortunate beheading.
His faithful wife and accomplice, according to some, kept her husband’s head in a velvet bag for nearly thirty years before expiring herself, both unable to retire to the castle that had become a rather frustrated property.

berchtesgadener land oder alpine redoubt

We learned that the name of the town Berchtesgaden means “hayloft-hayloft,” once in Latin and again in old German—the denizens having forgot what the original toponym meant, the settlement still known for the same feature and utility, and though that was an apt introduction for our weekend tour through the beautiful but haunted Alpine landscape on the Austrian border.
We encamped near the shores of the serene Königsee and once through the souvenir-stalls, enjoyed the amazing views of the towering mountains protecting this body of water—which awkwardly bore the redundant designation “Lake Königsee” for the tourists—not quite yet hoarding and given it was so vast, there was never a high density of holiday-goers. On the peak of the Kehlstein, visible from the lake and later, illuminated from the campsite—it was eerie to think about being looked down on even though Hitler visited the mountain-top retreat built on the occasion of the Fuhrer’s fiftieth birthday only a couple of times, stood the Kehlsteinhaus, known in most contexts as the “Eagle’s Nest” (conflated with the Adlerhorst near Bad Nauheim).
The structure has been given over to a charitable trust that runs a restaurant and not much mention is made about the place’s past in order that these places not be made pilgrimage destinations—an effort that does not seem quite so effective, given the throngs of visitors and the infrastructure in place to manage them all. Thanks to a rather ingenious bus pass whose network had a stop nearby, there was no need to decamp and find further parking and were chauffeured around quite at ease. A second bus took us more than a mile up the mountain on quite a harrowing journey, alighting before a long tunnel that led to a bronze elevator—the original, that hoisted us up the final hundred meters.
The views were breath-taking and we were treated to absolutely perfect weather. Descending below, we went to the Documentation Centre—a museum that is dedicated to the story of this area during the Third Reich, built on the razed ruins of the Obersalzburg half-way down the mountain side. This compound housed the elite of the Nazi party, and constructed over an ancient salt-mining operation, sits atop a system of cavernous bunkers, which had all the life-support and connectivity capacities to allow the regime to retreat underground—an Alpine Redoubt (Alpenfestung)—and continue persecuting the war.
Only a retaining wall of Hitler’s favoured residence, the Berghof, remains. It wasn’t that the outstanding beauty of this place was besmirched by its past but we did need something to cleanse the palette with so much to think about, and so went back to Königsee and took a little cruise down the lake.
Our guide played the flugelhorn in front of one flat rock face to have his tune echo and resound through the valley and told us more about the natural history. The trip took us to the very picturesque church of Sankt Bartholomä, named for the Apostle Bartholomew, patron saint of dairymen and Alpine farmers—and having miraculously, the ability to make things either very heavy or light as a feather, depending on what the situation called for.

dichtum und wahrheit

We had the chance recently to scamper around Weimar for a return visit and take in the sites, for myself at least, with a fuller sense of appreciation, recognising how since the residence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe overlapping with that of Friedrich Schiller, the town became a focus of pilgrimage for intelligentsia and academics.
The iconic statue by Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel, position before the court theatre and venue for many of Schiller’s plays under the direction of Goethe, is rather a quirky curiosity on its own, representing the cult-like elevation of the two figures, aligned with the town’s (and its independent avatar’s) tradition of patronage. Notwithstanding the republican experiment, the Bauhaus movement, and musical significance (plus all the other things to see and do), the bespoke and iconic monument to the two writers, scientists and collectors is a symbol of Thuringia and has been faithfully copied in America and China many times over. The gigantic likenesses place the two at equal height, though Goethe was quite a bit shorter in stature, and both offer their laurels for inspiration.

they'll be bluebirds over

For us, of course, Dover and its surrounds were more than a departure point and terminal, with its iconic chalk cliffs and stretches of beaches.  As always, click on any image to enlarge.
We were delighted, however, to also discover the series of white escarpments outside the town of Seaford (between Brighton-by-the-Sea and Eastbourne) in East Sussex called Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters. It was a pleasant hike through a tidal estuary, populated by cows and sheep, to the undulating cliffs, marching along pebbly strands that were abundant with the signs of partial fossil imprints—though no terribly exciting specimens were to be found.
The Seven Sisters, owing to their whiter character and lack of potentially anachronistic additions (there being only a sedate golf course a top the cliffs), are often favoured by film-crews as a substitute site, an understudy for the more famous White Cliffs of Dover.

avalon and did those feet in ancient times

A few days after visiting the birthplace of King Arthur, we came to Glastonbury in Somerset, which also proved to be a pretty amazing coalition of traditions and myth coming together, primus inter pares, the fabled Island of Avalon, where the once and future king went to recover after being mortally wounded and live out the rest of his natural life.
Indeed, geological evidence suggests that the high-ground of Glastonbury, dominated by the Tor, a high, manicured hill topped with the ruins of the medieval Saint Michael’s Tower, was once an isle in a marshland that was long-since drained.
Climbing up was a rather mystical experience, accompanied by procession of druid women with drums and tambourines (though we weren’t to be privy to any performance or ritual), plus a ladybird that refused to fly away home until I brought her to the summit. Walking back down through the neighbourhood closest to the Tor, we saw that there was a burgeoning independence movement for Avalon—though there are other claimants to the location but local authorities don’t want to dispel any of these long-held beliefs and associations. In town, we explored Glastonbury Abbey, which may be the remains of the eldest church in the world—founded on the spot where Joseph of Arimathea, conveying the Holy Grail to England for safe-keeping, rested.
Where he struck his walk- ing stick into the ground, accordingly, a hawthorn tree blossomed—a phenomenon unique to the Glastonbury cultivars—though the tree presently at the site is a graft, clone of the original having succumbed to vandalism. Furthermore, on the abbey campus, just under the great nave, after a devastating fire in the late 1100s, monks claimed to have found the tomb of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere, and though attested by several contemporary historians and chroniclers, perhaps like the chalice called the Glastonbury Bowl (which is far too old to be a candidate for the Grail), the acts may be pious forgeries to attract pilgrims—especially after the fire.
The tomb’s relics and the entombed vanished, presumably sometime during the Reformation and subsequent Disillusion of the Monasteries. The setting was no less remarkable, nor did the myth and the general mood of the place, esoteric shops lining the streets that were fun to examine, detract from verifiable studies that are too intimately intertwined to try to separate.
We paused before venturing onward to reflect with a coffee outside of the medieval scullery and discovered that this style of picnic tables with the seating attached is called a Glastonbury, the carpentry having been developed there—though no answer whether the Knights of the Round Table had a similar seating plan.

once and future

We’ve been posting these instalments a bit out of chronological order, but do hope you out there in TV Land are enjoying following along on our adventures. Solidified—but not without dispute—by the writings, commissioned in part for political propaganda by new minted king of a unified England Henry II, of Geoffrey of Monmouth as the birthplace and boyhood haunt of legendary King Arthur, Tintagel Castle was a masterfully enchanting place to visit.
According to the Matter of Britain, the wizard Merlin transformed Uther Pendragon’s appearance to the guise of his enemy Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall headquartered at Tintagel, so that he might sire Arthur through the vessel of his combatant’s wife, Lady Igraine, and thus over a generation, fulfilling a destiny himself to free the country from the Saxon yoke and unite England under one ruler.
Incidentally, among Gorlois’ legitimate issue was the enchantress and foil to Merlin, Morgan le Fay. Not that the beautiful scenery and archeologically troves needed the extra embellishment, this connection to Camelot had only one canonical mention and further associations have to be conjured by the imagination, which these wilds certainly do entertain. Some locals belief romancing the myth presently cheapens the experience by pandering to Arthurian legends, but Monmouth’s history was received quite uncritically until fairly recent times.
We hiked along the headlands with sweeping panoramic views to the ruined fortifications and took a stroll among the Norman walls and foundations of a medieval village, cured by the wind and surf, where one’s fantasy could run rampant.

pompeii or hornblower and hotspur

Whilst rambling through Devon and Hampshire, we stopped at the ancient city of Portsmouth, the oldest continually used docklands in the world awash with the trawling dragnets of historical connections. The harbour town is far too well regaled with references to pursue every footnote and link (though the local historical societies must have very fulfilling hobbies), but just to trace the city to its semi-legendary foundation by a Norman nobleman called Jean de Gisors whom famously harrowed Henry II into kingship and was allegedly the founder of the Priory of Sion I think gives one an idea. And merrily, we roll along.
One lawless exclave established on a tip of Southsea, called Spice Island, just outside of the city gates and thus beyond the crown’s jurisdiction was a regular Island of the Donkey Boys from Pinocchio for its bustling and brisk business attentive to visiting sailors, but rather gentrified and respectable since the invention of the steam-engine began to depreciate the importance of the trade routes that clung so near the continent.  The strategic significance of Portsmouth (nicknamed Pompeii) and attraction, however, has not waned. The naval presence has receded into its present boundaries but the defensive walls and garrison chapel with the statue of Lord Nelson are very much still the typifying landmarks, but a relatively recent addition in the Spinnaker Tower (named after the distinctive steering sail and which is probably the closest we’ll get to the Burj Dubai—at least for the present) adds an impressive element to the skyline, being the highest viewing platform outside of London.
Afterwards, we stopped to wonder at the massive, medieval Arundel Castle, seat to the oldest surviving earldom, and line of Anne of Arundel, Baroness Baltimore, wife to the first governor of Maryland and the province of present day Newfoundland called Avalon, named after the old lands in Somersetshire where Glastonbury lay—as the perfect transition to our next little tour.

hither and yon

Nearly eight years ago (and I must not forget my blogoversary), this little blog was created as a travelogue to document our adventures in Normandy and Brittany, crowned with a visit to otherworldly Mont Saint-Michel, a sight I could not believe actually existed until we spied it on the horizon.
A complementary destination, we discovered with a similar sense of wonder and disbelief, was to be found just across the Channel on our recent trip through England.
Saint Michael’s Mount, just off the coast from the town of Marazion, chartered since the Middle Ages and once wealthy from copper and tin deposits, is a tidal island—accessible by a footpath when the sea ebbs—whose summit has been adorned with various institutions since the eighth century, having hosted a Benedictine abbey, just like Mont Saint-Michel and inspired by the same apparition of the Archangel Michael appearing to local fishermen.

Though battered over the centuries by tsunamis and earthquakes and significantly smaller than its French counterpart, there was no shortage of exploration to do through the tiny village, harbour and the gardens that trellised upward towards the more recent castle and priory, which is still a royal seat and sometimes entertains distinguished guests.

alta-vista or happy-campers

Caravaning in England and locating a place to rest and recharge for the next day’s adventures always presented surprises. On the whole, we were afforded some breathtaking views without even the need for craning one’s neck and the pricing structure—for the off-season—was fairly reasonable.

Many of the campgrounds we found were on the periphery of working farms, like the one pictured above in the rolling pastures outside of Lewes in East Sussex, which reminded me of the old Windows OS start-up screen or this other terrace near Boscastle in Cornwall. There were friendly warnings to visitors not to disturb the livestock, and brilliantly, one pitch near Glastonbury did not allow children and was incredibly peaceful.

shutter-speed

Sometimes on a wind-shield tour, such as this in the countryside of Devon, I got lucky with the timing and captured this idyll of cursory curious cows watching us go by, but mostly as a still aggregated from a new feature on my gadget that captures a bit of what goes on before, during and after I take the photograph (the before part of my framing intentions being a little unsettling) that’s a bit like the next generation of animation appearing in Harry Potter newspaper columns, delivers a rather disturbing middling-focus like the aside of my wrist superimposed on the base of a ceremonial gateway wall along the wayside. Click to enlarge.  Have you tried this feature yet? I wonder if 4K videos might not produce chimera like panorama failures.  When I first noticed some twitching in the preview mode, I thought that I was just losing my mind.

from kent to cornwall or there and back again

Although one could be excused for thinking that the debates over the upcoming referendum on whether the United Kingdom should remain in the European Union or abandon it—the BREXIT—has been going on for decades, even prior to the Schinnen Agreement or the Maastricht Treaty, the discussion has only official started in the last few weeks, and pending this decision, H and I wanted to explore the south of England, from east to west, before such ventures might prove more of an administrative hardship.
Being on the fringes of the EU already with its border controls and separate currency and me holding a wonky status, I suppose it would not directly impact us—I always have to queue up to show my passport and get questioned whether I’m on holiday or on a mission (though on the return ferry, there were a couple of uniformed UK service members and I thought it was a treaty to travel in steerage like that). We saw that especially in the wealthier parts of the westernmost ceremonial counties that the sentiment, as displayed on shrill billboards, was to leave though no one polled us about the matter. Stay tuned for highlights of our travels from Kent to Cornwall and points in between. Let’s hope further adventures are not sullied by politics.

pour, oh pour the pirate sherry

PfRC will be taking a much overdue sabbatical soon. This time, we will be crossing the Channel and exploring south-west England. Stay tuned—same time, same station—for further adventures.

providenciales

Since 1917, Canada has sought to incorporate the Crown suzerainty of the Turks and the Caicos Islands in the Caribbean as its southerly province in order that the expansive nation be able to offer its residents the full-spectrum of tourism-opportunities without leaving the country, as TYWKIWDBI informs. When devolution has occurred in the past, it is not without precedent, like Australia or New Zealand administering even farther removed UK possessions in the Pacific, that such associations can be arranged. Previous polling as shown enthusiasm on both sides, and although the long, unusual quest has been going on for almost a century, the matter is on the docket for discussion for this weekend’s plenary party talks of Canada’s new government. I wonder if we will have anything new to report on this front soon.

pneumatic danube

The much vaunted hyper-loop looks like it have its ground-breaking ceremony soon, but not shuttling passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in California as originally envisioned, but on a circuit along the Danube (Donau) from Košice to Bratislava, Slovakia, to Vienna (Wien) and on to Budapest, Hungary. Driving, the journey would take around eight hours, but passengers aboard the hyper-loop trains would complete this route in just under an hour. That would be a pretty keen way to explore the region and be home again in the evening.