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.

megaliths and magic roundabouts

After leaving the port of Dover, the harbour dominated by an impressive defensive castle constructed under the reign of Henry II, and taking some time to get orientated—and the traffic gauntlet of first reacquainting oneself to driving on the other side of the road when fresh out of the ferry challenged with a lasso-like loop of a roundabout (and there were some compound traffic circles along the way) with other impatient drivers beginning their journeys, we embarked towards lands east.
Our first stop along the way was to the megalithic stone circle at Amesbury in Wiltshire County, conveniently just off the main motorway crossing the country.
Everyone is familiar with images of Stonehenge and has ideas about the enduring mystery of five millennia of this time out of mind cursus.
Many—unfairly, I think, would humbug this place as a tourists’ trap and not the best or most accessible example of this genre but the experience was pretty mystical and inspired us to learn more. We’d read the various complaints but barriers to appreciating the site had been removed, and we were lucky to visit when the place was not thronged with gawking crowds and got the full, unadulterated impression—the sort that requires one to exercise the imagination, which I don’t know if we always care to use while on holiday. What purpose do you think Stonehenge served?

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.