OK, Looking Back, I Guess Lancaster Isn't the Only Thing That's Changed......

Here's a copy of my 1972 Lancaster University student card and a copy of the photo on my International Driver's License today.

I made it home safely last night and it was a very good trip. Looking back the four weeks went very quickly and I can honestly say there wasn't one single negative person or event that took place--something that's unusual for an extended job overseas. From the time I arrived in Southampton to the very south with it's driving wind and rains until I left Edinburgh in the north four hours late because of driving wind and rains, I had amazingly beautiful weather in between.

Internet access was very expensive over there--as much as $20/hour so I didn't post as many photos as I'd hoped but I did get to see and do a lot. At Southampton I came across the oldest bowling green in Britain--dated 1299. They bowl small leather balls across beautifully manicured grass fields and I stepped inside and was quickly escorted out by security so I guess they don't like photos being taken (or maybe they don't like Yanks!). The memorials to the Mayflower and Titanic were impressive but I think I remember most the numerous memorials around the town dedicated to American soldiers who left here on D-Day. Later, at Weston, I would take a ride on one of the small craft that took part in that invasion and, believe me, it couldn't have been a pleasant ride. In Chelmsford, I talked with some WWII paratroopers who also took place in the D-Day Invasion but not by sea, rather by air when they parachuted into Holland.

But back in Southampton, they have a beautifully-preserved medieval wall and a pathway along it from the center of town to the sea and I walked along it several times despite the weather. I also visited the Maritime Museum with its tribute to the Titanic and stopped by the meeting hall where the pilgrims met and prayed before departing here in the Mayflower. They had to lay in again at Portsmith after departing and that city is often listed as the point of departure but Southampton is the true port from which our forefathers made that foolhardy trip.

Leaving Southampton, I was still getting used to the Volkswagen mini-bus and also to driving on the left-hand side of the road but I found my way up through Amesbury and to the Stonehenge site. Most people express disappointment with Stonehenge because it's well protected but not developed as a historical site. Frankly that's what I liked most about it.

From Stonehenge I drove east and caught the M-25 motorway (their version of Interstate) around London and then even further east to the old city of Chelmsford. I was beginning to get the hang of British roads and highway markers and found the hotel easily. It was an old hotel, but a very pleasant one. It had been built in the 1800s when Britain had a "closet tax" in which homes and hotels were taxed by the number of closets in the bedrooms ( guess their way of maintaining a population census count). As a result, hotels didn't have closets but used beautiful old wooden wardrobes, or "clothes cabinets." When the "closet tax" was abolished by Parliament most homes and hotels built in closets and that's why antique stores in America seem to have an abundance of old English wardrobes for sale.

Chelmsford was hosting the International Boy Scout Jamboree while I was there and there were literally thousands of Scouts from around the world roaming around town. I was surprised at some of the places they were from--China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan--places you wouldn't normally think would be open to Scouting. According to the BBC reports that week there were no boundaries within the campsite--camps blended into each other regardless of the nationalities and everybody was getting along fine. They also reported that Palestinian scouts couldn't afford to attend so the Israeli troops had included several of them in their contingents. Everywhere you went they were laughing, joking and taking pictures of each other. Kinda makes you wonder if they shouldn't be running the world instead of the current bunch of idiots.

It was also at Chelmsford that I had the very unusual experience with the military veterans. Each year they hold a memorial ceremony behind the local museum in the rose garden and I happened to be there this year. It was a brief ceremony and the number of attendees gets smaller each year. Afterwards I talked with them and they gave me a unit brochure and invited me inside the museum for their reception. These guys had parachuted into Holland in the midst of heavy anti-aircraft fire at a time when parachutes were still an experimental technology. As we talked, I started searching through the old photos on my digital camera and still had some from the British cemetery at the River Kwai in Thailand. It was really something to see them pass the camera around to each other looking at the photos and talking about someone they had known who hadn't returned from the Burma Campaign.

The Chelmsford job was especially good, the weather beautiful, and I was a little sad to wrap it up but I made the trip back around London on the motorway and headed back west--as far west as you can go at that point past Bath and Bristol to Weston-super-Mare. At first I didn't like the place--too commercial, touristy, and expensive. But here, too, I had a great group in the training program and we began venturing away from the beachfront and found neat little villages--very, very old villages--and I began warming up to the area. One of those villages was Uphill Village south of Weston and we drove by the old church one day and I was fascinated.

On Tuesday of that week two other instructors from my company who were training in Bristol drove over and we had supper. We drove back to Uphill and climbed the rock to visit the church there and then ate in one of the pubs below. I ended up going back there two more times by myself later that week. I've posted photos of the church and documented my search for Captain Morgan's grave, but the area above the village was so beautiful I've included one more. I remember one subsequent evening I climbed up there and walked through the grass and sheep to the bluff overlooking the ocean and sat for probably half an hour with the wind blowing. If I turned my head one way, the wind roared like a train engine across my ears but if I turned my head sideways to the wind it was almost complete silence. Reportedly over the years many a herdsman on the bogs and moors went crazy because of the incessant wind but for the half hour or so I was there it was a welcome relief from the rest of the world.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to visit Bath or Bristol and, like at Southampton and Chelmsford, I was a little sad to leave at the end of the week but I was also excited about the prospect of returning to the university campus where I had lived for a year in the early 70s. Unfortunately my blog entry seems to have given the impression the trip to Lancaster was extremely depressing and it wasn't--it just wasn't what I remembered. It was good to walk around the campus again but a little distressing to recall that when I was there, there were no laptop computers, cell phones, Internet or e-mails. Then I remembered that while I was there this trip I didn't have any of those either and guess what, I made it just fine.

Like I said earlier, I found my old graduate dissertation in the library--it was the original copy since I did it on a manual typewriter with three carbon copies (they didn't have photocopying machines back then either. It was kind of gratifying to find the library still had the copy on file after all these years but, looking in the card catalogue (computerized, which they didn't have back then) I noticed it wasn't exactly shelved beside Shakespeare or Bronte. Looking back though, it had a lot to do with my later desire to write.....

Like in the old days, I went into the "underground" below Alexandria Square and caught a double-decker bus into Lancaster. Since I was working for the national bus company this trip I had a free pass anywhere in Britain and this was the first time I used it. Lancaster is an old, historic city and for the first time, I walked up above the city and visited the cathedral. I do remember the Lancaster Canal--English cities for hundreds of years have relied on a series of small, narrow canals (usually lined with stone walls on the sides) in which small "punts" could

travel from village to village to trade goods. They've been preserved and today private charters can take you on them at various locations. I remember renting a punt years ago and "poleing" down to Heysham village through the farmlands. The Lancaster Canal runs along the cathedral and while I was there I could hear an extended tolling of the cathedral bells. They were beautiful but I noticed how long they were being played. I ended up taking a short video clip of the cathedral and the canal with the music in the background. It was beautiful......double-click on the triangle in the lower left corner to listen.

On a side note, I was told that when the Lancaster citizens complained about the Muslim community using loud speakers six times a day to call worship services, the response was that if the broadcasts to worship were banned the cathedral bells would also have to be silenced since they were also calls to worship. So I guess it's in litigation right now and the twelve giant bells might become illegal to ring. Personally, I think they should let the Boy Scouts sort it out--of course they'd probably blare rock music from the belfry six times a day. And I think they ought to let the old paratroopers enforce the rules--they'd probably tear those computer labs out of the university and put the pubs back in!!! How did the world get this messed up?

The bells kept ringing so long I finally walked over to an into the cathedral and noticed somebody going through a small stone doorway and up a spiral staircase. Since the door wasn't blocked, I went up it too and climbed a long time up a very narrow staircase to what ended up being the belfry of the cathedral. There, twelve people were pulling the ropes that rang the twelve giant bells and they were having a practice session which is why the ringing seemed to go on forever. Several other people were watching so I didn't feel out of place but the light was very low in the room and I didn't feel comfortable taking a flash photograph. Still, it was very interesting to watch twelve synchronized bells being rung.

Back in Lancaster I wandered around town looking for old landmarks but didn't find any and took a bus to the seashore town of Morecambe where we lived in a row house for three months in 1972 until the university had a vacancy in one of the colleges on campus. Morecambe has been a seaside resort for the British in mid-England for centuries but today the old multicolored brick promenade has been torn up and amusement parks built along the seawall. The old, old row houses where so many students lived in the 70s have mostly been torn down and more expensive tourist accommodations built. For some reason, and I really don't know why, I remembered the address where we lived and with a little effort I found it. That particular row house is still there and was one of the few old landmarks I could recall.

From Lancaster on Sunday morning I headed north to Glasgow and then over to Livingston, about 13 miles west of Edinburgh. It had started drizzling at Lancaster and continued into the early week then the weather turned beautiful but very cold--even the Scots were complaining about the "early winter." Like Weston, Livingston was a basically uninteresting, boring "new" town developed after WWII. But here, too, I had a good group and we got out of town into the villages and countryside and if you haven't seen Scotland--it's everything the calendar pictures suggest it is. They kept telling me that this isn't "real" Scotland and that I needed to see the highlands but I was very impressed with the scenery here. One day we drove up north to the Firth of Forth bay with it's old historic bridge and quaint fishing villages. Another day we drove into Edinburgh and along the base of the rock outcrop on which the castle is built. We drove around the Scottish Parliament which had a yellow flag flying above it meaning a member of the Royal Family was there. On Friday we finished early and since I was leaving the next morning, I used my bus pass to go into Edinburgh and walked up the "Royal Mile"--a street of historic shops and buildings and leading into the castle.

The castle is really something....it's not a true "castle" in the classical sense of drawbridges, ramparts and towers...but more of a fortress on top of a really imposing rock bluff overlooking the city. Of course it's very, very old and much today is rebuilt but I spent nearly four hours prowling around the nooks and corners and winding narrow staircases. This place predates the Crusades and they aren't apologetic about it....statues of knights are everywhere. I'm particularly interested in ancient cannons and this place has a treasury of them so I spent a lot of time prowling around courtyards looking for them. There is also a beautiful War Memorial for Scottish soldiers who have fallen in battles over the centuries and the beautiful St. Margaret's Chapel--the oldest building in the castle complex and all of Edinburgh. Built around 1124 in Norman architectural style it is very small but impressive.

Saturday morning I flew out four hours late because of the rain and wind...but made a later connection in Newark and arrived in Houston late Saturday night.

It was an excellent trip and adventure......

Scotland was Especially Interesting…..

…..despite generally lousy weather that included rain and very cold temperatures. I had a good group for the class and they were particularly good about taking us out into interesting areas of the countryside during the class.
I was staying in a town called Livingston, about 13 miles from Edinburgh, and, like Weston-super-Mare, it is essentially a post-WWII community that was created to accommodate the post-war baby boomers. As such, there is no real “history” here but the surrounding villages are loaded with it. During the week we drove through postcard-like villages named Broxburn, Queensferry, Midlothian, and Stonebridge. We also drove north one day and visited the Firth of Forth bridges and the beautiful bayshore there. We also went into Edinburgh one afternoon but didn’t really stop—just drove by the base of the castle, the Scottish Parliament and the National Museum.
I finished up Friday afternoon and caught a bus into Edinburgh and did some exploring on my own and visited the castle on the huge hill overlooking the city. Edinburgh is often called the “Paris” of the UK and it is in fact covered with statues, historic buildings, and old churches. The annual Edinburgh Festival is going on right now so the streets are literally packed shoulder to shoulder with tourists and every corner has street performers or musicians and despite the weather, it is truly a festive atmosphere.
The castle itself requires a long walk uphill but the trip is well worth it. From the summit and looking out over the ramparts, there is a magnificent view of the city with the ocean in the background. I spent several hours walking around—the castle complex is VERY big—and then descended the hill via the “Royal Mile.” That particular street is packed with restaurants, tourist shops and historical buildings. Again the main impression was one of “festivities.”
I am posting this from the Edinburgh airport and as I look back over the past four weeks it has gone very quickly and there’s been so much I’ve seen and done. From Southampton, with the Mayflower and Titanic memorials, to Chelmsford with its Roman ruins, to Weston with the quaint old Norman church on the overlooking hill, and finally to Livingston and the Edinburgh castle—I’ve covered a lot of ground this trip .There were things I didn’t get to see such as Colchester with its Roman bridges, Bristol and Bath, and Sterling Castle. But I did get to see Stonehenge, Lancaster University, and historic downtown Edinburgh. Overall, it’s been a very good trip.
I’m tentatively scheduled for two weeks of work in Thailand in October and I’ve signed up for a mission trip in the Peruvian Andies that will have a side trip to Machu Picchu in November so I haven’t finished traveling yet this year. With the Peruvian trip I will have worked in or visited five continents this year….

Drove to Lancaster, Found the University and the Green Dragon Pub…..

But it wasn’t like I remember it. The university has really grown, but down the hill in the other direction from where I attended classes. Still it was interesting to walk around the campus and try to find old hangouts. The university consists of a group of colleges (I studied Politics in Bowland College but lived in County College) and everything has changed. Lancaster was a hotbed of student radicalism in the early 70s—today all the signs and posters are for job recruitment, investment plans and financial loans. All the colleges had cafes and little pubs but today the cafes are all faculty offices and the pubs have been converted into computer labs. Most of the students I saw (it is summer session) were Asians. Frankly, I was disappointed with it all. I went to the library and checked out a copy of my graduate dissertation (they still have it) and some girl who hadn’t been born when I wrote it tried to hassle me about not having a library card. I’d had about enough, threw a minor fit, and her supervisor let me look at it in the reference section. I glanced through it, photographed the cover, and turned it back in.
For lunch I walked two miles into Galgate, a nearby village that is usually overrun by students during the regular school year, and believe it or not the Green Dragon Pub is still there! Many a student has patronized the place and I’ve had more than a few ales there myself and thrown a few darts at the board. Finding it was the highlight of the visit so far but lo and behold, it’s a bed and breakfast now so I found another pub and ate there.
I caught a bus into Lancaster and didn’t remember one single landmark in the city. Granted we spent most of our time on campus or traveling around on the motorcycle, but I didn’t see anything that looked familiar. Caught another bus into Morecambe and they’ve torn up the promenade along the ocean and rebuilt it as an amusement park. Many of the old, old flats and row houses have been torn down but I did find the first place we lived for three months when we first arrived there.
Caught busses back to Lancaster and the university and went to my room. Around 10:00 I decided to take one last walk around the campus and Alexandra Square but it started raining and I was starting to get depressed so I shut it down and went to bed for the night. Not exactly what I was expecting…..

There May Be a Little of Captain Morgan in All of Us…..

…..like the rum ad claims, and there may be a little of him in the cemetery I visited this afternoon. Today is Thursday and I’ve almost finished the third of four weeks over here. This has been another good group to work with and they have gone out of their way to show me this area. After work today I returned to the hotel, changed clothes, and drove back to Uphill Village with the old Norman church. Again the weather was perfect and I climbed the hill and took some more photos. I’ve been told it’s rumored, but not verified, that Sir Henry Morgan, the infamous pirate, privateer, and rum entrepreneur, is buried in the church cemetery. The reputed stone, however, has long been deteriorated and nobody really knows for sure if the story is true. I’ve marked it with a red circle on the photo to the left. In the photo look to the left side and the roof is missing. This dates back to the period of the Dissolution of the Monasteries which took place in the mid-1500s when Henry VIII confiscated the Catholic properties in England, Wales and Ireland. At that time Parliament made him the Supreme Head of the Church of England and the Dissolution edict was a direct challenge to the church in Rome. Because the churches were so solidly built and difficult to tear down, he ordered the roofs removed which resulted in the destruction of the interiors. As the political tides changed back and forth over the centuries, many churches rebuilt the roofs and part of this church did so but left the other half uncovered as an open-air entrance to the chapel.
After visiting the church again I walked back down the hill and wandered around the village for a while. There are stone structures everywhere—fences, buildings, bridges, tunnels—and that’s due to the fact that until recently there was a quarry here. If you look at the photos you’ll notice the granite is very dark, almost blue. The closer you get to Wales (which is just across the bay) the bluer the stone becomes. Welch blue granite is considered excellent stone for construction. In fact, some of the huge stones at Stonehenge have been tested and verified to have been transported nearly 240 miles from Wales to their present location. Again, nobody knows how. Maybe aliens from outer space really did build Stonehenge. Here, though, almost everything is built of stone--sidewalks, walls, buildings, the schools, churches, the post office--and since they don't "wear out," many of these buildings are very old and still very servicable.
After wandering around taking pictures I stopped at another old pub called The Dolphin. I really have a “thing” about old pubs and this was another really neat one. I’ve put some photos of pubs on the right—you can click on them to enlarge the photos. The UK recently banned smoking in pubs and it’s created havoc with a national institution. Now the pubs are cleaner on the inside but since most drinkers also smoke, these beautiful old buildings have put picnic tables around them on the outside for the smokers and it really spoils the ambiance. Because of the constant rain, some pubs have put up shelters behind with the cheap corrugated plastic that looks like something out of West Virginia. It’s the “sports” or “proper” pubs that got hit the hardest with the smoking ban. As one of my students at Chelmsford told me last week, once the smoke cleared out of “proper” pubs they all smelled like urine and body odor. Everybody preferred the smoky atmosphere.
This one was built on the slope of the hill there were at least six floor levels in the building creating a maze of stairways to various dining areas. Having satisfied my desire for a ploughman’s lunch earlier, I tried a second dish I’d wanted….fish and chips. When I was a student here, it was common for students without money to subsist on fish and chips. Unfortunately the fish and chips industry is quickly disappearing in Britain also. The cost of fishing, and therefore the cost of North Sea cod, has skyrocketed and many of the sidewalk restaurants are actually using previously frozen fish from Asia. A true cod fish and chips dinner is extremely expensive now and the one I had tonight was ok but nothing special—and it was expensive.

Today we ventured out of Weston into the countryside.....

and came across a neat little community called Uphill Village—so named because it is at the base of a large hill overlooking the ocean. The village is very old—in fact it dates back to the Romans which is first century AD. By the 11th century the Danish Vikings had established the town here and in the year 1088 a Norman church was built above the village. Today the church is called St. Nicholas Church.

After class two of my company’s instructors from the States drove over from Bristol where they are doing classes to meet me and we did the quick tour of Weston then drove back to Uphill Village and walked up the hill to look at the church. Over the years the church has been used for many functions including a lookout for Napoleon’s navy attacking the coast—which never happened—to a lookout for German bombers—which did happen. During the war the British set up runway lights on the hill but never built a runway. When, in the early years of the war, German bombers made night attacks, they turned on the runway lights and the Germans dropped load after load of bombs on a runway that didn’t exist.

Nearby is a stone tower that was originally built in the 13th century as a grist mill and did in fact grind grain for over 500 years. Today the windmill blades are gone but the tower dominates the horizon and today cattle graze around the structure—very picturesque!

At the bottom of the church path is an old pub called Ship Inn and, since 1620 it has been serving food and ale to sailors and tourists. We ate supper there and it was a real British pub—good food, drunk patrons, dart throwers, and a roaring fireplace even though it’s summer. Today turned out to be another very good day and I’m over half way through this job and trip…..

Took a Boat Trip Sunday…..

and spent most of the morning today walking along the beach line and walked up the hill into the old part of the city. Around noon I took a boat trip around the harbor and some of the islands between here and Wales.
The boat was a 1938 Royal Navy boat named Bristol Queen and carried soldiers across the channel from Southampton on D-Day to Normandy. I know the British summoned every boat they could find for the Normandy Invasion but I really can’t imagine crossing the English Channel on this thing. The sickest I think I’ve ever been was when I was crossing from Dover to Oostende in 1972 during 12-14 foot waves. I don’t know what the ocean was like on D-Day but I think it was very rough and I can’t imagine the trip on this ship in heavy waves and full combat gear. It looked and sounded like the African Queen with Bogart.
Other than the boat trip, I haven’t found much of interest here. When you get past the putt-putt golf courses, the inflatable cartoon characters and the other typical tourist money pits, there just doesn’t seem a lot to see. I think it will be a good town for training purposes but I’m really looking forward to next Saturday when I drive north to Lancaster where I have a room booked at the university. I’m really anxious to see what the campus looks like since I was there 35 years ago. The university has several suites that are rented out to the public—mostly alumni like me—and I got a room in the building I stayed in as a student. Should be interesting…..

Got Unpacked at Weston-super-Mare and Took a Look Around….

There was once a small village here but in the aftermath of WWII—and expecting a baby boom—the British government built several “new” communities for the expected population boom and this was one of them. As a result there is very little “old” here except a few buildings that were the original village. What you have today is a nice, clean beachfront community. Unlike Blackpool or Morecambe, very old and run down ocean-holiday communities where I was in the 70s, this place is very nice. I walked along the beachfront for a long way this afternoon and the place was packed. You are never more than 75 miles from the ocean at any location in Great Britain and they do like their seashores. School let out for holidays two weekends ago so this place is packed. Although it was overcast and cloudy today, you could look out over the bay and see Wales, and the city of Cardiff, in the distance.
I have a very nice room in a hotel just off the beach and my room overlooks a golf course. I love walking and Britain is a hiker’s delight with good sidewalks and scenic pathways, even in the town centers. On one of my journeys this afternoon I came across a sand sculpturing competition and got some good photos.

The week went very well....

On our drives we stopped at a little village called Writtle and I liked it so much I drove back after work and walked around. There is a very old church that was closed but I walked around the grounds and walked the narrow winding streets and took some pictures. They have a beautiful village green and the village is built around it with a small lake and geese. I stopped at a pub called The Rose and Crown on the Green and got an authentic ploughman’s lunch—and a very good one. I’ve been looking for 34 years for one of these meals which I remembered from my student days at Lancaster University in the 70s. It consisted of a salad with malt vinegar, coleslaw with hot horseradish creamy sauce, pickled onions, aged cheddar cheese and hard crust bread with real butter. You just can’t find a good one in the States. The pub was crowded and they had a soccer game on the television so it really felt like a British pub tonight. During the week we drove out by the Boy Scout World Jamboree site and it has about 40,000 scouts camped outside Chelmsford. I’ve been seeing a lot of the scouts in town. This morning when I went downstairs at the hotel I ran into a Scout leader from the Sam Houston Council in Texas. There are 140 countries represented here and it’s kind of neat seeing so many people from so many countries. I have enjoyed Chelmsford much more than Southampton.Saturday morning I drove back across country to the Bristol and a seaport town called Weston-super-Mare. It was a three-hour drive, again, around London and back to the west coast. The drive went well but this is the holiday season and the town is bumper to bumper with vehicles and people