The Beginning
Chapter 1: The Lake Shore Limited
Chapter 2: London and Environs
Chapter 3: The West Country
Chapter 4: Wales
Chapter 5: The Far North
Chapter 6: East by Southeast
Chapter 7: London (Redux)
Chapter 8: Back to America
Chapter 9: The Long Road Home

I don't know quite how to start this little tale. People asked me why I was going to Britain, and I said, "Because it's there." I didn't, and still don't, have any better motivation than that. At the beginning of my sophomore year of college, I read "Neither Here Nor There" by Bill Bryson. That particular book is the story of Bill's two trips through Europe, one as a new high school graduate and one twenty years later. I positively devoured it and went back for seconds and thirds, entranced by the prospect of going someplace where everyone was not a 'Murrican. Eventually my newfound wanderlust got out of hand. I bought a well-recommended guidebook for backpackers, regrettably named "Europe through the Back Door". My roommates both looked at me funny the first time they saw me reading that one. I knew it would be expensive, and I knew I couldn't do it alone, so I cast about for a traveling partner I could stand for several weeks or months on end. The logical choice was John Grover, the possibly the most laid-back man on earth who has never smoked marijuana. John and I met in the Boy Scouts in 1996. We hung out now and then, often through a mutual friend, MJ Vasko. After high school, John became one of my closest friends, and when I described my controversial plans over Instant Messenger (John was 500 miles away in Ohio) he jumped at the prospect.

After Christmas vacation we realized our carefully-drawn loop through Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, France, and Spain was never going to work. It would take more time and (much) more money than we could possibly muster. We discussed cutting the trip back to a more manageable level. John, an Anglophile of the first order, suggested Britain, and I concurred. As the next several months wore on, we unhurriedly made preparations. In January we bought round trip plane tickets to London. In February we bought 30-day unlimited rail passes. Not until I came home for break in March did we even apply for passports. Due to tightened security regulations at the Passport Bureau, the trip almost didn't happen. After the regulation five weeks had come and gone and my passport still hadn't arrived, I called the National Passport Hotline (and paid $5.50 for the privilege). It turned out my application was suspended awaiting more forms of identification, and the letter informing me of this had gotten lost in the mail. A quick phone call revealed that John was in the same boat. I implored my parents back in Ohio to send all the relevant records they could find, and they did so with gusto. A few days later I got a package containing virtually every report card, honor roll certificate, newspaper clipping, bank statement, and candy wrapper I had amassed since the third grade. I overnighted a selection of it, along with photocopies of all the cards in my wallet, to New Orleans, and a week later I had my passport.

As the school year wound down, I began to prepare myself mentally for the trip. I took to carrying my passport in my bag with me at all times, for no reason other than pride and relief that I finally had one. I read every website on Britain I could find, and went through books by Paul Theroux and Jonathan Raban at an alarming rate. But the trip did not seem exactly real until one Tuesday in late May when John and I went shopping at a thrift store called Savers. Trying to get myself into a British frame of mind, I picked out several articles of clothing. I got a nice corduroy jacket and a perfect-fitting pair of pants for a few dollars each. And then, blinded by excitement, I bought a tight grey sweater vest like one you might see in a Backstreet Boys video, and a big brown trenchcoat. I am convinced in hindsight that the mirror in the Savers dressing room was rigged. In the store I looked like an officer and a gentleman, dashing and handsome in my chocolate-colored cloak. After I got the coat home I had my doubts. In the more objective hall mirror of my house, it was evident that the coat was at least a size too big. Moreover, it smelled strongly of cigarettes. I sprayed it twice with Febreze and left it to dry overnight, but to no avail. The next day was on the verge of leaving it behind, but I decided it might come in handy in the foggy streets of London and stuffed it in my bag. The journal picks up here, as John and I prepared to leave Toledo on a train bound for New York City, and then on to Britain.

The first two dozen journal entries are a far cry from the long, complex summaries found later in this book. They were mostly recorded while in transit; before I had any sense of narrative about the trip, I made it a point to record what I was seeing every hour or so, without thought to style or continuity. Often these passages are no more than a sentence or random thought. Sometimes they are not even that. I haven't decided yet whether to convert these "stream of consciousness" notes into several longer paragraphs that more fully flesh out what was going on. For now, read on and stick with the story as it picks up steam.

Sitting here in Delta. Leaving for train in 1hr. Listening to Wesley Willis. Need to finish packing. Bought a new book, Learning Ancient Greek.

Waiting at Toledo station, all packed, too warm for coat. Left home at 10:15 PM, Randy drove. Train is Lake Shore Limited, Train #48. Itinerary is Toledo to Cleveland to Buffalo to Albany to Boston/NYC. Slightly tired, ate apple.

Just leaving station, train grating loudly, squeaking. Learned some Greek: hippos, filos, delfos. Bought a bottle of water, trail mix (which was all sunflower seeds). $1.80.

Annoyances of train – light on, no window, luggage rattles.
Sitting at the front makes one acutely aware of the comings and goings in the compartment.

There is an innocence and a simple grace about traveling in a train, especially at night. All is peaceful but I can't sleep.

Went to lounge – read Millennium – listened to young man and older woman talk and play cards. Stopped in Elyria. Found out from the conductor that the mysterious knobs on the seat control the footrest. I had been trying to use them to make the seat recline. That turned out to be a button.

Approaching Cleveland (arrival at 2:52). Left lounge.

Stopped (probably in Erie, PA)

When I got on, a girl asked where we were. Now that I've slept I feel the same. One town and station are identical to the last. Without being awake to count off each stop it's impossible to tell where one is.

Daylight has come, milky and sallow. We're on a lake, only 20 yards from the water. I still don't know quite where we are, but I suspect we're not quite to Buffalo.

Bright enough outside to see, but the dirty windows make it tough. According to the timetable we are 50 minutes behind.

Went to the lounge car again, bought Danish ($1.75!). Man at the counter seemed to recognize me, although I'd never seen him (he must've been on break when I came through the night before and seen me studying the menu). Cheese Danish was rather stodgy and heavy.

Home again? I can see some of the downtown, but little else. This is the first station since Toledo where any buildings other than factories are apparent.

Spotted some nice old city walls. Utica seems very into the whole scenic rail bit. One train was labeled, "Adirondack Scenic Railroad". Delayed again?

Moved up a car to get a better view and escape the ever-present lights and opening doors. Windows still dirty. Train to split in two (Boston, NYC) at Albany.

Passing through the stout red brick and stone buildings and lush fields of eastern NY, it is almost possible to believe that I am in some gritty little corner of Yorkshire. A red brick church with steeple adds to this effect. The passing of another train is always a shock, and too dizzying to look at for long.

Many old brick and fieldstone buildings here. This must've looked very British in its day. Fields here are small and irregular, nothing like the huge, square expanses back home.

Passed through a splendid little riverside village. If not for the profusion of American flags I'd believe I was already in Britain. It's as if the townspeople need these as a reminder to themselves.

The train has stopped and is splitting in two sections. The Boston passengers are getting off and our section will be picked up by a new locomotive for the rest of the trip.

Train split up and has just pulled out. Should be in NYC by 3:45.

Beautiful marshes on both sides of the train, riverside shanties, one large boat, herons, geese, a beautiful sight.

We've come through a huge deep cliff with bridges and other accoutrements. The effect was similar to passing through an ancient canyon ruin.

Walked from Penn Station (33rd Street) to the hostel on 94th. Walked across Central Park and down one side of it for some time. Sat on some large rocks, then had a sausage and water on a street corner ($4.00). Finally got to hostel after walking in the wrong direction across part of a Central Park walking train. Checked in with the Portuguese(?) reception guy, went upstairs to room and had a shower. Afterwards, planned to have a nap and go back out, but ended up sleeping until 9:40 PM. Arranged to leave early tomorrow morning, watched Orange County. Not a terrible movie, but not recommended viewing either. Read some of Tolkien's letters. Have to get up at 4:15 tomorrow morning to go to JFK (airport).

Went to the lounge briefly. Only a few people around, watched some TV and left. While I was gone, John heard a car stolen. Car alarm went off, then got more and more faint. Hostel runs out of cold water easily (later I found out the hot and cold knobs were switched), plus narrow corridors meant I had to squeeze past a German(?) girl and another guy to get a quarter bottle of piping hot drinking water.

Rode the subway from 96th Street (got on at 4:20 AM) to Howard Beach; had to switch trains twice and nearly didn't find the "A" Train. Saw a rat on the tracks, which we named Stanley because it sounded like a good British name. We were saddened by his imminent demise when the train came through. Had my first chance encounter: At the "A" train platform, an Asian girl was carrying a very big suitcase. After riding in silence on the train for half an hour or so, I made the pretense of checking the map (which she was sitting in front of) and we struck up a conversation. Her name was Hoa, which I guessed to be Vietnamese. She said that it was, and sounded a little impressed. Hoa was from Houston, TX, but she lived in the City and went to NYU. She was working on a graduate degree in a subject whose name I can't remember, but which she explained to be "the psychology of business." Hoa was going to JFK to visit friends in Florida. We talked for about 45 minutes until we got to Howard Beach, about my major (as usual I had to explain exactly what IT is), Chinese (I told her I was studying Chinese, and she was again impressed, and said that she had wanted to learn), London (she had been and said I would like it), and web sites (she was excited to learn that I did web design – a friend of hers needed a site. I gave her a card, so possibly I'll hear from her in the future). When we got to Howard Beach station we had to take different buses to get to our respective terminals. She said, "It was nice meeting you", and I said, "I'll see you later." The instant I said it I realized I'd probably never see her again, but it was just force of habit.

Called home, mom tired but happy to hear from me. Bus is called "Service Road Local" and loops through a series of bus stops in parking lots and on street corners before finally getting to Terminal 8. Stayed up most of last night watching movies (Orange County, Hart's War, Ghostbusters). John and I decided that our first foray into hostelling was utterly forgettable.

Bought some kind of strawberry juice ($2.15) at a store in JFK airport. It wasn't very good. Check-in and baggage check were easy enough. Our bags were tagged and waved through at the security station. Security required me to practically strip for the metal detector. I had to put my shoes, belt, and pocket contents into a tray, then walk through. On the other end of the conveyor belt my things got tangled with the very heavy bag of a rapid-Spanish-talking woman. I watched her very large bible while she put her shoes back on, then excused myself ("Buen viaje!") and left. It is now 8:15 and the plane has still not boarded. I find myself missing Hoa already. She made for a good conversation.

Much of the Underground is actually well above (I found out later this is only true out in the suburbs). The flight was enjoyable enough, with free seat-mounted TVs and comfortable seats. I watched "The Guru", which was entertaining but somewhat short on reality. Breakfast was omelet with ham, potatoes, croissant, fresh fruit (pineapple, kiwi, strawberry), and cheese and crackers. I usually don't like pineapple but I tucked into the fruit with gusto. Heathrow was largely indistinguishable from any other airport. I found it very unimpressive. A long walk down the windowing carpeted corridors brought us to the tube station, which was utterly confusing. I fumbled with a pile of British coins before finally handing over a £10 note. Making connections on the tube is similar to the NYC subway. We'll be getting off in North Greenwich.

The hostel was nearly impossible to find! We rode the tube (for £3.70) to North Greenwich, only to find out that that station was some distance from Greenwich proper. We took a bus to Greenwich Market (70p) but due to the lack of street signs and the growing darkness we couldn't find the street. Finally we caught a cab, which took us about two blocks and around a corner to the hostel (St. Christopher's). There was evidently a party going on at the bar downstairs, and while we waited to be let in we watched as some British kids were refused entrance (no ID – and you only have be 18! These guys just weren't trying!) The room is comfortable enough and inhabited by a good mix of people from the Commonwealth. Alistair is from Sydney, and he's in town looking for engineering job. Shayne is also Australian, and has been asleep most of the time. There is another guy who I understand is from Philadelphia (he turned out to be a Canadian-born guy living in Michigan, and left the next day), plus Jessica (from Australia) and a South African girl who whispered her name so quietly that I couldn't hear. These two have a silent conversation going on at all times, punctuated by the odd burst of giggling. I don't know how I'm going to find my way into London tomorrow, with all these unmarked streets. If I'm lucky I can get someone to show me to the Docklands Light Rail station and Tower Bridge. We definitely need to get our hands on an A-to-Zed.

It's far too early to be awake, but awake I am. Must be something to do with the time difference. It's really too early to get up and do anything, so I guess I'll just lay here and read. At 7:00 I fully plan to grab some (free!) continental breakfast and head out to see what I can find. I haven't been eating much so far, likely because of the time change. Right now I haven't had a bite since the plane ride yesterday, but I'm more thirsty than hungry. The exchange rate is going to kill us here. $30 only got me £13.97, after the outrageous £3.00 commission. Alistair says the British are "avaricious bastards" who keep the money supply low so as to keep the pound's value artifically high. At this point I'm more than ready to agree. So far my bank account appears to be in good shape. I've only withdrawn $60 and still have about $35 cash, with what I had on me already. From now onward I'll just withdraw directly in pounds wherever I can find an ATM.

St. Chris's is a mildly agreeable place. The people seem friendly, if a bit distracted. Went down to the "Chill Out Room" for breakfast. Provisions were meager but good enough. Had two slices of brown bread with butter and blackcurrant jam, plus tea. The tea was straight Lipton-style – very disappointing; I'll have to find a decent tea-house later on.

After breakfast, sat in the room waiting for John to get up . Talked to all and sundry, including Jessica and the South African girl, whose name I still don't know. We compared money and they discussed shoes. Jessica lives six hours from Sydney. South African ("Soud-African", in her own accent) girl lives 2 hours from Johannesburg. Her accent is quite attractive, as was pointed out by the Australian Shayne. John had breakfast about 8:45 and we left soon after. Took the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) right next to the hostel (a day pass for all forms of metropolitan transport is £4.10) and switched trains to Tower Gate station. At Shadwell I bought a Coke from the machine for £1. Been more or less following the course of the old Roman wall around town, although the wall itself has only made three appearances so far. The first was right out of Tower Gate station, and no sooner had we descended to see it than a fast-talking Caribbean man asked if we were come to see the Tower of London (accessible via a subway next to the wall). We of course answered in the negative. Our route next took us to a back alley, where among the delivery docks and hotel gardens we found another fragment of the wall. We continued on the course, deviating now and then to see a particularly nice church or courtyard, of which there are many in central London. We rejoined the route at Guildhall, the headquarters of the Corporation of London, and home to theatres, museums, and galleries. We declined to pay £2.30 to enter. A pedestrian flyover (that is to say, an elevated platform, covered but open on the sides, and lined with shops) brought us to St. Alphage Gardens and the wall again. It is peaceful and cool here, and I hate to leave, but the wall goes on.

(Addendum)
In our walk to this point we encountered several ducks in the most unlikely locations. Next to the Guildhall square, in a small ornamental pond, was a single male mallard. He glided around the pool like the proverbial cock of the walk, and for no reason we decided to name him Morris. Later, between the pedestrian flyover and St. Alphage Gardens, we encountered another pair of ducks, a male and a female. The female was crouched in the shade of a building on a street corner and the male hovered close nearby, doing his best to scare away passers-by. To correspond with the first duck (Morris) we named this second duck Minor, and his wife Mrs. Minor. (This is a joke that one American in a thousand will get; the Morris Minor was a small and rather swanky kind of British car.)

We are seated on a bench in front of the Barbican, an ancient Roman guard tower that has lent its name to the surrounding area. Because it's Saturday, nothing is open and no one is around to spoil the view. A lone raven caws at intervals, and the far-off clang of metal adds a timeless feel to the scene.

(Addendum)
In between the previous entry and the next one (a span of about two hours) we finished our Roman Wall walk, accidentally stumbling upon St. Paul's Cathedral in the process. We took the tube from Blackfriars back to Tower Hill, and as we still felt in the walking spirit, decided to follow a second walk from Tower Bridge back to Greenwich. Had we stuck strictly to the bank of the Thames it might have been pleasant and peaceful, but circumstances intruded as they are so prone to doing. At this point I had no more than a couple of pounds to my name, so we began to duck inland in search of an ATM that would take my card. It was also very hot that afternoon, so our quest to stay hydrated added to the troubles. Finally, John began to complain of the weakness and general malaise that was later to change our trip so radically. We mostly forsook our Thames-side stroll and cut across two of London's worst suburbs, Southwark and Deptford, on our way back home. This episode later became known as the "Deptford Death March".

We finished our Roman wall walk, along the way encountering two ducks and the vaguely obeliskoid Baltic Exchange Building, which rises over east London looking like a Fabergé Rocket Ship (a newspaper referred to it as the "erotic gherkin"). We ate lunch at a shop called Benjy's, which bore the slogan "Less bread!" I had a tuna salad on wheat and a Spa-brand "Multifruits" (a juice and mineral water concoction). Everything cost a thrifty £2.55. John had Coronation Chicken, which is a kind of chicken in yellow curry sauce, and at his bequest we swapped half sandwiches, so I had some of that too. After lunch we walked to Blackfriars and took the tube to Tower Hill. On the way out an old crone handed me a paper rose and immediately asked for some money "for the children". She wanted £5 ("God'd bless ya!", she cawed), but I told her (truthfully) that I only had a couple of quid and thrust her a handful of coins as I walked away. John spotted a sign nearby warning passers that the money collectors were not working for charity. We have still yet to find an ATM, and have since started walking back to Greenwich. We stopped in at a pub called "Old Liberty" or "Old Victory" or "Old Gold" or something, and asked for some bottles of water. The young barmaid asked, "Sparkling or still?" which was not a question we had anticipated. We took the still and sat at a side table in a shady corner. The bar was very convivial, with a small crowd of regulars just chatting about local business and the football match, but within a matter of minutes we had downed our water and were on our way.

The rest of yesterday turned out somewhat bad. We slogged through south London's worst parts on the way home to Greenwich, unable all the while to find a cash machine that would take my credit card. After what seemed like an interminably long walk, we arrived at the hostel and promptly collapsed. Jessica and the South African girl, who is named Elizna (pronounced "E-leez-na") came back shortly after and we spent a while comparing consumer products and such from our respective home countries. Jessica confused as all by saying that she put pepper on her tea, and was shocked to find that only in Australia is "tea" an acceptable synonym for "dinner." She also had us rolling (and herself quite embarrassed) by the fact that what we call a bell pepper is called by the Australians a "capsicum" (a term derived from the Greco-Latin scientific name, it seems).

Eventually we decided to go to dinner. I consulted my London Walks book (a dangerous and unreliable tome which I later confined to the bottom of my backpack) and decided we would go visit one of the Arabic restaurants on Edgware Road. That, however, was not to be. We walked next door to Greenwich rail station, but in our haste we forgot to walk down to Platform 3 and got on the first outgoing train, which was not the DLR at all, but a Connex suburban service train. Our mistake was not immediately apparent. The train went towards the City as far as London Bridge Station, then abruptly stopped and turned around. We sat by, unsure of what to do, as it took us careening out of London. We finally got off at a remote, single-platform stop called St. John's. In hindsight this was a good move; any longer and we could have ended up in Brighton or some place similarly far from dinner. After watching three trains pass without stopping, we finally caught another and got back to London Bridge Station. From there we took the tube to Marble Arch, which was to be our gateway to Edgware. Typically (for we didn't have a map yet) we misjudged our environs and wandered in the wrong direction, finally stopping in desperation at a forgettable Chinese restaurant on a side street. I foolishly agreed to pay, spending all of my newly-acquired £13 (for which I had exchanged my last $20) on some mediocre chicken with slimy mushrooms and rice, and a bowl of soup for John. All the while John was either complaining of fatigue and general bad feeling, or else hanging his head in total silence. This made dinner, and the night in general, miserable. We took the tube and DLR back without incident and went to bed more or less immediately.
It's 8:35 as I write this, and I'm contemplating having a shower and going down for breakfast. We're supposed to go to the British Museum today, and we'll maybe work in a walk around the Tottenham Court area. Money is my great issue right now; without it I'm sunk and my morale remains low.

Things are looking rather up. Breakfast was white bread with raspberry jam and tea. Afterwards we stepped out into a pleasantly cool and slightly drizzly morning. I bought my tube pass for the day (£4.10) with my credit card, which was good because I only had £1.01 to my name. We took the DLR (making sure to get on the right train this time) and the tube to Tottenham Court Road to visit the British Museum. The Museum has a dazzlingly array of plundered goods, but art museums rarely stray far from the traditional format. This might as well be the Toledo Museum of Art with better loot. En route to the museum we found an open Thomas Cook shop (most unexpected for a Sunday) and I was able to get my hands on £50 (for a £5 service fee). That done, my money worries are over as long as we're in London. After about an hour looking at ancient British artifacts and oriental art, John complained of being tired (he think he's turning diabetic) and we retired to a bookstore, which was overpriced and made us check our backpacks at the front counter, and then to the Forum Café. Lunch is chicken salad with tarragon and wild mushroom on brown bread and a Snapple to drink. The usual array of lettuce, tomato, etc on sandwiches is referred to here as "salad" and only included on request (presumably at no extra charge). After lunch we'll head back to the museum in search of a giant stone foot plundered from a statue of Alexander the Great, and then on to Westminster and the Houses of Parliament.

Lunch was good and not too expensive, £4.60 all told. We returned to the museum, but never did find that foot. In our search we did come across some better-known relics, including the Rosetta Stone, the Elgin Marbles (a series of friezes chipped from the façade of the Acropolis and the subject of much protest by the Greek government, which understandably would like them back), and a huge red Egyptian granite fist. There were also hundreds of feet of intricately-carved temple walls, torn whole from the corridors of ancient temples and shipped to London to be attached with plaster to the Museum's own walls. One impressive section of wall contained a pair of 10-foot-high "flying bulls". A nearby plaque explained that they were guardians meant to protect against misfortune. Evidently the only misfortune their ancient creators hadn't thought of was an army of British with crowbars.

10 Downing Street, which we had planned to see, was barred and gated against the public. This did not prevent a small crowd from gathering to peer through the fence, but we decided our view from across the street was just as good. I got several good pictures of the Houses of Parliament. As we crossed the road towards Westminster Abbey, I saw a double-decker tour bus speed by. I can't see what other tourists see in these things. You pay an extortionate sum to crawl up to the top of a bus and zip around the crowded city from one famous plaza to the next, while a slick Italian ex-bartender rattles off the same schtick he's told a thousand other groups. "And this is the Houses of Parliament. Parliament dates back to 1246. On your left you will see a statue of Richard the Lionhearted, and several pigeons taking a crap on his horse." It makes me cringe to think that these tourists will pay a month's wages to come over here, then pay even more to "see the sights" at 45 miles an hour. Nothing short of total spinal paralysis could persuade me to stop walking and join them. We sat for a bit in a little green between Parliament and Westminster Abbey. There was a flock of pigeons there, the foremost of which was a very fat and imperious fellow we named Winston, after Mr. Churchill. As rain started to fall, we approached the front doors of the famous Abbey. At an entrance fee of £6 per person, we unfortunately got no closer. Next it's on to the Imperial War Museum.

We're back from a long day of Rory Calhoun-style standing and walking. The Imperial War Museum was full of lots of tanks and an original Nazi eagle from the Reichstag (complete with bullet holes), which I was sure to photograph. After a while the day's walking caught up with me, and we decided to stop having only seen a quarter of the museum. We declined to pay £4.75 for tea in the museum café and returned to the hostel. Later we're going to the "All-Books-£2" book shop and to find some dinner (hopefully at a less scandalous cost than last night).

Dinner was good, if not spectacular. We left the hostel in the rain and visited the "All-Books-£2" shop, which was inexplicably open at 7:00 on a Sunday night. I bought a novel called England, England (which I never got more than 10 pages into and later left in New York). John bought several books. We proceeded on down the High Street to a chippie. Dinner was plaice and chips. I asked to try the house lager but they only had Budweiser, so I drank apple juice instead. John had scampi, chips, and water, which he really seemed to enjoy. The prices were reasonable; my plaice, chips, and two apple juices cost about £6. The takeaway menu was even cheaper. I meant to come back, but I never got around to it. We returned to the hostel and I quickly fell asleep. When I awoke it was 4 am and the room was dark and depressing. The curtains filtered the incoming light a dirty rust orange, and Jessica and Elizna had gone, leaving four beds empty.

After I got up for good around 7:30, Alistair, Shayne, and I had a long talk about health. They offered some suggestions as to how I could help my skin and improve my diet, and then revealed they were 40 and 37, respectively. This floored me, as they didn't look older than mid-twenties. We decided to make our first trip into the countryside. Rochester seemed logical, as I could "compare and contrast" with home. The ride took about 45 minutes and was spare but comfortable. Rochester in Kent is nothing like the city back home. It's smaller and very old, with a core of narrow pedestrian streets surrounded by a ring of motorways. We just missed the Dickens Festival (Dickens grew up in Rochester and several of his books were set there). This could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your point of view. The strangest thing is that everyone here is English. After these few days in London we got used to people being French or Australian or Japanese, but not often English. They don't appear to take to well to Americans in these parts. The few people with whom I've talked darkened slightly upon hearing my accent. I hope this won't make us pariahs in our upcoming travels, because I certainly can't afford to stay in London.

The cathedral was splendid in a minor way. There were thankfully no admission booths or any such nonsense, just a series of collection boxes announcing that the cathedral costs £10,000(!!) a week to run and suggesting a donation of £3 per adult. I threw in a £2 coin, plus several coins and an American quarter. We took a few photographs, mainly in the splendid courtyard out back. There was a statuary group (of a woman and a child) which we captured from various angles. The smirk on the little boy's face was quite haunting, and even now it creeps me out to look at the photos. Afterwards we went across the way to Rochester Castle, which was majestic in its ruin. We walked around the walls and the inner courtyard, where a Ferris wheel and some tents from the Dickens Festival were being taken down, but declined to pay the £4 entrance charge. We are now sat in a little pub on a side street, having some decent tea and trying to decide where to go from here. I've made several observations recently: first, wherever we go we hear nothing but American music. Last night we heard country in the chippie's, and as I write this we're listening to Elton John. John wondered aloud why we never hear any Portishead or Radiohead or other fine British music. I said it would spoil the tea, and we agreed that if one were to listen to Radiohead, the only appropriate tea would be Earl Grey. Secondly, I can't shake the feeling that I'd like England a lot more if not for the damned English. So far all of my companions have been foreign and the English have been short, if not outright rude, with us. I hope it will change soon, but these people seem to have a rather low opinion of Americans.

Rochester was pleasant enough except for its people, who seemed surly and withdrawn. I saw an inordinately large number of pregnant women, at least half a dozen in our short time there. The return train was delayed because someone has crashed a car into a bridge up the line and an inspection of all the bridges fshad been ordered. We decided at length to take a different train directly to Victoria Station and from there buy tube/DLR passes and go to the Natural History Museum. John intends to look for new shoes to replace his clogs, which have become quite uncomfortable on his blistered feet. Out in the area east of London we passed many landfills, overflowing with heaps of partially-buried trash. I've made the decision to throw out my brown overcoat at the first possible juncture. It's been far too hot to wear it and despite my earlier enthusiasm it's too big and makes me look like a total ponce. It's a good thing I didn't bring that sweater vest. Tonight I'll have to do laundry, as I'm getting low on clean clothes. This marks our last day in London before heading out into the great green yonder.

We got to Victoria Station as planned, then took the tube to South Kensington to pay a visit to the Natural History Museum. I read in my guidebook that it was free after 4:30 PM, so we got there with enough time to look around for about an hour. Most of that was spent in the grand central gallery, which featured many of the "dead-things-in-glass-cases" that interest me so much. I saw a coelacanth, bleached white from fifty years in formaldehyde, a reconstruction of the ill-fated dodo bird, and many large stuffed mammals. After the museum closed, we went outside and had a look around the outdoor exhibition, a large collection of pictures from "The Earth From Above" series by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. We got back on the tube and rode to Covent Garden for some dinner. We missed our street right away as we left the station, but it gave John a chance to find an outfitter where he bought moleskin for his feet, plus new hiking boots and socks. The girl at the shop was from Zimbabwe, and had come to Britain to make some money and see the world. She seemed genuinely interested in hearing about America, once more proving that the only ones who appreciate us here are the foreigners. Dinner was at a great vegetarian joint called "Food For Thought". A huge slab of potato-and-leek quiche and a mountain of potato and vegetable salad, plus fresh apple juice, was £6.50. The place was packed, but a pair of American guys let us share their table. Afterwards we returned to Greenwich on the tube and DLR. John went back to find the laundry room, and I went uptown to buy postcards. The ones offered at the local Cost Cutters were fairly banal, but I selected five of the least terrible and paid £1.30 for the lot. On the way back I was accosted by not one, but two beggars. I gave one £1 and the other a handful of coins, about 20P. For some reason I seem to be magnetic to those types. I can hardly pass one without being pestered for money. Back at the hostel we put the laundry in and (after begging at the front desk for the right coins and some laundry soap) I went downstairs to attend to my correspondence. After finishing the postcards, I went upstairs and fell quickly asleep. At some point two new American girls came in. I never found out their names, but they turned out to be lesbians. I named them Jersey and Caroline, after their home states. They were both students at UNC Chapel Hill, and Jersey was studying archaeology. They were only in London for a few days before continuing on to Italy for some kind of Etruscan dig. Jersey was short and kind of cute; it's a pity she was a todger dodger. I woke up at 5:00 again this morning, but forced myself to sleep until 7:30. After a shower I went downstairs with the intention of checking out, but the reception was locked and nobody was around. Instead, we went to the "Chill Out Room", where Alistair was eating breakfast. We talked to him for a bit, then sat down for toast and tea (only white bread again). While I was eating, a very confused and loud American woman wandered in. She was from Massachusetts originally but was living in Florida. Her friends, she said, called her "Betty from Boston". Betty had been planning her trip to Europe for a long time and was supposed to be visiting Paris and Spain with a brother. The brother had asked at the last minute that the trip be postponed for two weeks, but Betty refused. She'd struck off for Paris on her own and found the French to be rude and unhelpful (though in her case the blame might not be all on them). Having hurt her back somehow, she came back to London and was trying to get her plane tickets to Barcelona switched for tickets back home. Betty slathered her toast with butter and nibbled at it, complaining all the while about the quality of the coffee. After some time, a pretty French girl came in. She evidently knew Betty, and they discussed a job interview she had coming up. The girl wanted to design sets and costumes for the theatre.

After half an hour of Betty's whinging, an attendant turned up at the front desk. We checked out and took the DLR to Canary Wharf and the tube to Waterloo, where we caught the next Salisbury-bound train. We boarded early and managed to get a good four-person seat with a table. Two of the seats were given over to our luggage, and I read and wrote most of the way. An elderly British couple sat across the aisle from us, chatting quietly in the way that Brits on trains do. Finally we arrived, and it so happened that we disembarked behind a tour group, plodding around like cattle on a drive. We followed them along the edge of the park leading into town. At length we broke away from the herd, stopping to ask a gardener the way to Milford Hill Hostel. He thought a second and told us to stay on the same road, which he said would turn into Milford. The road in fact became Mill Street, but we were able to follow a series of black iron signs on a long, circuitous route to the Tourist Information Center. A glance on the map confirmed our route. We turned up the road and made a short uphill climb to the hostel. The hostel turned out to be quite pleasant, with big wooden staircases and comfortable rooms. We grabbed two bottom bunks, trying not to disturb the cranky-looking man sleeping on the bunk opposite, and headed for lunch. We plan now to wait out the rain here in the market, then head to the cathedral and whatever else might present itself.

(Addendum)
In the central pedestrian district we found a nice bakery called Reeve the Baker, where for about £1.30 I got a delicious Wiltshire pasty (pronounced with a short 'a', like in "cat"), which is like thick beef stew inside a pastry pocket. We sat at a table behind the bakery, and I wrote and munched. In my journal there are two stains, which I labeled "Authentic Wiltshire pasty stains!" based on the assumption that I had gotten some stew on my hand and dragged it across the page. As we were getting up I saw a rather worrying blotch on the table and decided that the "pasty stain" might actually have come from the wrong end of a pigeon. This was more disconcerting still because I'd sniffed at the substance on my hand, and even licked it at a little. Ewww.

On the way to the cathedral we browsed through an open-air market, where venders were selling everything from fruits and spices to floor mats for cars. I bought a packet of Japanese crispy peanuts, then returned to the bakery for a load of bread (60p). In the center of town John picked up a writing tablet and some pens, as well as a phone card. I mailed 4 of the postcards (£1.68) and bought a new one to replace the one for Anna, which had gotten bent all to hell in my pack.
Salisbury Cathedral was as spectacular as everyone says, although their handling of admissions leaves something to be desired. Visitors (of whom there were many, including several school groups) are herded past a "ticket booth"-style enclosure in the vestibule, where a sign announces that admission is free, but a donation of £3.80 is suggested for adults. So the visitors are not compelled to pay, but rather shamed into doing so by the watchful eyes of the deacons. I dug through my pockets and produced a £1 coin, plus various other change, some of it American.
Inside the cathedral all was dark and soaring and rather hushed, with green-sashed employees leading small throngs of schoolchildren around to various displays and sarcophagi (of which there were at least a dozen). A faint smell of shoe polish permeated throughout. After checking with a staff member, I took several photographs, battling all the while with the too-thin British batteries in my camera. I sat in a row near the crux of the cathedral and wrote out the new card for Anna while John shuffled around looking at exhibits. When I arose, he called me to the Morning Chapel, where a quite beautiful glass prism with the cathedral etched inside of it revolved slowly. From there he pointed the way outside to the Chapter House, where an original copy of the Magna Carta was held. The famed Magna Carta was really just a small parchment, little bigger than a pair of placemats, and densely inscribed with Vulgar Latin (by which I mean rustic spoken Latin, not a bunch of Classical cursing) in a neat, compact script. It was remarkably well-preserved for being so old, but not otherwise exceptional. The guide woman it noted that of the 63 original freedoms it guaranteed, only three were still in effect (the fourth, right to trial by jury, having recently been violated in the worldwide terrorism scare).
Afterwards we left the cathedral and decided to go to "Winston Churchill Gardens", hoping that they would be like the neatly-manicured riverside gardens near the railway station. After traversing several unmarked culs-de-sac and a four-lane highway we sighted the "gardens", an overgrown lot across from Salisbury College. After waiting a small eternity at the pedestrian crossing, we arrived in the gardens proper. They were small, scrubby, and appeared to center around a skate park. We sat down on a raised terrace near some shrubs and tore small pieces from the bread loaf. As it was growing dark and was still quite damp from the earlier rains, we quickly left and vowed never to return. Back at the hostel, I read for a bit, then fell asleep. This hostel does not have mixed-sex rooms, which makes the experience infinitely more boring. I suppose I'll shower now and then go see about breakfast.

The trip has taken a rather unexpected turn. John has felt unwell for several days, almost since we touched down in London. He spoke his to his doctor, who thinks it could be one of three things: blood imbalance, heart disease, or on a very small outside chance, cancer. He wanted John to come home immediately, but John decided that was out of the question. So we agreed on a compromise: we will return home in two weeks, on or about the 17th. This will mean the elimination of much of much of our journey, and the restructuring of what is left. First and foremost John has decided to eliminate most of the walking from our agenda. We've decided to forgo our rail passes and rent a car. This will allow us greater flexibility in going from place to place. It will however, cut the scale of our trip down; it is unlikely that we will see Scotland. Furthermore, there will be the added expense of car rental (which John has agreed to cover entirely, with help from his parents) and petrol, which I have agreed to pitch in for. It will also necessitate cancellation and renegotiation of our hostel stays. But enough bad news; there is more to be told in more pertinent matters.
Breakfast was decent enough, and could have been better were it not for my new-found sense of health-consciousness. Full English Breakfast with bacon, sausage, eggs, tomato, beans, and the whole bit was available, but now that the Australians have got me thinking about my diet I could only bring myself to have an orange, a bowl of muesli (which is like a mushy granola), apple juice, and tea. The day started rather dimly, but soon brightened up. We met a couple of other Australians on our way out, who had been in Dublin the day before and come in on the first train from London. They were waiting to check in and take a bus to see Stonehenge. The reception woman gave us a map, and when we asked where Telford Street (which John mispronounced "Tollford") was, she pointed us to Tollgate Street, on the entirely wrong side of town. After tromping through some ugly industrial side streets, we caught our mistake and turned around. In town I mailed my card to Anna and cashed a traveller's check. Astonishingly, just 30 feet from the bank was a Halifax Bank that accepted my ATM card. Elated, John and I each withdrew enough money to cover us for a while. We've now come to the loveliest part of town, a quiet meadow around the banks of the Avon. On to the car hire, and from there, who knows?

The re-focused trip is taking shape. After making peace with the fact that Scotland is now out of reach, I've become rather partial to the idea of cruising around England in the car. We hiked out to Telford Road, in the supremely ugly "Churchfields Industrial Estates". En route we stopped many times along the beautiful little River Avon to watch the huge white swans splash around and beg for bread. The sun beat down on the sandstone avenues as we arrived, drained, at the dusty lot of National Car Rental. After some protracted negotiations the eager young salesman arranged a "W-Group" car for us, this being the smallest, cheapest automatic-transmission model available. The only catch was that the nearest W-Group car was at London Heathrow Airport, some distance away. John paid for the deal (around £400 altogether) and the salesman graciously gave us a lift back to the hostel. Having already checked out, we could not leave our bags and so had no choice but to stay in the parlor and wait for the car, which was promised between 4:00 and 5:00. 4:00 rolled around and the car was nowhere in sight. I walked down the hill to Reeve the Baker and bought two curried lamb pasties, which were not as good as the Wiltshire variety, and another loaf of bread (66p), which turned out to be quite burnt. I searched for a place selling apples, but since the open air market was gone, found none. The local health food store appeared to specialized in overpriced herbal supplements and tofu instead of anything genuinely healthy. After our impromptu lunch, John and I went out to the porch to wait. Finally at 6:00 pm, the car arrived. It was a small, boxy silver Mercedes Vaneo, which I named Eva after Eva Braun, and John called Gina, after a Geggy Tah song.

Being a passenger in Britain is an altogether different experience. As John adjusted to driving on the left, I clutched the door handle in white-knuckled panic. We drove through some rolling hills to Cheddar, about 30 miles from Salisbury. Once there, we checked into the local hostel. The girl at the counter was a pretty French redhead, and John was instantly smitten. Our room was exquisite and empty of other guests, so we grabbed bottom bunks. For dinner we went to a local Indian restaurant, the Cheddar Cottage. I had vegetable daksal, a spicy, vinegary red gruel which I spooned over scandalously-expensive (£1.80) basmati rice. Poppadoms and chutney were a further 90p, and for £2.50 I had my first glass of Somerset cider (which, unlike our American version, is alcoholic). Afterwards, with a mild case of tunnel vision from the cider and £10 poorer, we returned to the hostel. On the way I decided that we should go back to rations (as opposed to sit-down meals) for the time being. In a convenience store I bought cheese baps and a small plastic crate of grapes. We returned to the hostel, where I read briefly and then went to sleep.
I awoke at 8:00 this morning, later than usual. I had a shower, then we drove to a car park on Cliff Road and walked into Cheddar Gorge. The Gorge is billed as "the biggest in Britain", but it is not really very impressive. One sees higher gorges every few miles while driving through the Appalachians, and Letchworth Gorge south of Rochester (New York) would tower over it. We bought some good local cheese (Cheddar, of course) for £3.85 at a shop. Three varieties were available, "medium", "tasty", and "mature". The shop worker let us try all three, and I decided on the "tasty". Unlike our neon-orange Midwestern cheddar, this small wheel was creamy white, with a pleasant smell and mild flavor to match. After our cheese-buying adventure we stopped to write in one of the many riverside parks, then continued up the Gorge until we reached Cheddar Caves. Marvelous though these might be, could not justify the £8.90 admission charge. We walked uphill past the caves and it became quickly apparent that there was "ne plus ultra" except highway and a parking lot for tour buses, so we doubled back, pushing through a crowd of schoolchildren, and walked back towards town. On the way back we bought bottles of local cider (£1.30) from a souvenir shop. Having largely exhausted Cheddar's possibilities, we returned to the car and drove on towards Boscastle Harbour, on the west Cornwall coast.

The trip from Cheddar has taken us through some of the loveliest terrain I've ever seen. Between Minehead and Lynmouth the road became steep and narrow and more winding than usual. We had a direct downhill view to the sea, and the misty bulk of Wales on the far horizon. We pulled off the road for lunch in a field of red dirt and construction equipment. Lunch consisted of cheese baps, some rather overripe grapes, and the fresh Cheddar cheese, with water to wash it down. I had planned to drink my bottle of cider, but between my inability to find a bottle opener and John's jokes about drinking at noon, I was forced to refrain. Later we stopped on a lonely stretch of hilltop road where I, accompanied by sheep and sheep "leavings", brought the book up to date. After a rather nerve-wracking downhill drive, we turned up unexpectedly in Lynmouth, a town built wholly on the vertical, with narrow roads and steep paths straddling the gorge of the River Lyn. We bought a one-hour parking pass (60p) at the pay-and-display and set about town. I bought two postcards from a friendly gallery owner, with whom I decided to try my British accent. I think it may have almost worked; I said few enough words and made enough very British comments about the weather that he didn't once ask if I was American. Charming as it is, Lynmouth appears to be an entirely tourist town. I could not find fruit anywhere on the main drag, despite the abundance of B&B's and "Authentic Devon Cream Tea" shops.

After we passed Barnstaple the treacherous A39 was reformed into a road worth driving (and riding) on, and we arrived in Boscastle about 4:20. The hostel was literally the last building in town, at the end of the pier where a little stream emptied into the ocean. When we arrived no one was there, but the door was unlocked so we let ourselves in and played cards until 5:00. At that point a friendly, somewhat scatterbrained receptionist (Michelle) showed up and helped us check in. Michelle fumbled for several minutes about how to work the credit card machine, and didn't seem to know where anything was. She explained that she was a volunteer for YHA, sent wherever they needed her, and had just arrived a few days before from Bristol. The rooms were astonishingly good, huge with large picture windows overlooking the hill down to the harbor and single (not bunk) beds low to the ground. I spread my belongings out on the end table, then unpacked my wet towel and threw it over an old hand-hewn rafter to dry. At this point John and I had a brief squabble about the conduct of drinking cider. I suggested we go out into town for some food, and wash it down with the cider we'd bought in Cheddar. John refused, saying he wanted to save it for when we got back. I reminded him I wouldn't be able to take the cider to the States, and he made some crack about me being underage. Fuming, I spat "You're worthless!" and stomped out of the hostel. I met up with John some time later at a nearby store, where he was examining a counter full of pasties attended by an attractive brunette. After he bought his pasty (he chose a cold one, for some reason), I stepped up and bought a hot pasty and some apples. He apologized for his remark, and we returned to the hostel to eat. My pasty was an immediate disappointment. It was flabby and bland and bore no resemblance to the delicate stew in a flaky pocket I'd had in Salisbury. John's cold pasty was understandably worse still. As the hostel had no microwave, and John was unwilling to wait 20 minutes for the pasty to warm in the oven, he decided to try it cold. He took a few tentative bites, then tore the pasty open. Inside the doughy pocket was a single, large, dried out chunk of meat, flecked here and there by what might have been diced onions. Meanwhile, my cider was equally disappointing. It had a plasticky aftertaste and none of the fresh taste of the glass I'd had in Cheddar. I drank about half and passed it to John, who downed the rest. After this rather unspectacular meal we set down to the business of re-planning the route. Efforts to call the airline were foiled by the cheap coin-only payphone found in many small hostels.

We did manage to phone ahead to Slimbridge, near Gloucester, to arrange tomorrow's stay. The next day is on to Wales, then to the unknown. Depressed by the notion of planning, we resolved to walk. First we stopped by an ice cream window and bought ice cream, topped with dollops of Cornish cream. The experience of eating the cold ice cream, followed by a lick of sweet clotted cream, was very agreeable and I look forward to trying it again. Cones in hand, we followed the cliff path out of the town onto rock ledge around the bend. It seemed that each step we took revealed a newer and more spectacular vista that had been previously hidden by the hills. We sat for a time with a few other tourists enjoying the late afternoon sun slowly sinking into the ocean, then spotted a white tower on top of a far-off hill, which we decided to hike up to. The walk was not nearly as long or challenging as it had seemed from the bottom, and in fifteen minutes we were at the summit. The tower turned out to be a lookout point for the local Coast Guard unit. From our high vantage point we had a spectacular view in all directions. To our west, the last rays of sunlight shone dramatically over the vast open, silhouetting some giant rocks a few hundred yards offshore. To the east, soft rolling hills and farmland stretched to the horizon. Cottony white clouds tumbled through the sky like massive airborne sheep. For the first time in the trip I had a real sense of accomplishment.

Rain all day. We stepped out of the hostel into a driving rain about 9:30, having undergone the intimidating experience of sharing a single bathroom and shower with a large party of English vacationers. We attempted to find a post office in town, but were unsuccessful. It was still raining as we backtracked up the little B3263, a road narrower than many American driveways. We caught the A39 south, and drove on through the downpour (missing our turnoff once) until we finally caught the A395/A30 across Cornwall, past Exeter, and on into Somerset. Just past Exeter we merged onto the M5, a rather soulless, sleek American-style six-lane highway that will take us nearly to Slimbridge. As of now we stand to get there about 1:30, leaving a further 3½ hours of lockout before we can check into the hostel. Therefore, we have decided to keep driving past Slimbridge and visit Gloucester.

Lunch was rations. Since our overpriced Indian meal in Cheddar, we have decided to stick to simple fruit and bread, supplemented by whatever local goodies we can pick up. We bought sausage rolls, cherries, and small tomatoes in Boscastle, and had the rest of the apples. We got into Gloucester shortly after 1:00 and parked on a side street. The cathedral is quite splendid and not at all pushy about donations, although (as the woman handing out free pamphlets explained) if we wanted to photograph, it would cost £2. In the event, we were more than happy to oblige. After the cathedral we'll try to find some more rations for tonight and head for Slimbridge. There's talk of a proper breakfast tomorrow, with omelets and toast and tea, and likely whatever fruit we can turn up.

Addendum:
While walking through the cathedral taking photographs, I began to have problems with the replacement batteries I bought in Salisbury. The British don't have the same classifications for batteries that we have (A, AA, C, etc.). Instead they have small, medium, and large, though it is possible to find AA batteries if you shop around. Medium batteries are the same length and voltage as AA's, but they are slightly thinner. This has the unfortunate effect of making them slide around hopelessly in American equipment, and I was constantly forced to open my battery case and shake the batteries around so they would contact and give me enough voltage to take a shot. Eventually I gave up, and asked to borrow John's batteries (good AA's he'd bought for nearly a pound apiece in Cheddar). For the rest of our time in the cathedral we passed the single set of batteries back and forth repeatedly, like the Fates sharing their single eye.

Each cathedral has a particular smell associated with it. Rochester smelled faintly of incense. Salisbury smelled like shoe polish, and Gloucester smells a bit like old clothes, like the World's Biggest Garage Sale. The cathedral is largely in need of repair. Already I see scaffolding around many parts, and others are blackened and crumbling. The interior, however, is exceptional. There is a small side room, dark but for the light filtering in through a triptych of deep blue stained-glass windows. Nearby, a small chapel holds an exhibition of art by a local theology student. The paintings, called "Phoenix", are mainly in primary colors and all feature a figure, bent as if hanging or crucified, and irregular and jagged in form, as if the flesh has been flayed off by whips. The effect is disturbing, but quite powerful. The cloister itself is peaceful and centers around a slate walk and a small fountain. In addition to the architecture, Gloucester Cahtedral also houses the remains of many famous English figures, including a king and the son of a king. Robert of Normandy was the eldest son of William the Conqueror, the French bloke who landed in 1066 and gave those Saxons a right drubbing. Robert would have been king if not for the machinations of his brother, Henry. Edward II (died 1327) also lies buried there, enshrined at the request of his son (and possible murderer), Edward III.

The Gloucester Cathedral brochure included one particularly tantalizing passage: "Visits to the crypt can be arranged with the cathedral staff." Having never been in any crypt, cathedral or otherwise, I was intrigued. Unfortunately for my curiosity, our attempts to visit the cathedral crypt were foiled. We inquired with the information desk staff, who informed us that there was a staff member floating around who could take us, but he wasn't in sight, and wouldn't we rather tour the tower instead? We said that might be good too, but upon visiting the gift shop realized we'd have to pay for the privilege. The fact that our one-hour parking pass was already half an hour overdue made a convenient way for us to excuse ourselves and slip out. Outside the cathedral, Gloucester seemed to have little to offer. It lacked the narrow lanes and charming aspect of smaller English cities, and from the car looked almost like an American suburb. We rode along slowly behind a series of large trucks, and declined to visit the "historic docks". Distances being as short as they are in England, we were back in Slimbridge by 3:15 with little to do. We stopped in at the post office to buy phone cards, but the office was little more than a counter and a couple of racks of stale cakes and crisps. The woman working inside told us that we might try at the co-op up the hill. We drove on to the hostel, at the end of a very narrow dirt lane. The hostel was empty, but the front door was unlocked. We stepped inside, and miraculously there was a proper phone that would take our card. We called Amtrak and the airline, both of which were surprisingly helpful. The Amtrak rep, who sounded like Wesley Willis, arranged for us to take the 10:36 train from New York to Toledo on the 18th, and even managed to keep our two-for-one fare. We only had to pay an extra $30 to reflect summer prices. Calling the airline, I was bother amused and embarrassed to find that the ordinary "Press 1 for Flight times, Press 2 for Schedules, Stay on the Line to Talk to an Agent" had been replaced by a voice-driven menu. I had to tell it in a loud, slow voice, my destination city, my origin city, the respective airports, and the dates. To John, seated in the next room, it must've sounded like I was having a conversation with a foreigner or a halfwit. For the reasonable fee of $25, I was able to reschedule for a flight on June 16 at 9:20 AM. The same agent then cheerfully agreed to be turned over to John, who booked for the identical time. It was about this time that some of the employees returned to find us inside a supposedly-locked part of the hostel. They weren't angry, but asked us to leave as soon as possible so as not to get them in trouble with the boss. We drove off in search of the aforementioned co-op, but it was nowhere in sight. The next logical choice was the Wetlands Centre down the road. The Wetlands Centre is Slimbridge's one and only claim to fame. The river marshes are home to many kinds of ducks, swans, cranes, and the like, and the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (one of those delightful agencies with no appreciable value whatsoever) had set up a big visitor's center so that tourists could come meet and greet the fowl. We hiked up the long wooden causeway towards the center, which was built on pillars and surrounded by a moat-like ring of marshes and little streams. The place was very popular, as evidenced by the packed-full parking lot and the smattering of school buses, but the £6.00 entrance charge prevented us from getting any closer. Honestly, who's going to pay ten dollars to look at a bunch of British ducks? Unsure what else to do, we puttered through the neighboring villages: Wooton-under-Edge, North Nibley, and so forth. Although it was early afternoon on a Friday, nothing was open. In desperation we stopped at a gas station where I bought some McVitie's Fruit Shortbread biscuits and John got roast chicken-flavored crisps and an egg-and-cress sandwich. We spied a lone tower on a hill above North Nibley, but were unable to find any way to get up to it. At length we backtracked and stopped by a fruit farm, where for £2.27 we got apples, potatoes, an onion, and half a dozen eggs for dinner. We got momentarily lost among the hedgerows and turned up on the A38 roundabout, just a mile from the hostel. Since it was now past 5:00, we checked in and bought some bread, cheese, and butter for about £1.00. The "self-caterers" kitchen was well-furnished with equipment, but poorly in basic food supplies. The only condiments we found were some paprika and a reddish powder that looked and smelled like greasy coffee grounds. Dinner was a minor success, and dessert a definite one. The main course was omelette with cheese and onion, with fried potatoes and toast. The egg was willing, but the potatoes refused to be tamed and remained tough no matter how long I cooked. Still, with enough eggs they could be made palatable. After the meal I bought down apples and biscuits and we had (or rather I had, and John politely refused) biscuits, apples, cheese, and tea. As we ate a nice Irish couple with a small boy came in and made baked potatoes. We sat and wrote until another family came in and started rattling pots and pans, making it abundantly clear that if we stayed on we'd be right in the way. We walked outside, but there was little to be seen except the duck pond in back and the sheep in the neighboring lot. Before retiring we visited the game room, and for 40p played an improvised game of American pool on a British snooker table while several young English boys looked on in bemusement.

The short period of after-dinner rest made me want to walk. Aside from Duck World, or whatever they called that ten-dollar crime against economy, the only other feature of note was a canal on the edge of town. John and I set out from the hostel and walked across a bridge, down the bank of the canal, and towards another bridge on the far horizon. We passed several eager dogs and their owners, trailing behind on bike or on foot. Near the far bridge, we saw a swan, dipping its long neck gracefully into the oily water of the canal. Some ducks flew low over the surface of the canal, and with military precision skidded into the water and landed in unison. A mother duck led her brood of ducklings across the still water. The ducklings darted skittishly about, occasionally venturing away from the mother then hurrying back with a splash and a flutter of stubby wings. It occurs to me what a perfect little garden this country is, lush and overgrown, but on a miniature scale. Nature is shoehorned into a space many times smaller than the vast American forests and fields. All the same, I find myself missing home. I miss the convenience and order of a land that I know without trying. Coming to a place where wondrous sights lie around every corner has made me more willing to seek out the wondrous sights in my own back yard. When I get back there will be an eternity of business to catch up on: stories to be told, pages to be written, places to go, and people to see. I'm sure this time away will make my time back there all the more fulfilling. We're already talking about where to go next year; John says Russia – I think New Zealand would be a more realistic option.

Slept rather late this morning, till about 8:30. While getting ready for a shower I discovered I have no clean shirts or underclothes, so I've resolved to find a laundry somewhere today All the hostel and travel arrangements are sorted out, with the exception of Manchester (we can't find the phone number to cancel) and Scotland, which we can cancel over the Internet. It has been some time since we came to a hostel with Internet service and Ystradfellte promises not to have either. So, we need to find an Internet café or public library sometime today. The drive from Slimbridge to Gloucester and beyond has been so far uneventful. We have yet to eat lunch, having only some apples and shortbread for rations. About 10:30 we entered Wales. This was marked principally by the sudden (and often sporadic) bilingualism of highway signs. Though signs were marked "250 yds/250 llath" and "1 mile/1 felltir", most destinations and instructional signs ("Heavy vehicles slow") were only in English. Near Monmouth we saw a ruined castle on a hill. We turned at the nearest roundabout and drove back to the gates. Admission was only £2.50, a steal in the land of £6 duck ponds and £9 Ferris wheels. We are now looking around in hopes of killing some of the 6 hours before the hostel in Ystradfellte opens.

The castle is splendid enough in ruins, and must have been a marvel when it was whole. Here and there, bits of white plaster and smooth flagstones cling to the rough stone walls, and one huge timber window frame remains off the biggest courtyard. All this serves to remind that this was once a palace with carpeted apartments and servants, not merely the militant stone shell that lies glowering behind. The saddest part is that this splendid castle was wrecked willingly by human hands. After its surrender in the (English) Civil War, it was blown to bits with cannons and burnt to prevent it from ever being inhabited again.

The remainder of the afternoon was clouded with failure, though pierced by occasional bright spots. Upon arriving for the first time in Ystradfellte (a place of stony and desolate silence, whose big skies and towering far-off hills put me in mind of the American West), we stopped at the Waterfall Forest Preserve. It was there that John noticed he was missing his camera. He decided that he had left it on a bench in Usk, where we had stopped earlier for lunch, and we reluctantly decided to go back for it. Permit to me to insert a brief and uncharacteristic flashback here to recount the day's earlier happenings. After leaving Raglan, we took a wrong turn on the A40 and ended up going south down the A449. While investigating a way to get back on the main road, we saw a baker shop in the village of Usk. We parked (for free, miraculously) on a side street and went uptown. The baker shop did sandwiches to order. I had chicken salad with bacon and sweetcorn, a combination which never would have occurred to me, but which was delicious nonetheless. John had his usual standby, egg mayonnaise. Both sandwiches were prepared by an extremely pretty Welsh girl, (this is an outrageous understatement; the girl was an angel) who had a somewhat sullen expression on her face. I only had to hear her cute little accent (she pronounced butter "better") before I was willing not only to forgive her, but to take her back to Ohio then and there. In the event, I only answered a few sandwich-related questions. I accepted her offer of salad, but specified "no tomatoes" in a rather confident way. I then paid up and stepped aside. It was clear I'd never get to know the girl, but I did have a small consolation: while she was making John's sandwich I stood and idly browsed the pastry rack. I looked back up and noticed she was looking at me. When she met my gaze, she smiled sweetly and returned to cutting the sandwich. Feeling like a million bucks, I moseyed on out of the restaurant. We ate lunch (the sandwiches, plus apples, shortbread biscuits, and a can of orange-flavored pop) on a bench in front of the Usk Museum of Rural Life. We hoped to see the museum, but it didn't open for a further hour, so we packed up and drove on. Several hours later, we found ourselves back in Usk in front of that same bench, in search of John's missing camera. The bench was empty. The museum (which had opened in the meantime) hadn't seen it, but suggested we check at the police station. The aforementioned station turned out to be shut and dark. (When John called several weeks later to check on his camera, the confused operator told him Usk didn't have a police station.) In a last-ditch effort, we went back to the sandwich shop. The pretty blonde said she hadn't seen it and shrugged in her scrumptiously sullen way. On the way out of town we picked up some rations (eggs, baps, and oranges), and I bought some decent camera batteries from a second beautiful Welsh girl, this one a brunette. We then set out for Ystradfellte for a second time. This time we skipped the waterfalls and headed straight for town. "Town" turned out to be about seven buildings at a crossroads. These included a post office, a church and cemetery, a bed-and-breakfast, and a smattering of houses. The post office was no help, as it was only open from noon to 2 PM, Monday to Friday. We checked in at the hostel with a gruff Welsh warden. At first he seemed unhappy and brusque, but it was all a charade. Every time we saw him after that he joked with us, continually winking as if he wanted to break out into a huge belly laugh but was bound against it by his tough Welsh persona. The rooms were comfortable, but nothing special, and full of guests. We took a drive around the surrounding area, finding one larger (but entirely closed-up) town and a whole lot of sheep. On the way back we stopped in to the only open business for miles, a gas station which doubled as a Spar market. The inside was laid out like an antique general store, with all the food stacked on various shelves behind the counter and more in a big deli-style refrigerated case. A friendly Welsh woman sold me the only block of real butter (no "Flora" brand vegetable spread, please) for 70p. Dinner was scrambled eggs with little packets of brown sauce (from the hostel's meager larder), fried baps, and fruit. While drinking tea after dinner we got to know the hostel's other inhabitants. They were older, evidently well-off Brits who seemed to mostly know each other, and who were out for some weekend walking. As they got progressively drunker on moderately-expensive wine, they noted that we were Americans and told us about their trips to visit relatives in California. These stories gradually turned to jokes as the alcohol kicked in. After dinner we left to have a drive, and thus I find myself trespassing in the sheep pasture of some Welsh farmer, listening to the whirring of insects and birds as clouds creep over the landscape. I can see for miles around, and the terrain is the same in all directions: high, bald hills dotted by patches of forest and rocky outcroppings. Sheep call from all around me, and the only signs of humanity are a plowed field far below and the bit of fence stretching behind me (and which the sheep do not heed anyway). In rural Wales, the sheep have the run of the roads. They walk on, alongside, and across it with impunity, and we regularly have to honk at them with the car horn to get them to move. South of Abergavenny, we saw two sheep walking along the median of the four-lane highway, at least a mile from any pastures. The poor farmers must go mad trying to keep track of all their animals. Tomorrow it's off to Dolgellau ("Doll-geth-lai", as one of our fellow hostellers corrected us), where we can hopefully do some laundry and catch up on civilization.

Our fellow hostellers are, judging by the noise, now quite drunk. We still have yet to do laundry, and Kings Dolgellau (pronounced "Doll-geth-luh", "Doll-geth-lai", or "Doll-gehh-lee", depending on who you ask, or in our case, who decides to tell you) doesn't have a laundry either. Nearby Corris hostel does, so we plan to show up, use their laundry services, and depending on how nice it is, maybe even stay the night. Tomorrow morning we'll get up and fight for a spot in the only shower in the place (or maybe I'll get up extra early; the way they're drinking I doubt I'll have much competition), then go and see the waterfalls in the forest near Ystradfellte (Es-drad-velt?). One of our bunkmates is a Londoner named Tim, who is traveling with a woman who may or may not be his girlfriend. He referred her (when she was not around) as "my girl", but she referred to him (when he was not around) as "my friend". We discussed the pronunciation of Welsh (which Tim insists to be easier than English; I remain unconvinced), regional accents, and the war in Iraq. The consensus among the British travelers is that we have done well in coming to Wales instead of judging the whole country by London like so many other tourists.

Operation "Get-up-early-and-beat-the-Brits-to-the-shower" was a bit of a bust. I distinctly remember getting up to my alarm at 6:15, but I also remember reaching down and turning it back off. In the end it was unnecessary and I got into the shower at 8:30 with no trouble. The shower room had a very strange setup, a loudly-whirring heating box into which water was piped, and which may well have been powered by a gas generator. We got up to rain, drizzling slowly over the green hills. As we packed up and left we shook hands and exchanged farewells with the Brits, who were also going out to walk the waterfalls. I talked to the apparent leader of the group, an older man with iron-grey hair, perfect RP accent, and a slightly pompous manner. I never did find out his name, but he sounded like a Frank. Frank told me that he and his companions were an organized walking group who met on weekends to hike in England, Wales, and Scotland (and once to France, Frank said). They had met years ago through a school events planning committee, and when the committee disbanded they went from planning trips for children to planning trips for themselves.

When we arrived at Waterfall Forest, I had envisioned a proverbial "walk in the park", a ten-minute walk along a wide trail ending at the falls, which would of course be equipped with benches and a tasteful informational plaque. What we actually found was anything but easy; our walk commenced with a half-mile walk along a gravel logging road (as evidenced by the clear-cut fallen trees on either side). Finally we arrived at the start (!!) of the "Red Trail" which would take us to the waterfalls. The Red Trail was no Oak Openings Mallard Lake walk. It wound up, down, and around hills, ascending and descending at steep angles with few switchbacks. The rain, which was still dripping through the trees, had turned the entire trail into one giant mud slick. I surfed down muddy hillsides, desperately clinging to tree branches and roots and trying to find rocky areas less prone to slipping out from under me. After a miserable slog, we came to a set of stone steps carved into the hillside. Descending, we came to the beginning of the loop winding around the hill where all three waterfalls lie. At the loop we met a British woman out walking with her two small children. They ate bananas and the woman asked us which way the trail went, despite the arrowed sign in front of us. I think she was just trying to make conversation. A short distance from the loop was the first waterfall. I was hardly surprised to discover that there were no benches and no plaques. Instead there was a flimsy fence that I could've sneezed into oblivion, and a wet, muddy cliff with a couple of sit-worthy rocks. The falls were beautiful, but I couldn't decide if they were worth the hike. When I sat down to write, who should turn up behind us but the British Walking Club (not their official name, just a nickname I bestowed on them). We nodded some hasty hellos and goodbyes and continued along the trail. The path, which was poor in the best spots, had become muddier and steeper still. We passed the woman from the crossroads and her two children; they had decided that the trail ahead was too long and slick to walk in such inclement weather, and were backtracking to the car park. The trail here followed a ridge high up the hill. We could hear the waterfalls down below, but they were invisible through the thick trees. Finally a small trail split off down the hill. We skidded downhill at a 45-degree angle through mud ankle-deep, eventually coming to a stop near the second of Ystradfellte's three waterfalls. This falls was much lower than the first; more of a rapids really, and we could walk right up to it and stand on the eroded rocks as the river rushed not two feet below us. Several still pools lay a few feet from the falls. They must have been filled when the river was higher and cut off when it receded, left to their fates. One pool was full of large black tadpoles, which we watched with some interest. We have one more waterfall left to see, then it's off to find some rations and on to Corris (to do laundry) and Dolgellau.

At the third waterfall a very strange ritual was taking place. Some sort of tour group, possibly one of those fashionable office training retreats, was lined up in wetsuits and helmets at the top of the waterfall. A guide gave a pep talk about confidence and then tossed the group members, one by one, over the falls while the others cheered them on. The members would plunge into the deep pool below, then bob to the surface, give a thumbs-up, and swim over to the nearest rock ledge. We watched in silent and open-mouthed bemusement until they were all finally over the falls. Rather than backtrack up the muddy hill to the high path, we decided to follow the base of the hill around and try to meet up with the trail ahead. We clambered up a nearly-vertical pile of crumbly Welsh boulders, then followed a muddy, narrow trail just inches from the cliff ledge. I stumbled on a rock and nearly toppled into a sharp brush pile ten feet below. When we finally got back to level terrain, I began searching for the high road. We walked along the edges of steep ravines and dodged boggy mud slicks. When we came to an open meadow, I saw a hill at the far end with a flat clearing at the top. I decided that the high road must lie just over the crest of the hill, and climbed up to intercept it. While John waited nearby, I scrambled up a mound of moss and loose dirt around a dead tree, and had a peek over the top. To my annoyance, I saw only another meadow, with a hill at its far end and another clearing. I pulled myself up and crossed the ankle-deep grass of the second meadow, over a row of mossy stones, and up the second rise (which was steeper than the first). Peering over, I saw only more trees. At this time I decided that we should just return to the lower path and see where it would lead us. As I came back down the hill we saw two people come around the bend on the lower path and knew that it had to lead to somewhere. Back on the lower path, we stopped briefly to examine a satiny black slug and bemoaned our lack of any salt to get rid of it. This may not be the P.C. thing to say, but I feel that any creature which leaves a trail of slime wherever it goes is better off dead. At last we came around a bend and arrived back at the first waterfall. If we had only found this lower trail before, we could have seen the three falls much more quickly, without all the mud and climbing of the higher Red Path. We stayed at the waterfall for a while, then reluctantly started the muddy uphill climb back to the car. Needless to say we made it, but it was tiring work. We found ourselves stopping for rest (and water) every five minutes. About 12:40 we shuffled into the parking lot, rather steaming and reeking, and drove off towards Dolgellau. Our first obstacle (or destination) was Brecon Beacons Park, a rather stunning collection of towering hills (well, towering in the Welsh sense) interspersed by rocky valleys. As the clouds moved swiftly through the sky they cast dark shadows on the massive hills, given them a mottled and camouflaged appearance. Out of the park, we stopped in the town of Brecon (Aberhondau in Welsh) to see about some rations. Just as we were complaining about the profusion of tourist traps and the lack of real stores, we came around the bend and there lie a huge Safeway. Inside we bought juicy red plums (in a small plastic basket called a "punnet"), bread, cheese, marmalade, and two kinds of McVitie's biscuits: John bought shortbread, which was rather dry, and I got HobNobs, the sweet, oaty cakes that became a staple of the rest of the trip, and which I miss most of any British food. We ate lunch inside the car in the Safeway parking lot and continued on our way. After 15 miles short of Dolgellau we stopped in the town of Corris. There was another hostel here, which we planned to use to do laundry before going on to Dolgellau. It was about 4:00 PM, but the doors were unlocked and the friendly proprietor, Mike, told us to have a look around and let us do our laundry, even though he was going into town to do some errands. The hostel was big, warm, and inviting, with a fireplace in the common room that gave the whole place a wonderful aroma. Later, when I asked if the fire would be lit that night, Mike scoffed and said, "It's not even cold! That's only for the winter." I guess you can't win them all. Partially because of the hostel's wholesome aspect, and partially because of the fact that due to the tiny and environmentally-friendly laundry equipment our wash wouldn't be done for at least four hours, we decided to stay. The evening was mostly given over to laundry and reading. Some time around 6:30 we wandered down the hill to the Slater's Arms tavern (named presumably for the local slate mines, and not A.C. Slater of "Saved by the Bell" fame) for some dinner. The pub served standard fare, and I had a passable chicken-and-mushroom pie with vegetables and a mountain of delicious chips (with plenty of brown sauce). John had sausages with chips and veg. We washed it all down with pints of Guinness, which I found to be good, if quite bitter. After dinner we tottered back up the hill, tipsy from the Guinness, and went back to reading. I ate a few HobNobs and tasted some "Rooiboos" tea. Rooiboos is not a true tea, but rather an herbal alternative which has become popular in recent years. Rooiboos is Dutch/Afrikaans for "red bush", and not surprisingly comes from a South African shrub. The resulting drink had a rather clayey taste, and I had no desire for a second cup. After determining I couldn't call home on the cheap phone setup, I called it a night.
This morning I work up about 8:00 and went to check the laundry (which had still not dried after half a dozen cycles, forcing me to hang it on the line overnight). Leaving the bunk room, I noticed that a door labeled "Fire Door – Keep Closed" was propped open with a fire extinguisher. I couldn't suppress a chuckle at that beautiful morsel of irony. I threw my mostly-dry laundry back into the dryer to soften, then came back inside. When I went back out to retrieve it, I forgot to prop the door open and was forced to walk, half-clothed, along the sharp chipped-slate path and in the front door of the hostel, carrying a pile of folded laundry. Today it's off to the Centre for Alternative Technology, which seems to specialize in "hippie science", and then a quick visit to the Welsh coast before continuing on to Liverpool.

After a shower in the usual cramped hostel facilities, we packed up and left. Hostel-owner Mike ran a lovely place, and seemed pretty nice considering he was a Christian, vegan, environmentalist. We overheard Mike talking to a regular visitor, and he confessed that since the foot-and-mouth epidemic a few years back, he had been losing money and was now having trouble just keeping the hostel afloat. We left the hostel feeling a bit melancholic. This feeling was enhanced when I realized later that I'd left a T-shirt and one sock hanging in the laundry room. We drove to the Centre, which really is a tree-hugger's paradise. Everything from the wind- and solar-powered phone booth (which John is using to make a call as I write) to the water-powered cliff railway, is all-natural. I look forward to lunch in the vegetarian cafeteria.

The rest of the C.A.T. was interesting and mildly informative, but not in any meaningful sense. The gift shop was full of good books and knickknacks, but although I had to restrain myself from buying expensive gifts for all and sundry, I found little for myself. I considered, but eventually declined, to buy a £2.95 copy of "Welsh Talk: A Guide to Basic Spoken Welsh". Lunch in the park restaurant was nothing short of spectacular; it consisted of a hearty and delicious vegetarian lasagna, greens salad (which reminded me both visually and gastronomically of lawn clippings), and cranberry juice. Dessert was a regional treat called a "flapjack". This one was studded with cherries and coconut flakes, and had the texture and flavor of a granola bar soaked in vegetable oil. Altogether it cost about £7.00. After lunch we departed and set off for the coast. Half an hour's drive took us to the nearest sandy beach, at a little town called Barmouth. Barmouth was the picturesque image of a sleepy seaside town. The whole village was set in the cliffs that wrapped around the coast and fronted by huge stretches of pale beach. We wended our way down the narrow, twisting road to a pay-and-display and walked towards the ocean. There must have been hundreds of visitors, but the beach was so vast that only scattered groups were evident. There was a sign at the edge of the concrete path marked "No Dogs/Dim Cŵm", but a flabby older woman strolled right past it, her furry little mutt in tow, without a second thought. As we walked the lonely expanse of sand, a sullen grey sky loomed overhead and threatened rain. I wandered around idly, picking up interesting-looking shells and rocks and tossing them back if they didn't meet my criteria. John walked close to the water, trying to recreate a happy moment from his visit to the Jersey Shore. I paused to examine what looked like a worm in the sand, an irregular ring of pink. Stooping down, I noticed the ring was surrounded by a translucent halo of goo. The cogs in my brain started to turn, and just before I reached out to poke the blob with my finger I realized it was a jellyfish. I yanked my finger back, realizing I'd narrowly missed doing something painful and stupid. Standing back up, I saw that the entire beach was littered with washed-up jellyfish, quietly decomposing on the Welsh sands. As we walk I made a habit of kicking a pile of sand over each one, a sort of impromptu burial ceremony. I found a stone about the size of a small potato, which was milky with white veins, and I kept it as a souvenir for my dad. Soon the sky opened up with drizzly sheets of cold rain, and we shuffled off the beach and back to the car.
The drive to Liverpool was neither long nor memorable. We skirted the famous Snowdonia region, but had no interest in stopping. The north of Wales seemed to have a great many sheep, and little else. After a week traveling through the countryside, we were ready for a proper city. Eventually we crossed back into England and entered the little peninsula called the Wirral. We fought the city traffic to the Birkenhead Tunnel and crossed into Liverpool, and then promptly got lost. We missed a turn in hellish traffic and drove around aimlessly for most of an hour. Finally we stopped at a BP station and bought a Liverpool A-to-Zed (for £4.95). By the time we got our bearings we were several miles south of the city centre on the banks of the Mersey. We turned around and headed back, and eventually found our destination, Falkner Street. The hostel, however, was nowhere to be found. After a little more confused wandering we found out that Falkner Street stopped dead at a housing development, then inexplicably picked up again a few streets over. We had the right street, just not the right segment. This was annoying to say the least, and though at first I was tempted to dislike Liverpool I reminded myself what a nightmare London would have been by car. We found Falkner Square, a quadrangle of colossal old buildings surrounding a well-manicured park, and then located the Embassie Hostel. We rang the bell on the big red front door, with its centrally-located Hobbit-style doorknob. After a short delay, the door was answered by a thin, wiry grey-haired man who introduced himself as Kevin. His first question was where we were from, and his second question was what we wanted to drink. I knew then that I was going to like this place.
A short time later we found ourselves seated at the kitchen table, drinking mugs of good tea with the other new arrivals, which included Sarah, an American from Cleveland (wonder of wonders!) and two Chinese fellows, whom I mildly impressed by telling them I had studied Chinese and saying, "Wo shuo de zhongwén bu tài hao" (My spoken Chinese is not very good). Kevin distributed small maps of the center of Liverpool, and then using a bigger, wall-mounted version, pointed out the local sights. He showed us our beds, in a large bunk area which had probably been a state parlor or something (the hostel was once the Venezuelan consulate, hence its name). With that, Kevin left a big, short-haired guy in charge and took his leave. We decided to walk to the Central Library and take advantage of the free Internet access. At the library, we ran into Sarah, the American girl. I caught up with my email (50 messages, approximately 46 of which were spam) and John wrote emails to friends and read CNN until the guard came around to announce the library was closing. Just as he did, a pack of small, Scouse-speaking children (think Craig Charles on "Red Dwarf") came running up and descended on the Internet terminals. Sarah got up to leave, and as soon as she did her seat was filled by a little girl. While the girl surfed some bright pink website, the two boys struggled to make the computer do anything at all. One sputtered in a thick Liverpool brogue, "How dew yew git to Gew-gull?" I walked over and showed him how to open up Internet Explorer. His friend looked on, then said, "When yew gonna show me howda dew that?" A matter of minutes later, the guard came and announced closing. The kids (and John, who was still writing) grudgingly got up to leave. On the way out, the small girl picked up a brochure called, "Croxteth Hall & Country Park", studied it for a few seconds, and then handed it to me, saying, "Hey mister, d'yew wan a pam-phlitt?" I smiled and took it, knowing that she really meant, "Here, you throw this away." On the way back, while looking for an ATM, we ran into Sarah again. I was shortly afterwards accosted by a drunk man who said I sounded Canadian. I explained that I was American, from Ohio, and he asked several enthusiastic questions and mumbled some story about having been in a band and playing in California and Texas. Then he began to tell me how he loved Chinese culture (his initial question had been, "Do you know the nearest Chinese restaurant?"). He told me he was part Chinese, though he was plainly English. I sat back and listened to his rambling, waiting for the inevitable plea for "a couple of quid to buy dinner", but surprisingly it never came. At lengthy he shook my hand, told me he was glad to have met me, then stood aside as I hurried off. The three of us (John, Sarah, and I) went off in search of a good pub. We visited Slater Street, recommended by Kevin in his earlier briefing, but all the bars looked dead and dreary. Finally we decided on The Cavern on Matthew Street, a downstairs club just across the street from the old Beatles hangout of the same name. Inside, a duo with guitars was rustily covering old Beatles favorites while a small crowd looked on. I had a pint of something Irish and watched as they finished their set. When they did, we drank up and headed out in search of some food. We tottered around in a mild daze, calling in at one pub after another and being told that food service had already stopped (it was by this time around 8:30 PM). Finally we ducked into an Italian place so unmemorable that I don't even remember its name (though truthfully the alcohol might have had played some part in that). I had a vegetable (verdura) pizza, Sarah had the pescatore (fish and vegetables) and John had plain old pepperoni. We agreed to cover Sarah's meal and after persuading the waiter to bring out our bill, paid and left. Casting about for a place to go, we decided on a pub called the Philharmonic. Said pub was a classy place, decorated in carved wood, marble, and expensive fabric, and across from the orchestra hall. I had a pint of Tetley's Smooth (£1.95) and we sat in the quiet, stately Liszt Room (named after the composer). Sarah had been telling us her story in installments during the evening. She was a grad student, writing her dissertation on International Relations. She had done her undergraduate in history at Oberlin College in Ohio, and was working on her master's degree in Norwich, East Anglia. She was in town for an interview with a local university, where she was considering doing her Ph.D. She had spent a year working for a non-profit organization called Outlook on Peace or something similar, during which time she had traveled to Mexico and Colombia and dealt with labor unions and corrupt militaries. We talked about the post-modern generation and the state of universities and students, and left the Philharmonic just before 11:00, sparing the bartender from the duty of kicking us out. The walk home is a bit muddled, but for the first time I brought up my specialty, computers, and I remember talking to her about the features of Linux (she had mentioned a vague desire to install and learn it). I asked if she would come with us to the Cathedral the next day, but she said she was leaving early to go to another interview in Chester. We shook hands and said good-night. I tried to call home several times, but got no answer. Tomorrow the plan is to visit Liverpool's two cathedrals, the solid, imposing Anglican and the silver, futuristic Catholic (both of which were built in the 20th century) and then to some of the museums and galleries at the Albert Docks. From Liverpool we have no future hostel arrangements, though we will probably end up in the Lake District, long known for its natural beauty and the incredibly fruity poems of William Wordsworth. Thus ends a long, informative, productive, and thoroughly fun day of the trip.

I slept late today, until about 9:00 AM. Luckily the Embassie is not at all strict about checkout time, so I had time for a leisurely shower in the sole working men's stall and a mug of tea in the kitchen. Sarah had probably already left, so I made no attempt to find her. Just another random encounter, although a rather nice one at that. John eventually got up and we packed, then called ahead to reserve a room at Ambleside, in the Lake District. The weather is odd today and very like home; intervals of pouring rain mixed with periods of blazing sun. We loaded the car during a rainy spell and made for the first of Liverpool's two warring cathedrals. Both were built in the last century in some apparent "arms race" between the Roman Catholics and Anglicans. We visited the Anglican cathedral first. The cathedral stood in the middle of a fenced-in, well-manicured lawn covering an entire city block. It was enormous, made of red stone in a neo-Gothic style. Over the colossal front door was a copper statue, weathered green. It portrayed a stocky, bald man, with large piercing eyes, short arms and huge hands, and no clothes except a loincloth. I saw a similar statue inside and asked a warden what it was supposed to me. He gave me a funny look and said, "It's Jesus." I could only smile and nod at their rather unique interpretation of the Christian demigod. The cathedral interior was spectacular, with soaring vaulted ceilings rendered in stone the color of ochre. We browsed around for a while, noting with a sense of wonder that this was how every cathedral in Britain had looked in its prime. The whole interior was sparkling clean and all the furnishings and woodwork were solid, shiny, and new.
At length we moseyed on out and drove a short way to the more liberal Roman Cathedral. For whatever reason, the local Catholics had decided to build their seat of power into a jagged modern-art monolith. The base of the cathedral looked like a giant concrete birthday cake, with sloping walls braced with huge metal ribs and scored with narrow vertical windows of deep-blue stained glass. The "cake" culminated in a multicolored "crown" of stained glass and steel. The entire cathedral yard was under construction, leaving only a few narrow paths up the side steps. From the top of the birthday cake, the Anglican cathedral was visible just down the road. These two great churches and the faiths they represented were locked into a permanent staring contest. The inside of the church was domed, with electric-blue light filtering in through the window slits. A huge lattice-steel structure hung over the center like a garish modern-art chandelier. This struck me as particularly unlovely and unsuited for a church. The cathedral was mostly empty except for a man polishing the benches and a group of schoolchildren. In the gift shop, the top book on the clearance table was "Northern Blood 3: A Collection of Crime Stories with a Northern Flavor". How this came to be for sale in a church is beyond me. Evidently these Liverpool Catholics had little in common with the austere fire-and-brimstone sorts back home. I haven't been Catholic for many years, but the Liverpool cathedral left me with a bad taste in my mouth. From here it's on to the Albert Dock and its great museums.

After a customary period of driving around lost, we arrived at Albert Dock, which turned out to be a shady square of shops, cafés, and museums surrounding a large open pool, presumably an antique loading dock for ships. Our first destination was the Tate Museum Liverpool Branch. Admission was free, but we were required to check our bags in the cloakroom. Actually it was less of a cloakroom, and more of a brutally efficient lockup for clothes. A bored-looking girl at the counter took our bags into the back room, shoved them into a cubbyhole, and gave us two plastic numbered tags. The museum had five floors, one of which was closed, one of which was staff-only, and one of which was a "special exhibition" with an extra admission charge of £4. That left only two floors, with a paltry three exhibitions. The first was a collection of abstract sculpture and painting, which were with few exceptions, utterly forgettable. Most of the pieces were of the "field of solid color broken by lines of some other color" variety. One painting was a canvas painted with purple so dark as to appear black. Nothing else. I walked out of the gallery not knowing whether to marvel at the sad state of modern art, or pick up some finger-paints and wait for the profits to roll in. The next exhibit (my favorite) was called Forty-Part Motet, by Janet Cardiff. It was an empty room with several benches, and forty speakers set up in an oval around the edge of the room. Each speaker was set at a different height, and played the pre-recorded voice of one man, woman, or child singing. The effect was identical to standing in the middle of a forty-part choir in a small room. As I moved around the room, I heard each voice from a different angle. The song was beautiful, but without my pencil or notebook (both were in my confiscated bag) I could not stop to write, and eventually I left. The ground floor was a disturbing walk-through exhibit by a young German former mental patient named Rebecca Horn. While in art school, Rebecca inhaled too much fiberglass dust and ended up brain-damaged and in a sanitarium. The exhibit was two rooms: the first and larger was lined with mirrors, each of which had a couple of small motorized hammers attached to it. Every few seconds the hammers would tap the glass, not hard enough to break but hard enough to make a resounding "thwunk". On the one wall without mirrors, a larger hammer taped away at a bundle of charcoal sticks, producing dust that fell on an egg sticking out of the wall. The exhibit was called, not surprisingly, "Woodpeckers". The smaller room showcased Horn's work since leaving the sanitarium. This consisted mostly of making outlandish costumes of unicorns, butterflies, and other nonsense. Three video screens showed her wearing the costumes (and little else, it turned out). Despite the nudity, it was more sad than erotic. There is a touch of desperation and disconnection from reality inherent in a grown woman prancing about in twenty yards of canvas and plastic. We shortly collected our bags and left. Further down Albert Dock was the Museum of Liverpool Life. We almost missed it, distracted as we were by the imposing Victorian edifice of the Liver Building (the name of which rhymes with "fiver", for some reason). The museum featured an interesting (but not overly entertaining) collection of Scouser relics. My favorite section was a bit about Britain's various colonial wars and the Liverpool regiment's participation in them. Rewarding as it was to read about the American Revolution from the perspective of the runners-up, hunger and the beginnings of "museum-itis" (a rare condition caused by absorbing too much history in a short time) drove us out of the museum in search of lunch. We stopped in at an unnamed sandwich shop down the dock. It has been my experience that if a restaurant doesn't need a name, the food must be good. Unfortunately, this place proved an exception. I had a hot roast beef baguette, which was bland and insipid, and had altogether too many cucumbers. This tragedy-on-a-bun cost me £4.50, and a dry fruit scone was another 60p. Only the ubiquitous Orange Fanta saved the meal from total gustatory ruin. A bit more reflecting along the water, then it's off to the Lake District and our eventual destination, Ambleside (on the shores of Lake Tourist-Trap, also known as Windermere).

The drive out of Liverpool was nothing short of nerve-wracking. It took the better part of an hour to find our way through the maze of side streets onto a major highway. Out in the country we missed the A58 a few times and eventually caught the M62 north to Lancashire and Cumbria. Somewhere in southern Lancashire, the prattle of the BBC1 announcers finally got to us. The little BMW had a 4-disc CD changer, but we didn't have any discs to put in it. We stopped at a rest stop and bought three discount two-CD sets: Supa Funky (good, funky James Brown-type stuff), Beautiful Game (songs for soccer hooligans), and Loungin' (groovy trip-hop and bossa nova stuff). Imagine our horror when we returned to the car and discovered that the 4-disc changer was less of an audio player and more of a dash-mounted decoration. The friendly folks at the agency had shown us the cheapest class of automatic car, the "Class-W", which promised tape player only. The National Car Hire Corporation had compensated for BMW's unwarranted extravagance by unhooking the CD-changer from the stereo, thus preventing us from using any unpaid-for features. Silly, yes. Outrageous, probably. But I was unwilling to admit defeat. We stopped in the city of Lancaster to seek out a portable CD player. As luck would have it the first plaza we pulled into had two competing Circuit City-type stores just a few doors down from each other. I scoped out the CD players in the first while John went on yet another pointless quest for a prepaid mobile phone. After picking out the cheapest model available (£15.99), I sought out the nearest shirt-and-tie man and asked him to open the CD case. It turned out he didn't work there at all, and I slunk away to the cash registers in embarrassment. Eventually, I got my CD player and a tape-deck adapter as well. I was just preparing myself for a £35 shot to the wallet when the clerk announced there was a special that week and a tape-deck adapter came free with every portable disc-player. Bit of good luck, that. I walked across the plaza to the other store, where John was interrogating some poor sales girl about which phones would meet his criteria (that is, prepaid, internationally-capable, and cheap). Once again, none did. I bought a 12-pack of good Duracell AA batteries for £4.49. That's a damn cheap price for batteries, even with the exchange rate. Mere minutes later, we were cruising through Lancashire to the tunes of Kool and the Gang. Life was suddenly better and brighter, and the troubles of Liverpool driving were forgotten. The Lake District has long been regarded as the most beautiful part of England (mostly due to the poetry of that grand bore Wordsworth). If I'd just arrived from London I might be inclined to agree with him, but I'd just spent three days in Wales, and green hills and sheep were nothing new. Still, in the setting sunlight there was a certainly quaint and misty quality about the farms and little villages. Windermere was blue, sparkling, and a little choppy, which is just how a lake should look. It was also fairly small. As you may or may not know, the famous Windermere is the largest lake in England, but if relocated to America it would rate little more than a large pond, a suitable site for an overnight summer camp. A red ball floated on the water, giving the lake a playful feel. Dodging tourist traps, we arrived in Ambleside and nearly missed the hostel driveway. The hostel had once had been a hotel and it showed. The building was a towering slate structure in a prime location, only 30 feet away from the shores of Windermere. John saluted its grandeur as he pulled in by running into a covered drain, breaking several large slabs of slate and further destroying his chances of recovering the £75 damage deposit on the car (the hubcap now has extra corners). I hurriedly got out and rearranged the broken pieces of slate, trying to ignore the stares of several Indians playing football in the yard. Inside the hostel I discovered an infestation of schoolchildren, who ceaselessly tromped through the halls and stairways yelling like a herd of tiny elephants. The reception girl, Christine, was very nice and sold me a packet of HobNobs for £1. (I wrote that very line in my journal, but I don't remember anything else about her now, so she couldn't have been that spectacular.) I wrote out some postcards to send tomorrow. Now I suppose I'll track down John and go look for something to do.

The Lake District is singularly inhospitable to self-caterers. We had a drive around Ambleside in search of rations, but found nothing except restaurants of the "Country Inn" variety and a few closed ice cream parlors. In desperation we stopped at a BP station. Their stock of food was meager at best, but did include such oddities as "Breakfast All Day", a canned product containing "baked beans in tomato sauce, sausage, bacon, egg nuggets, potato, and cereal bites." The picture on the can looked like pork and beans gone haywire. Next to the stack of "Breakfast All Day" was a product by the same manufacturer called "The Full Monty", which I was too worried to even examine. In the end I picked up a chicken, bacon, and sweetcorn baguette and a plastic tub of pasta salad with bacon, plus Tango Orange pop. It all came to about £4.75. We drove back to the hostel and sat down on a bench on the lakefront to eat. No sooner had I opened the plastic seal on my pasta than a curious female duck wandered over. She looked at us expectantly, as if waiting to be fed. I refused (I'll have no truck with mooching mallards), but John unwisely tossed her a bit of bread. The duck waited nearby, and then started to quack in a soft cooing way which was almost cute. It was then I knew that we were dealing with a professional. I had visions of the duck waddling up and down the waterfront all day, practicing her cooing and looking for her next "trick". Seconds later, a male duck climbed out of the lake and padded over, followed by some smaller gulls. As we ate, the female duck circled around our bench quacking seductively while the male stood by, pimp-like, and surveyed the scene. When we refused to contribute the duck-whore became very insistent and jumped up on the retaining wall behind the bench, nearly at eye level. When this didn't work she leapt up and fluttered onto the bench between us. I took a swipe at her as I moved to protect the baguette, and she quickly jumped down onto the pavement. We ate on, wary still of the hungry birds at our feet. Finally some of the school kids sat at the next bench down and the ducks went off to pester them. We could finally eat in peace, but the victory was a hollow one. My gas station baguette and gas station pasta salad tasted exactly as you would expect, which is to say, lousy. The bread was chilled to the same temperature as its contents, and the pasta dressing had long since separated into oil and gritty little "flavor bits". I finished the sandwich but left a good portion of the salad, and at length we collected our trash and left. Not a moment too soon, for as we did the ducks were starting to regroup around our bench. The rest of the evening was given to reading. I tried to call home, but again there was no answer. Tomorrow's activities are largely unplanned, and the next night's destination has hardly been considered (although it will probably be in Yorkshire).

Our first destination for the morning was Keswick (pronounced "Kezzick"), on the lake called Dorwentwater. We drove about 15 miles from Ambleside and parked in a pay-and-display on the north edge of town before heading into the town center. As I dug my bag out of the back of the car I noted that most of my plums had become hopelessly squashed, and was obliged to throw out the majority. We made our way south through the cozy streets, filled with tourist shops and takeaways, and stopped in at a new-and-used bookstore called Bookends. I bought a travel/history book (my favorite sort) called "Colour", the author of which tracks down the history of many kinds of colored dyes and makes trips to exotic parts of the world to see their sources. This cost £7.99. We got takeaway (filled paninis) at a place called Mayson's. Mine was cheese, tomato, bacon, mushroom, and pesto, and was quite good for £2.60. A Twining's peach-flavored iced tea coast an extra 70p. I've stopped trying to work out prices in American dollars in my head. Food seems more reasonably-priced if you only figure it in pounds, so the extra work of converting it back (and finding out my lunch just cost $8.00) is no longer worth the trouble. Our entire reason for coming to Keswick was to see the Derwent Cumberland Museum of Pencils, on the grounds that neither of us had been to a pencil museum and the full-page ad was very nice. According to the free tourist map we picked up, the Museum was at a place called Greta Bridge. I studied the map and found several Greta names, but no Greta Bridge. We took our lunch and made for Greta Street, a bit south and east of the pedestrian district. As we neared Greta Street, it became evident that the whole area was strictly residential, with no shops, pubs, or Pencil Museums. We stopped for lunch in a memorial park alongside a river, which I later found to be the infamous Greta. I studied the map again and finally found Greta Bridge, tucked in the northern corner of town about fifty feet from where our car was parked. We collected and deposited our lunch trash, then took a walk through the center of town and up to Greta Bridge. The museum was sited away from the road and hidden from view by a row of tall trees. Only a few signs announcing "Pencil Museum" advised us of its presence. We paid the student rate of £1.75, which even included a free pencil, and went in. The tour started with a walk through simulated 18th-century graphite mine. Several mannequins crouched in the torchlit darkness with pickaxes while a hidden speaker told the story of the Keswick graphite mines. Graphite had been known for hundreds of years, but was previously used for making rifle bullets and that sort of thing. It was not until the 17th century that someone thought of replacing the toxic lead in pencils with harmless graphite. Keswick was the first area in the world to commercially manufacture pencils, and was still a leading light in the industry well into the 20th century. The supply of local graphite ran out years ago, and now most pencil graphite is obtained in the Far East, in Korea, China, and Sri Lanka. The tour continued into an exhibit on the pencil-making process. The graphite is ground down into powder, then mixed with various oils and binding agents (previously chalk, but now mostly synthetics) to make a clay-like substance which is forced through a die and into long strips like a giant pasta-maker. Here is a fun fact which you may not have known: the pencil industry has, in the last few hundred years, run through much of the world's supply of cedar. Originally pencil casings were made from Florida cedars, a fine-grained and aromatic wood. Many old pencil casings were made from recycled railroad ties shipped from the American south. When those ran out, cedars of lesser quality from Kenya were used. When the Kenyan cedars became scarce, the manufacturers turned to California cedars, actually a member of the redwood family. The "cedars" are grown on huge plantations in California and Oregon and shipped to Britain to be cut apart for casings. We saw historic pencils and pencil-making equipment, which was roughly as exciting as it sounds. In a makeshift theatre, two videos were showing on an endless loop. The first was boring and not worth a mention. The second was an animated feature called "The Snowman". It was drawn entirely with Derwent-Cumberland pencils, possibly by an artist under the influence of narcotics. It was beautiful in a dizzying kind of way, with lots of blinking lights and psychedelic vistas as a wayward snowman led a rosy-cheeked little ankle-biter on a flight across Britain. When that icy little acid trip was finished, we made our way past the world's longest colored pencil into the gift shop. The shop was outstanding. Let me say that again. Outstanding. All manner of art supplies were to be found; pencils, paints, specialty papers and canvas, and art books, plus some delightful factory seconds. I bought an assortment of seconds pencils, a misstamped eraser, and "The Complete Book of Drawing Techniques" for about £7. I was positively whistling with glee as we strolled out the front door.
Our agenda for the day ended with the Pencil Museum, so we drove in a random direction out of Keswick and stopped some time later in a painfully green, rocky valley alongside a bubbling stream. We parked the car at a turnout and clambered up among the rocks, dodging sheep "leavings" all the way. As I wrote, a trio of large brown sheep came nosing along in my direction. They watched me and made a slow circle around my boulder, but when I rose to photograph them they skittered away. I nicknamed these sheep "buffalax", a reference that will be lost on ninety-eight percent of my readers. When two other cars pulled up and began to disgorge visor-wearing daytrippers, we knew it was time to move on.

We have deviated somewhat from our course. And since we had no course to begin with, I don't know where that could leave us except Scotland. When our blind automotive ramblings finally turned us onto a major highway, I checked the map and realized that we were less than fifty miles from the Scottish border. Scotland, you will remember, was the major casualty in our decision to cut the trip by two weeks. Why not, I reasoned, go and visit just for the afternoon, if only to say that we'd been. John agreed, and a short time later (for in Britain there are no long distances) we were across the Scottish border. We passed the hamlet of Canonbie and turned onto the B6357 towards Hermitage Castle, the only attraction for many miles. While driving through Newcastleton we spotted a bakery and stopped for rations. The clerk was a pretty brunette with a delicious, lilting voice. As she rang up my oranges and ice cream (£1.50) she kept smiling at me in an interested sort of way. Maybe she was just being polite, or maybe she was amused by my American accent, but I like to believe otherwise. In any case nothing came of it; we got back on the road and a few minutes later we arrived at the castle. Hermitage was not the same kind of castle as the ruin we had seen in Wales. It was purely military, a spare and Spartan bunker with no ornamentation whatsoever. The pony-tailed Scotsman at the gate looked starved for human contact, so I inquired about the castle's history and he gave me quite an earful. Hermitage dated back to a time when England and Scotland were perpetually at war and the border was as lawless as the Old West. A warden inhabited the castle, and with his garrison spent most of the time tracking down cattle rustlers and settling disputes between the warring clans. Once in awhile an English army would march up through a nearby vale called "the bloodiest valley in Britain", and scouts from Hermitage would rush off to sound the alarm. We paid the modest admission and went for a look. Inside the spotless stone shell, there was little to see. The whole interior was wrecked, and because of some construction only two rooms and a few small corridors were accessible; these accounted for less than half of the ground floor. The castle instantly made me uneasy. There was a haunted aspect to its slime-covered walls that gave me the chills. Birds cawed and hissed in far-off parapets inaccessible by men. A sarcophagus full of black water lay in the entry hall. In what had been the dungeon, someone had arranged the tourists' coins into a cross. John disappeared after a few brief minutes, and I wandered around the wrecked structure looking for him, expecting something to jump out and grab me at any time. When I stepped out into the air and discovered John staring down some sheep, I breathed a sigh of relief. We lunched on bread, oranges, and HobNobs, and we had another brief chat with the gatekeeper. He seemed sad to see us go, and I wondered how long it would be before he saw anyone again.

We drove on towards the town of Hawick (pronounced, comically enough, "Hoyck!") in search of a payphone. For absolutely no reason, there was a BT kiosk in the middle of a field, so we stopped and arranged to stay in Acomb, a town back in England near Hadrian's Wall. We also took the opportunity to reserve two nights at the end of the trip (the 14th and 15th) at our old haunt, St. Christopher's Greenwich. Hawick itself was unimpressive and appeared to revolve around the sale of wool products. We found another phone booth and I managed for the first time to call home and speak to someone besides the answering machine. My mom explained that everyone was working and doing well. I thanked her for depositing some money into my bank account, then I hung up and we drove back to England. At the border was little turnout for the kind of tourist that likes to stand with one foot in Scotland and the other in England and take lots of cheesy pictures. I am, of course, that kind of tourist. There was a rather large and impressive rock slab standing upright at the border; on one side was inscribed "SCOTLAND" and on the other side "ENGLAND". After we had finished taking pictures and studying the ubiquitous herd of sheep, we continued south on the A68.
Hadrian's Wall is a sort of seventy-mile-long privacy fence, built on the orders of a Roman Emperor (can you guess which one?) to keep the Picts from raping and pillaging and getting their blue face-paint all over everything. The project was an ambitious one, but it was not destined to last. Many of the forts along the wall were abandoned mere years after being built, and as more and more garrisons were withdrawn from Britain to help defend the Continent, the whole thing fell into disrepair. Nowadays the sections of wall still standing barely approach waist-level, and only two of the forts (or rather, the foundations thereof) are still extant. One is at a silly place called "Once Brewed", which we were told is frequently overrun with schoolchildren. The other is just north of Acomb, in a village appropriately named "Wall". We arrived at the hostel in the late evening and were shown around by the warden, a tall, bearded man whose accent I can only describe as "movie Amish" ("'Tis a fine barn, English, but 'tis no pool"'). The hostel was built like an army barracks, with a two-story bunkhouse (one floor for men, one floor for the ladies), a shower house, and a common room/kitchen. The place was empty except for us, the warden, and Old John, a rather eccentric old cyclist. John had biked 20-odd miles from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to a Gypsy Festival somewhere in the area. It soon occurred to me that if John were not a pikey himself, he certainly had known a few. It was his voice that gave him away; he spoke quickly, or rather bellowed, since he was nearly deaf, and he used many an odd turn of phrase. He referred to us as "young'uns", "li'l ones", or "young pups". Nevertheless, Old John was pleasant company and offered us fresh tea with milk and sugar, which we gladly accepted. We talked for some time and the conversation steered to the nearest big city, Newcastle. Unbeknownst to us, Newcastle has a reputation as a party town with an active nightlife, and is a haven for young Scandinavians looking to take advantage of Britain's lower drinking age and alcohol prices. We asked John and the warden for hostel recommendations (between the two of them they had been damn near everywhere), and we eventually booked a place at King's Lynn, East Anglia, several hours drive down the coast. With that I retired to the bunkhouse to do some sketching. After a while John came in from the common room, where he had been chatting with Old John and listening to football on the radio. By this time it was nearly 10:00, so we hurried to find some dinner. Acomb was shut up tight so we crossed the bridge into neighboring Hexham and found a Safeway with ten minutes to spare. We scanned the aisles with a furor rarely seen outside of low-budget game shows like "Supermarket Sweep", and escaped with our purchases into the parking lot at 10:00 sharp with the employees hot on our heels.
Back at the hostel we arranged our food on a table in the common room and had a tiny feast consisting of packaged roast beef, a focaccia-like bread called stotty, apples, and pasta salad. Tomorrow we will visit the Roman ruins, then Durham cathedral, and finally drive far down the coast to distant East Anglia.

We were awakened at 8:45 this morning by Old John as he was leaving. He bellowed in his deaf way, "Yeh young'uns still asleep?" Well, we were… He gave us half a bag of mints (which proved to be delicious) and some "Ginger Nuts" brand cookies (which neither of us tried). We crawled out of bed just as the warden was arriving and had our showers as he went about his daily cleaning routine. As we were preparing to say goodbye to the warden, he stepped out of the bunkhouse and asked whether one of us had left a towel behind. It was mine, and I thanked him doubly for returning it. Right about then a pretty little brunette checked in and went up to the bunkhouse, but it was too late to stop and say hello.
It began to rain as we drove north to Chesters Fort. We paid the £2.30 student discount rate and walked a trail mowed in the tall grass out to the ruins. There was little left of the border fort; just a series of foundations, none more than five feet high. John was fascinated, but I soon grew bored. After the first fifteen minutes my brain devoted itself to some external purpose and my body trudged on, pausing at intervals to remark politely on each successive pile of stones. Finally we ran out of ruins and stopped at the on-site café "Lucullus' Larder" to buy sandwiches. I had turkey and apple chutney. This was not as bad as it sounds, but I don't wish you to believe that it was very good either. We browsed through a small museum of Roman artifacts found nearby, then had a quick look around the gift shop and returned to the car to eat lunch.
As soon as we pulled out of the car park the sky began to darken, and by the time we reached Durham it was pouring rain. Durham is a good-sized city, and apparently a college town judging from the number of appropriately-aged girls walking around. We missed the turnoff at a mind-warping roundabout and circled once around town before finding a car park and walking to the cathedral. Let me say one thing: Durham Cathedral is big, and it is magnificent. The squared-off Gothic architecture reminded me of University Hall at the University of Toledo. Bryson visited here while working on "Notes from a Small Island", and noted that it was as spectacular as Salisbury and not nearly so pushy with regards to admission. In this respect I agree wholeheartedly. The cathedral was huge and imposing and sparkled after the recent rain. Bryson also commented on the profusion of donation boxes deployed around the cathedral, and as far as I could tell things have only gotten worse. There was no admission booth (yet), but a sign near every door stated that the cathedral needs £3 from every adult visitor just to stay in operation. It had of course occurred to me by now that most every cathedral had similar notices, and not everyone was paying, yet they all seemed to be doing fine. I contributed a £1 coin, plus some small change. A few steps into the cathedral I was invited by various signages to buy a souvenir guide (£3), a map (£1), and a children's guided walk (30p). If that were not enough, I was also asked to contribute to a number of subsidiary causes ranging from a fund for the Durham Light Infantry Regiment to HIV Relief in the African nation of Lesotho. No thank you. There was a prominent sign at every door expressly forbidding photography and video recording. This was ostensibly to prevent the visitors' cathedral experience from being spoiled by flashes, but I hardly think a camera flash is any worse than a gauntlet of gaudy signs and collection bins. Strike one against the majesty of the cathedral. In a moment of rebelliousness I stole down an unguarded side corridor and took a hasty snapshot down the long row of columns.
Near the rear of the cathedral was an enclosed shrine to St. Cuthbert, a historical bigwig from the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne, which has some connection to Durham that I never quite figured out. Behind the shrine were some spectacular sculptures, carved from huge downed trees and ornamented with brass. I would have taken pictures if not for the constant hive of tourists swarming around. We completed our circuit of the cathedral proper and went outside into the cloister, which hosted several exhibitions (including the monks' dormitory with original ceiling and "The Treasures of St. Cuthbert") for 80p a pop. Here was strike two; I was not about to pay 80p to see a small room full of musty antiques that would have been free in Gloucester or nearly anywhere else.
Finally we proceeded into the shop, where it became apparent that the good name of Durham Cathedral was definitely for sale. Store policy was one of ruthless merchandising; anything that could be fixed with a Durham Cathedral logo and put on a shelf, had been. Admittedly there was a large and varied collection of religious and theological literature, but that was mixed in and overshadowed by such irrelevancies as Durham Cathedral-brand chutney and cheap plastic Durham Cathedral calculator-keychains in the shape of cellphones. Strike three, and we were on our way out. John said, "If Jesus were here, there would be some serious table-overturning."

The drive from Durham was the longest of the trip so far, and due to various difficulties we didn't arrive in King's Lynn until about 7:00 PM. Near Boston we encountered an accident site and the flow of traffic was diverted off the highway and through a small village. Further east we got lost and blundered around on unmarked country roads until we found the A17. Upon entering Norfolk we noticed an eerie resemblance of the surrounding area to our own Northwest Ohio. The same wide fields, big skies, and humble appearance made us feel as if we were in some alternate Ohio where everyone spoke funny and drove on the left. Nearing King's Lynn we approached a farm market, which I can say with authority would be put to shame by any market in Northwest Ohio. Except for a large stock of onions and two rows of wrinkly produce along the back wall, everything was candy and jars of chutney and preserves. The place was nearly empty and the clerk, whom I guessed to be about my age, was watching me as if he expected me to grab an armful of jams and run for it. Awkward as I was, I would have felt more awkward leaving without buying something. I committed a minor gaffe by stepping up onto the second tier of produce to grab a bag. Unbeknownst to myself I had violated the clerk's territory, and he came over immediately and asked in as unfriendly a manner as possible, "Can I help you?" I pulled back as if burned and quickly scanned the crates of dried-out carrots and mushy oranges. I blurted, "Just some apples!" and pointed to a crate on the far end of the display. I got five wizened Braeburn apples, which were quite obviously past their prime. This came to 83p. I didn't have enough change, and had to break a £10 note. I felt the clerk's scowl burning into my back as I limped out with nine pounds change and a bag of shriveled fruits.
Shortly we reached King's Lynn, which looked like Wauseon, Ohio if Wauseon had a river running through it. A shock of ugly prefab buildings and parking lots diverged suddenly from the fields, marking the edge of town. We found the hostel tucked into a narrow alley just off the riverfront and checked in with the receptionist, a nice middle-aged lady with bad teeth and a relaxed manner. I remarked that the area was a dead ringer for our own home, and offered to send a picture. I honestly meant to follow through with this, but after I got back I lost my wallet containing the hostel's address. Oh well. We said hello to our roommates, two older guys who had little to say in reply, and went out to see about dinner. I was initially impressed by the large pedestrian district, which turned Northwest Ohio into Merry Olde England in a matter of blocks. On closer inspection, the shops mostly dealt in cheap plastic junk and holidays on the Costa del Sol. There were few restaurants, and the only one open was a place called "Hogshead", which despite its British name could have been T.G.I. Friday's. The bartender-cum-waiter had to check whether they were still serving food (it was only 7:15!), and in time he grudgingly passed us some menus. I ordered the "Bookmaker", roast beef and onions on a baguette, plus chips for the scandalous price of £6.15. The place was mostly unoccupied, so we sat at a table and discussed hostel plans over the pounding music. When my food arrived I looked at it in disbelief. The "Bookmaker" was the most perfect textbook example of how not to make a sandwich that I have ever seen. The roll was ciabatta. Ciabatta, for those unfamiliar with it, is a tough, spongy kind of bread with a crusty exterior. It is best served with soup, which can soften up its hardtack texture. The roast beef was pre-sliced, dry, and flavorless. The caramelized onions had obviously come frozen and been reheated into a uniform brown slop. Lastly (and I must have overlooked this in my haste to order) the sandwich came topped with a healthy dollop of room-temperature chunky salsa. In short, not a single ingredient was well-selected, and not one complimented the others in any way. Shameful as the sandwich was, not even the Hogshead could ruin chips. My fries were brilliant dipped in brown sauce, and in reality that was all I wanted. I gnawed and read while John ate his scampi and chips, plus a few mouthfuls of peas. I watched the other customers, seated in isolated clumps listening to too-loud American R&B and drinking overpriced beer. The scene could have taken place in any commercial suburb in the Midwest, right down to the patrons' inexplicable preference for denim. Something in me wanted to stand up and shout, "You're all American! Don't you know that?" Instead I put my dishes up on the bar and left. Well, shouting's not really my thing.
Our trip is nearing its end. Tomorrow we'll see if there's anything to do here in King's Lynn, then head on to historic Winchester (barring any unlikely change in availability in Brighton). The day after that we're due back in Salisbury, where we will return the rental car and take a train to London. And not so long after that, we'll be on a flight back to New York.

Addendum, 9:15 PM:
Due to the sneaky British habit of including a Ground (Zeroth) Floor in buildings, our second floor room is actually on the third. This also happened in Ambleside; our room 329 was actually on the fourth story of the building. The British concept of "floor" apparently refers to how many flights of stairs you have to go up to get to it.

I got up late again today, nearly 9:00. I don't know why I keep mentioning this, since left to my own devices I rarely get up before noon, but when I first came to Britain I kept waking up at 5:00 AM and some demented part of my body thinks that's the right thing to do now. To my surprise, the bathroom in the hostel actually has a bath (and not a shower, unless you count the rubber hose-attachment; my experiments with it were messy and unsuccessful). I haven't taken a bath (as opposed to a shower) since I was about ten years old, and in the meantime the concept of washing while seated has become most foreign to me. Without getting too graphic, let me say that I flopped around like a sea lion in the lukewarm water trying to get my various parts soaped and then clean again, a feat that took some doing and that I hope not to repeat soon. When I told John about this he looked at me like I had a foot growing out of my face. He'd found a shower in another part of the hostel and washed up without event. Bastard.
That hurdle overcome, we checked out of the hostel and went uptown. Our first stop was "Tales from the Old Gaol", an exhibit about crime and punishment in historic King's Lynn. The exhibition (student admission £1.50) was populated by dusty props, cracked mannequins, and poor lighting, but the audio tour was interesting and informative and the collection of town relics at the end was splendid. Taken for what it was (that is, a low-budget town attraction probably run by volunteers), it did not disappoint. I bought a souvenir map of King's Lynn for 25p, and from the way I fumbled around looking for a 20p coin before finally producing two 10p's, the woman at the cash register must have thought I was fresh off the boat. We descended upon the town market, where, in stages, we assembled lunch and picked up a few trinkets. We looked through a discount bookstore (a combination of words guaranteed to make either John or myself stop and take notice). Unfortunately, I failed to find anything interesting. Next we stopped in to an Oriental art store which was having a "closing down sale". There I bought a small red dragon figurine from a decidedly un-Oriental woman, who spent our entire time in the store on the phone complaining about her boyfriend.
"He always says, ‘New shirt? New shoes?'", she said. "Why can't he ever say, ‘You look nice in that skirt. That perfume smells nice."
I paid £4.50 for that statuette, and I was excited by its uniqueness and charm until I got back to New York and saw the same exact statue for sale in Chinatown for $5.
We bought sandwiches from a bakery nearby. My Chicken Tikka cost only £1.50. A few streets over we called in at a chippie. A cone of chips, which I doused liberally with vinegar and brown sauce, cost 70p. We ate in front of the shop, supplementing our meal with the stunted farm market apples. The Chicken Tikka tasted like cumin, which put me in mind of Mexican cooking. A phone call established that Brighton hostel was full up, so we drove on south to Winchester.

After a good long drive we got away from the Ohio-style fens of Norfolk and into Hampshire. We arrived in Winchester just after five, but spent at least half an hour wandering around the winding, poorly-labelled streets (an English tradition it seems, or maybe the unfortunate consequence of the houses being built before the streets). Finally we found a bus map and located Water Lane, down a narrow side street, up a hill and around the bend, and thus totally invisible from the main road. Of course, the lane was not signposted. The water in Water Lane was the shallow, fast-flowing River Itchen. On the near bank was a shady park, patrolled by ducks and dotted with people reading, sleeping, or playing. We crossed a footbridge and wandered down a side street for some time before doubling back and finding the hostel (indistinguishable but for a faded YHA logo) in a narrow alley about 75 feet from the car. The warden was a thin, fussy-looking man whom John immediately nicknamed "Jeeves". He showed us around the hostel and to our room, conveniently located just off the main dining room. The hostel was a converted old mill built on a small island in the middle of the river. Most of the mill machinery was still in place, and during the hostel's daily lockout Jeeves opened the place to tourists. After we settled in I went to the peaceful little garden behind the hostel and consulted my travel guide. Winchester has several apparently spectacular museums, churches, halls, and other attractions, but they all close at 5:00 PM. The sole night spot was the Royal Theatre, a combination cinema and playhouse. We went around the corner to the "Wonderful" Chinese takeout for dinner. I got chicken with mixed vegetables for £3.80 and we returned to the hostel to eat. Our original plan had been to drop off our clothes at a launderette a few streets over and pick them up, fresh and clean, tomorrow, but (typically) the launderette closed at 6:00. After dinner we walked several blocks to the Royal Theatre on Jewry Street. En route I picked up a new phone card, as John's had run out of credit. At the theatre, the only thing playing was a play called "My Cousin Rachel". It was a drama (shudder) set in Victorian times (shudder), and at £17 a ticket there was not much chance of us staying. We thanked the clerk for his time and left. On the way back through town I stopped at an ATM and got £40 that I hope will last through London. We passed by the public library, which was closing its doors just as we approached, and several groups of well-dressed pedestrians, presumably on their way to drink themselves stupid at one of the many pubs, which were definitely still open. Back at the hostel, our roommate Bill was changing for dinner. Bill was a postal worker from Poole and had been for the past nine-and-a-half years. He spent his first three years in delivery, but he hated it. His superiors said he was too slow and switched him to sorting. When I told him we were from Ohio, he perked up and said that he'd recently been doing a lot of international mail, including the 4, 5, and 6 zip codes (which is to say, the Midwest; my zip code is 43515). We talked briefly about postal matters, then I excused myself to go out to the gardens. Tomorrow we plan to drop off our laundry early and then see the Winchester sights before driving the 25 miles to Salisbury to turn in the rental car. The old girl's been through a lot and has a few scars to show for it, notably a mangled left front hubcap ("wheel trim") resulting from the incidents in Cheddar and Ambleside. It will be sad to lose her, and a damned inconvenience trying to stuff all the books I've bought into my backpack.

I got up earlier than usual this morning, about 8:10, and proceeded to have a shower in the claustrophobic stainless-steel cubicle downstairs. We collected our things and left with a valedictory wave to Jeeves. We made our way to Garbell Street, where we arranged to have the laundry done. The helpful Canadian woman working at the launderette had quite a backlog, but she still offered to change our laundry over and keep an eye on it if we left her the money. We loaded our clothes into the washers and left £1.60 each for the dryer. She said everything would be done by 10:00, which surprised me quite a bit since it was already a few minutes past 9:00. Leaving our packs in the launderette, we drove to a parking garage on Tower Street near the military museum district. Unfortunately none of the museums opened before 10:00, so we walked a few blocks to the pedestrian district and found a Reeve the Baker. I bought a leek-and-chicken pie and a loaf of bread for later and we sat outside on a statue, eating and watching the people go by. In the adjoining square a team of mountain bikers was giving a demonstration. I was not aware there were mountain bikers in England. I was not aware there were mountains. After our meal we had a walk around the pedestrian district. A few streets over was a Games Workshop store. Games Workshop is the producer of Warhammer, a silly game which entails buying hundreds of dollars worth of expensive plastic miniatures, painting them up real nice, and then sitting back and talking to your friends about how cool it would be to play with them, since the actual game rules are far too complicated for anyone less than Marilyn vos Savant. Ben has been wasting his money on these things for years, so I stopped in and picked him up some souvenirs. On the way back to the car park we passed a Mailboxes, Etc., which had a sign advertising "INTERNET ACCESS". We stopped in, and I asked the clerk if we could use the internet. Evidently this particular store did not sell a lot of public internet access, because the clerk gave me a blank look, then asked, "You want to use the internet?" When I confirmed that I did, he showed me to the back of the store, where he pushed a pile of papers off of an ancient computer and started a dial-up connection. John and I checked our email, a process which took precisely 14 minutes. I know this because the bill (helpfully tallied up by the connection software) was £1.40 at 10p a minute. We drove back to the launderette and found our clothing looking clean and smelling fresh. The Canadian attendant refused a tip, so we showered her with thanks and continued on our way. A few minutes later we descended the Tower Street parking garage again and headed for the first historical attraction, the Great Hall. If ever a Hall deserved the moniker "Great", this was it. Under the high vaulted ceiling lay a double row of grey marble pillars, framed on one end by a fancy metal screen (donated by the Lord and Lady Something-or-Other) and on the other end by King Arthur's very own Round Table. Or so the tourism bureau would love for you to believe. The table is huge and cleverly painted and undoubtedly historic, but it only dates back to the 13th century (about 700 years after Arthur's supposed reign). At some point that Fat Bastard of English rulers, Henry VIII, had the table done up in green and white stripes radiating out from the center, crowned with a portrait of King Arthur. Because he was such a modest fellow, Henry had the Arthur's facial features modeled after his own. Behind the Hall I found some lovely gardens, full of colorful and sweet-smelling flowers and guarded by a flock of white pigeons (I suppose they could be called doves.) I found an empty ledge near a fountain and sat down to write, but in England no place is secluded for long. I soon found myself uncomfortably seated in the middle of a tour group, the members of which tried hard not to stare at me while the guide described the famous flowers directly behind my bench.
Admission to the Great Hall was free, with none of the pushy guilt tactics employed by similar attractions. There was only a small black box near the entrance which said, "Donations toward the upkeep of the Great Hall gratefully accepted". I found this to be perfect, and bestowed a fistful of coins upon the box.

Outside the Great Hall we searched for a way to get to the Military Museums. We found a well-preserved and well-signposted segment of castle basement passage, which unfortunately led nowhere, before inquiring at the Great Hall gift shop. It turned out we needed to go back through the hall, into the garden, and out a small back gate. We did so, and soon found ourselves at the Gurkha Museum. Despite what you may think, "Gurkha" has no relation to "gherkin". The Gurkhas are a group of Nepalese tribes, against whom the British fought a short war in 1814. The Gurkhas were hopelessly outmatched, but they put up such a good fight that upon their surrender they were given full military honors, and the following year the Brits came back to recruit a regiment of them for the imperial army. The Gurkhas eventually expanded to include soldiers from Nepal, Burma, and the north of India, and repeatedly distinguished themselves in action around the world. The exhibit was a true bargain at 50p student rate. It was pretty interesting, supplementing the usual collection of uniforms, old swords, and written unit citations with life-sized and miniature dioramas, complete with audio commentary. After a trip around the museum and a quick browse in the gift shop (specializing mostly in Gurkha-logo activewear and keychains), we crossed the close and passed a statue of Field Marshal Lord Seaton (a hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo campaigns, apparently). We stopped in at the Royal Green Jackets museum, but the two clerks informed us in a kind of out-of-sync duotone that the museum was closing for lunch and would open back up at 2:00. We decided not to stick around and drove on to Salisbury, about 25 miles away. Just outside the city we stopped at a BP to refuel for the last time, vacuum the car, and sort out our belongings. We gave away our road atlas to a skeptical older couple ("You sure you won't be needing it?") and infuriated another old man by leaving our doors open, fractionally impeding his progress into the BP car wash. He shouted, "Shut the doors, for fuck's sake!" as he drove by with no less than three feet of clearance. I bought a couple of Drumstick-style ice cream cones called "Cornet Whippy", which we ate on the way back to the car rental place. The man on duty was surprised to see us. He said he was "just covering for the boss boy; he's out gallivanting in the cars". He inspected the damaged hubcap and jotted some notes on a form, which John was obliged to sign. I presume it said something along the lines of, "I the undersigned hereby acknowledge that I will never recover my £75 damage deposit, and I'm okay with that." We gave Eva Braun a final once-over, then hoisted our bags and hiked the few blocks to the BR station. When we arrived the London-bound 2:25 was just leaving, so we waited around for the 2:48. I spent much of the train ride reading and glancing casually over at the pretty brunette in the opposite seat, who unfortunately disembarked at Basingstoke. It appears we won't get to London in time to get a good look at the Natural History Museum tonight, but I think I'll try to find the Twining's tea shop and maybe have dinner at Food For Thought, since we'll be in the area.

Home again, sort of. The train pulled into London Waterloo station at 4:00 PM, but due to the vagaries of the tube and DLR it was almost 5:00 before we reached the familiar green sign of St. Chris's. They put us in Room 6, across from the hall from where we had stayed before. Our room was piled high with luggage, but the tenants were nowhere to be found. After a cursory look around, we hopped on the DLR and headed back to Waterloo. We took the tube from Waterloo to Charing Cross and looked around for Bunjie's Folk Cellar, an old-style basement restaurant specializing in cheap vegetarian eats and live music. Our guidebook described it as "the last of a dying breed." Unfortunately, in the five years since the book was written, Bunjie's too had gone under. We found 25 Litchfield Road and 26, but where 27 should have been there was an empty blacked-over window and a locked door. Determined to carry on, we stopped at a nameless corner sandwich shop. I had a passable ham, chicken, and mushroom sandwich, plus a can of Fanta, for about three quid. Since it was nearing closing time (6:00 PM), the shop was out of many sandwich fillings and John couldn't find anything he wanted. He was still hung up on his egg mayonnaise kick and wouldn't settle for anything less. We took the tube back to Victoria (accidentally stopping at Waterloo for a third time that night) and found an internet café called "Café Internet". There I had an excellent cup of Earl Grey and surfed the internet for half an hour for £1.50. Unfortunately the mail server was down so I couldn't print out my airline ticket confirmation, which was my entire reason for wanting internet access. The café had stopped serving food (this is a British custom; restaurants stop serving just as most Americans are getting hungry for dinner), so John was again denied. We got hold of the white pages and looked up the Twining's Tea Shop, located at 216 The Strand. After a short tube ride back to Charing Cross we arrived at 1 The Strand and began the long walk down to Twining's. The string of closed shops (it was by now 8:00 PM) did not encourage me, but I reasoned that at least I could find the place and come back the next day. Sure enough, Twining's was closed. The sign said it closed at 4:45 PM on weekdays and was not open at all on weekends. My hopes thus dashed, we took the tube back to Tower Hill for the long ride home to Greenwich. John and I split up at the station; I returned to the hostel and he went into town in search of dinner. Up in the room I met our bunkmates, three girls who had been studying in Britain. Cristina from Portugal and Chiara from Italy were friends. They had come recently from Nottingham, where they studied English and Portuguese, and Business Engineering, respectively. Cristina was half-American and spoke English with virtually no accent. Chiara was cute, if not beautiful, and had a single-minded determination that is uncommon among Italians. They spent most of the evening trying to stuff their mountain of belongings into a molehill of suitcases. The other girl, Aude, was quiet and French. She had been in Cardiff, studying business and languages (English and French). John returned some time later with a bag of fried fish from the faithful Turkish chippie on the High Street. He gave a brief hello to all and then disappeared into the "Chill Out Room" to eat.

Last night as we headed home on the DLR, a huge crush of people attempted to board at the Crossharbour (London Arena) station. When we went back out later they were still there, walking around in suits and dresses and wearing badges that said, "Give God Love." I asked a man what they were doing, and he told me they were Jehovah's Witnesses, 10,000 strong, in town for some sort of convention. They were still here this morning, getting on at every station on the way to London Arena. The place was positively crawling with them; from the train it looked like a nest of colorful ants, swarming in and out the doors and trying to give each other free magazines with names like "God's Work" and "Hangin' with Jesus". Well, probably. I certainly didn't stop to find out. More to come later on the subject of breakfast.

Our last day in London finds me in a state of information overload. I got up around 8:15 this morning and showered, then went downstairs to see what delights St. Chris's had set out. As usual I found an assortment of white bread, jam in single-serving tubs, "Flora" artificial butter, and generic tea bags. After a quick bite, I grabbed my bag and we headed out. We took the DLR to Tower Hill and the Tube on to South Kensington to see the London Science Museum and revisit my personal favorite, the Natural History Museum. The ground floor of the Science Museum was a dizzying, multicolored panoply of shiny objects with no discernible start or end point. After picking our way through part of the "Space" exhibition (which featured notably few British contributions and an endearingly pathetic side gallery called "Canada in Space"), we decided we had better take an elevator to the top and work our way down. Floor 5 (actually the sixth due to the disingenuous British numbering scheme) was small and had not been updated since the early 1980's. For all I could tell, it hadn't even been visited since then. There were two poorly-lit exhibits, "The History of Veterinary Medicine" and "Medicine through the Ages". The former contained a devious array of tools designed to do unspeakable things to animals. The "lamb castrator" and the "chicken caponizer" made me wince, to say nothing of the "horse neck-hole-poker" (not its real name, but there was no hiding its purpose). The latter exhibit was a show of the various things that could go wrong with the human body, and the various devices that could either treat them or make them worse, depending on the historical period. The graphic design was hideously out-of-date, featuring the "80's Futuristic" look with lots of oranges and greys and jaunty round-edged fonts. The exhibit was dark and musty, and various surgical tools glinted menacingly in the flickering light. I began to envision myself in a horror movie with a scalpel-wielding serial killer, so I got out of there fast.
Floor 4 (actually the fifth) was a series of dioramas depicting health care through the ages. These ranged from a group of cavemen splitting their friend's skull open with a rock to let the demons out, to a high-tech 1980's intensive care unit. Dioramas 27 through 31 had been replaced with a more modern exhibit about psychiatry. Some thoughtful curator had placed an exceedingly comfy leather couch here, and we sat down for a rest.
The third (or fourth) floor was the first full-sized one. We saw a very interesting exhibit on photography and cinematography, with some old daguerreotypes and several examples of 19th-century "kinetoscope" or "thaumatrope" moving pictures. These usually featured some short and minimally complex scene, like a horse running or a bird flapping its wings, but they were fun in a quaint way. We pressed on, but by the agriculture exhibit I was burnt out and ready for lunch. We sped through the lower floors, pausing in the food exhibit to watch some vintage educational films like "The Baked Beans Story" (courtesy of the J.R. Heinz Company) and "4000 Loaves an Hour", about the manufacture of bread. We then left the Science Museum and took to the pedestrian subway. Lunch was at the Greenfields Sandwich Emporium, a few streets over from the Natural History Museum. I had a ciabatta with Chicken Provençe (this was thankfully much more tasty than the ciabatta in King's Lynn), a small container of Greek salad (cubes of tomato, cucumber, olive, onion, and feta), and a Snapple Apple, which cost a rather extravagant £6.85. The fee to eat in the restaurant would have been additional £2, so we carried our food to the museum grounds and ate in the midst of the "Earth from the Air" exhibition. Today the foreign tourists were out in force and I scarcely heard a word of English during our visit. I had come back to see the exquisite dinosaur fossils mentioned by Bryson in his new book, as well as the galleries of dead-things-under-glass which delighted me on the previous visit. These did not disappoint; the museum's collection is doubtless the finest in the world. Briefly we ventured into the "Earth" section of the museum, where we saw many rocks and stood in earthquake simulator, but by and large our browsing was confined to the "Life" galleries. Back in the museum gardens, one young boy started a trend by chasing the pigeons while roaring like a walrus at the top of his lungs. Within minutes half a dozen little brats were pouncing at the poor birds, assailing them with the inexhaustible energy of youth. One girl apparently didn't understand the concept. She kept feeding the birds potato chips, causing them to pursue her. I couldn't help but smile as the poor thing retreated hurriedly across the court with a dozen winged rats in tow. I am unwilling to abandon my quest for authentic British tea. Though Twining's is closed, I have tracked down a new source, the "Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum". We'll go there later, but first it's off to the Café Internet to check my e-mail and have a cuppa.

We took the tube to Victoria Station and walked to the Café Internet on Buckingham Palace Road. There I bought a half-hour pass, a bottle of fruit juice, and a cup of Earl Grey for £3.50. The mail server was (miraculously) working, so I read the Dilbert Newsletter and printed off my airline confirmation for an extortionate 20p a page. As we were leaving, the waitress from last night came in. She must have remembered me, because she smiled and said goodbye. Only after we'd left did I realize that I had left my printouts on top of the computer. There went 40p down the drain, but it turned out not to matter. My confirmation number had not changed so I was able to use my old paper. We took the tube to London Bridge Station, located in a parched and dusty borough. Down one destitute street after another we wandered, and somehow found ourselves at the Bramah Tea and Coffee Museum, our target for the evening. The museum was closing shortly, so we were unable to take a tour. As the tour cost £4 and consisted mostly of fancy china teapots, I was less than disappointed. In the gift shop I surrendered my last £5 note for a packet of aromatic loose Earl Grey. Clutching my prize and my last few coins, I exited and headed back through the ghetto as quickly as possible. We disembarked from the DLR at Cutty Sark Station (instead of our normal Greenwich) and walked down the High Street in search of some fruit. Back at the hostel, Aude and the other French girl were asleep, so I took a book (The Art of Travel) and went to the "Chill Out Room". I read some very interesting passages about how travel cannot be enjoyed while it is happening because the minutiae of daily life interrupt. True happiness in travel comes from anticipation, when the mind is building a mountain of enthusiasm from the limited sources available, or from hindsight, after the mind has had time to select out the interesting bits and leave the chaff behind. I thought about that, and it occurred to me that my general level of excitement was higher during the five months leading up to the trip than at any point while I was traveling. This is not to say that I didn't have fun, just that the anticipation was equally enthralling. I look forward to the coming months, when my memory will burn away the painful and dull moments and leave behind a sparkling mental slideshow for me to enjoy, supplemented by pictures and this book. In the course of my musings I was joined by a South African, who had some bananas. I asked where he'd gotten them, and he told me of an off-licence a couple blocks away. I went and bought four green apples (for 40p apiece) and met John, who was returning from dinner at the chippie's. We went back to the hostel and watched some British TV. First up was a bizarre show about survival in worst-case scenarios. The host demonstrated how to overpower a terrorist who has hijacked your bus (collect pocket change from the other passengers, put it in a sock, and flail him with it), and then how to throw projectiles (in this case, sacks of flour) from a low-flying plane, should the earth be taken over by aliens. Next was a special about Hollywood stunts. I watched a bit of that, then went back up to the room to sort out my belongings and prepare for the flight home.

I was in bed reading "The Art of Travel" when Aude and the other French girl returned from dinner. John was still downstairs, and Aude went to have a shower, so I just kept on reading. Eventually she came back and we started to talk. We went on for several hours, and I discovered many interesting things. I found that she was a language enthusiast like me. She was trying (with debatable success) to read a book in Spanish called "Cien Años de Soledad" (A Hundred Years of Solitude), and I vowed to find the book and read it some time. Given a little more time, I think we could have had a meaningful relationship, but our conversation came too little, too late. Eventually we both lay back in our beds and tried to sleep. After awhile I gave up and left to see what John was doing in the "Chill Out Room". He was having a conversation with two South Africans, one of which was eagerly asking for all kinds of details about American life and repeatedly exclaiming, "I want to go to America!" I didn't know quite how to react to this. Months ago I was thinking the same thing, even though I wasn't shouting it out. But the reality of Britain has gradually superseded my anticipatory visions, which I admit were based almost entirely on Red Dwarf, Monty Python, and a handful of pictures, books, and websites. I found a Britain more mature and less quirky than what I had pictured, and I came to love it just the same. Eventually I went back upstairs, but sleep was slow in coming. In my second basement visit I walked into an impromptu party, complete with music by John the American bartender and a trio of spiked and mohawked Bostonians. John was sitting along one wall, sipping a glass of wine and looking exhausted but happy. The smoke, plus the fact that I'd left the room door propped open, prompted me to leave before too long. I said a preemptive goodbye to Aude, knowing she'd be asleep when I left in the morning. I went back to reading The Art of Travel and a while later John came in, a bit tipsy from the wine. Minutes later I finally fell asleep.
5:45 came far too soon. Early mornings (especially after late nights) never fail to leave me feeling wretched. My eyes refused to stay open, and ached as if someone had swabbed them with lemon juice. I staggered to the bathroom and took my last pushbutton shower, then I gathered my things and we slipped out. The trip to Heathrow was protracted and uncomfortable. I had assumed that so early in the morning, we would have the tube and DLR to ourselves. To say merely that I assumed wrong would be to vastly understate the situation. I failed to consider the first-shift commuters, who packed every train so full that we didn't even get a seat until far down the Piccadilly Line.
At about 8:10 we finally got to Heathrow's Terminal 3, but the check-in and security lines were so long that it was after 9:00 when we finally got to the gate. Fortunately, every aspect of the flight was behind schedule. Due to heavy traffic on the runway, we didn't take flight until after 10:00. In my comfortable (but not too comfortable) seat, I watched "the Ring" for the umpteenth time. After the movie I slept, waking up only for the in-flight snack of pizza and grapes.

We landed at JFK about 12:20 local time and got out remarkably quickly, considering the nightmare that is U.S. Customs. We called to locate our hostel, then took the shuttle bus to the Howard Beach subway platform. It was immediately apparent that we weren't in London anymore. We had to wait 15 minutes for a train, which then took a further hour to get to Manhattan. Onboard the train I encountered something new and surprising: the roving junk merchants. First two students came onboard, offering M&M's to raise funds for a class trip. I found this to be a worthy cause and bought a bag of almond M&M's for $1. Later, another disheveled-looking man came on peddling batteries and incense. The locals had developed a tactic for warding off these pests: every passenger simply froze. Out of the corner of my eye I watched as the other riders stared at the floor, completely inert. The train looked like a gallery of French statuary. We got off at the 103rd St. Station and hiked a few blocks to the hostel. The girl at the counter kept us waiting for several minutes before checking with a manager and telling us to come back at 4:00. We retired to the TV room, where several others in the same situation were already waiting. Watching the New York news has reminded me of how truly ignorant and uncaring New Yorkers are towards anything outside of the five boroughs. There has been a public outcry over a federal plan that would redistribute money away from the New York City transportation budget and apply it to roads in other parts of the country. New York may be populous and well-known, but it's not the be-all and end-all of civilization. If some yokels in Bumblefuck, West Virginia, get a highway repaved at the City's expense, I say good on them.

After a grueling third repetition of the NY1 News ("Weather Every 10 Minutes!"), 4:00 finally rolled around and we lined up to check in. There were three check-in stations but only one line, the idea being that whoever was up next would go to the next available check-in. Several different employees kept drifting in and out of the back room, occasionally stopping to check someone in. When it was our turn, we had the unfortunate luck to be handled by the same trainee that had kept us waiting earlier. Her ineptitude and unenthusiastic manner turned what should have been a simple transaction into a ten-minute ordeal. She asked for our reservation number, even though we'd told her before we didn't have it. She asked to see John's credit card, scanned it, stared blankly at the screen, and called another employee and a manager over, before finally handing it back and announcing that we'd already paid in full. After a minor eternity she asked to see my HI card (but not John's) and gave us our key cards. Our room was 407, and was – horror of horrors – on the fifth floor. These people had obviously been infiltrated by British secret agents, bent on making the whole world walk up an extra flight of stairs. After an arduous climb I found the room, which was Spartan but comfortable and had a locker for each tenant. We quickly dumped our bags and headed out.
The neighboring shop fronts were mostly small ethnic groceries and bodegas, so we picked the closest one and went in to find some lunch. After scanning the moderately large selection, I picked a Peach Snapple and a roast beef and cheese sandwich for $3.25. Actually, it wasn't as simple as that. Along one wall near the register was a deli counter with a large and mouth-watering assortment of meats and cheeses. This appeared to be unmanned, so I surmised that the clerk must double as a sandwich-maker. I stepped up to the clerk's Plexiglas box and asked if the deli was open. He grunted in the affirmative, and when I began to ask for a sandwich he interrupted me in a thick Middle Eastern accent. "Man is there", he said, gesturing at the darkened counter with a stubby finger. I cogitated for a second, then turned back to the deli. Hidden behind the racks of turkey and pastrami was a second man, short and balding and staring intently at something on the shelf along the back wall. I had to knock on the counter twice to get his attention, but finally he spotted me and made my roast beef and cheese roll.
We took the subway 3 stops to the Museum of Natural History. There were no signs pointing from the station exit to the museum, which was camouflaged by construction and would have been indistinguishable if not for a large banner for the "Chocolate" exhibition, which had featured prominently on the NY1 News. The guard at the front desk searched my bag and told me the museum was closing shortly, so we hurriedly scanned the exhibits and decided to return tomorrow when we had more time. Crossing Central Park on the way to the Met(ropolitan Museum of Art), we heard operatic music wafting in from some unknown source. We stopped to investigate, and lo and behold, a band shell and a profusion of huge speakers were set up on the Great Lawn. There was to be a free performance of Lucia di Lammermoor by the Metropolitan Opera, so we decided to stick around. We ate our early supper on a park bench at one end of the lawn. I had my sandwich and Snapple, supplemented by a frozen juice bar bought from a nearby vendor, and John had hot dogs. After we ate, we moved onto the Lawn itself to find a good spot for the concert. All around us, New Yorkers packed onto the grass to hear the concert. Friends gathered in small clumps, locating each other by cellphone. They sat on blankets or sheets, eating fragrant fruits, breads, and salads and sipping wine. In a city so big and faceless, it's amazing that anyone knows anyone else at all, to say nothing of rendezvous-ing for a concert. The scene was interesting and heartwarming, a rare example of a casual and friendly gathering in the cold, buzzing madness that is New York. The clumps of people around me lazed about, chatting softly in a dozen languages while a far-off brunette sang soprano. From far away they must have looked like a colony of Armani-clothed sea lions. Under normal circumstances I would have been glad to take my place on the proverbial beach, but jet lag, combined with the rapidly chilling temperature and damp grass underneath me, drove me indoors in search of a warm bed and a mug of tea.

After leaving the open-air opera and limping my way home on the subway, I found my energy somewhat restored. I could not find a way to make tea (it was only later that I found a kitchen in the cellar), but I did get two apples from a Spanish-speaking corner market at 35¢ each. I found a small nook with some tables on the ground floor of the hostel and had an apple and a can of Hawaiian Punch while I read from Route 66 A.D. I also checked out the hilariously-misnamed "library". This consisted of one half-filled shelf of books, several couches and chairs, and one wall of Internet terminals which were of the cheap sort with tiny keyboards designed to waste your time and money. I decided I could wait two more days to check my email, and in any case all the machines were being monopolized by pathetic guys (not a girl in the bunch) surfing and playing online games. After my snack I continued reading, eventually making my way up to bed.
I woke up about 8:30 this morning and lay in bed for some time, trying to summon the will to get up and have a shower. When I finally did, I was pleasantly surprised by the finest shower and bathroom facilities of the trip so far. My corner cubicle had its own frosted window, plentiful hot water with adequate pressure, and a wide array of benches and hooks to hang all my supplies. It didn't even matter that I'd forgotten the soap, because the shower had its own dispenser! After this gratifying experience we left and went to Penn Station to exchange our train tickets. After a long-ish wait in line, we hit a snag: our new reservations had been booked for July 18 instead of June 18. Luckily the man at the ticket window recognized my mailing address as being from RIT. He, or possibly his son (I couldn't hear exactly which) had done his undergrad at RIT, and he kindly pointed us to a free phone with which we could call reservations, and then told us that once we had called, we could come directly back to his window without waiting in line again. We did so, and after being put on hold for several minutes, got it sorted out. He handed us our tickets and off we went to the American Museum of Natural History. This time we found an exit that took us directly from the subway station down a flight of stairs into the museum. Adult admission was $12, a fee similar to that which I'd refused to pay for Cheddar Caves or the British Airways London Eye. Thankfully there was a student discount rate of $9. I thought the clerk said, "five", and handed her a five-dollar bill. She said nothing and handed me my ticket. Later John, who had paid the full $9, asked to see my receipt. It said:

STUDENT RATE                        $9
(Long meaningless register code)   -$4
--------------------------------------
TOTAL                               $5

Evidently the prices are negotiable after all, given a bit of luck and bad hearing. We spent the next several hours viewing the Museum's four floors, stopping around noon to eat lunch on a park bench before re-entering. The New York Museum featured a large assortment of "dead things in glass cases", which we viewed with some interest. The collection (at least, the part on display) was larger than the collection of the London Museum, but it lacked any objects of real grandeur. There were few "one-of-a-kind" specimens, and most of the displays were in dire need of some repair and renovation. Interestingly, a segment from the same giant redwood tree on display in the London Museum was on display here. Finally we ran out of things to see, as many galleries were partially or fully closed for repair and others bore an additional fee, so we headed for the subway and discussed what to do next. Our original plan, carried over from the day before, was to go from the Natural History Museum to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but continuing jet lag and museum burnout (I calculated that we had seen at least 10 museums of one kind or another on the trip) convinced us to look for another option. John suggested we see a movie, which would tax neither our legs nor our brains. We bought tickets to see the 3:55 showing of Bruce Almighty and retired to nearby Penn Plaza, a sunny square of gleaming marble and greedy pigeons flanked by boutiques and semi-derelict brick high-rises, to wait. John bought lunch at Burger King (ironically, the cheapest food available in this part of town) and I watched the never-ending diverse parade of humanity roll by.

Bruce Almighty was funny in parts, but what could have been a genuinely good movie was ruined by more "Ace Ventura"-style slapstick and irritating one-liners. The movie ended about 5:30 and we pondered how to spend our last night (and last few dollars) in the City. On a whim I suggested we go to Chinatown. We took the "blue" train to Canal Street and started walking east. The transition from New York City to Chinatown was gradual and somewhat surprising. It started with a few Chinese building signs and a man selling lychees on the street, and before I knew it I looked up and everyone around me was Asian. I was able to read small snippets of signs, especially those of banks (yinhang) and the numerous "something-or-other centers" (zhongxin). I have often heard that the language of American Chinatowns is Cantonese, but I heard a good deal of Mandarin as well, though I was not brave enough to try any myself. We stopped at a bakery where I ordered two pork pies and a cup of tea, and I was delighted to hear the man in line behind me say, "lai yi bei kafei" (please bring me a cup of coffee). After this little foray we realized there was not much else to do in Chinatown, so dodging pungent and drippy fish markets and carts full of exotic vegetables, we found a subway station and made our way to Rockefeller Plaza. We stopped in a bleak marble courtyard (which we supposed at the time to be Rockefeller Plaza) and ate. My pork pies were good, but the tea had steeped far too long and become bitter. I had to buy a bottle of water from a vendor to clear the taste from my mouth. It was only a random decision to turn the corner near Radio City Music Hall (where New York's self-proclaimed "best Barry White impersonator" was raspily belting out "Brick House" by the Commodores) that led us to Rockefeller Center. The plaza was easily recognizable by the cavalcade of world flags and the famous golden statue. The ice skating rink featured in nearly every movie ever set in New York was at this time of year merely a sunken courtyard flanked by shops and packed with people drinking coffee. We searched the streets around the plaza and found expensive and mostly-closed boutiques. The only thing still open was a Barnes and Noble, and of course I was compelled to go in and buy still more books. I tried to call home from a payphone, but the number was busy. John talked to Randal and arranged to have him pick us up at our new arrival time (about 6:00 AM, as it turned out). We took the subway back to the hostel and sat out on the third-story terrace, relaxing and swapping stories about work. I told the tales of idiocy and incompetence at Valleywood Golf Course, and John told me how he managed to arrive late for work 83 consecutive days and still keep his job. Back in the room, the lights were already out; evidently one of our eight roommates had decided on an early night and condemned the rest to follow. I read downstairs in the library for twenty minutes or so before going back up to sleep.
The final morning of our trip dawned rainy and grey. I woke about 9:00 to find John already awake but reading in bed, a position he was to maintain until about 10:30. I showered and dressed, then went down for a breakfast of bagel, cream cheese, and tea. This was inarguably more substantial than a St. Christopher's breakfast, but it cost me $2.31. While I ate I read from "Route 66 A.D." and watched a pretty brunette of uncertain foreign provenance (possibly French) out of the corner of my eye. She picked delicately at her bagel, then utterly destroyed the mystique by pulling a two-liter of Pepsi from her bag and draining the bottle in a single long swig. I deposited four books in the hostel's meager library, then went up to collect my bags and persuade John to get out of bed. We check out about 10:45 and walked the few blocks to the subway. It was no longer raining, but fat drops of water dripped from the trees as we passed underneath. Due to the annoying New York Subway policy of running more than one train on the same platform and providing inadequate signage, we took the Orange Line (instead of the Blue) and ended up back at Rockefeller Center. Two more trains and a lot of frantic scurrying later, we arrived at the hive of humanity that is Penn Station. We made our way to the Amtrak waiting area and I sat watching the bags while John went in search of food. Nearly an hour later he came back empty-handed, having spent the intervening time nursing a bottle of Snapple and reading USA Today. I perused the various shops and, after determining that none of them had remotely reasonable prices, settled for an $8 "Chicken Caesar" sandwich and bottle of Hawaiian Punch. I brought my pricey fare back to the Amtrak bench and ate, scattering flecks of desiccated lettuce and crumbly Parmesan all across the floor. At length I finished "Route 66 A.D.", and still there was no sign of the train.

At long last our train arrived and we made our way to Track 6 East. As we entered the car, an attendant asked if we were going to Chicago. I assumed she wanted to know if we had the right train, so I nodded and we got aboard. Almost immediately the car began to fill up with the rudest and noisiest sort of people one could ever hope to meet. A loud black woman, her mother, and two kids got on. When I tried to go to the front of the train to ask about the tickets, she cawed, "Would ya please let me through?" obliging me to duck into a seat while she barged past. An old couple sat behind me and hissed at each other like lizards. They were arguing about a lost bag, which was later found at the front of the train. My tolerance for people was at an all-time low when the stewardess came around and asked, "Are all of you going to Chicago?" I nodded absent-mindedly. It had not occurred to me that they were segregating the cars by destination until a conductor came around and checked our tickets. He yelled to the stewardess, "You need to start checking these – we've got two for Toledo here!" At this point the spiny-headed stewardess stamped over and whinily intoned, "I just asked you and you said you was going to Chicago!" I stammered something apologetic, muttering "Fuck's sake" under my breath and feeling ready to hit some things. The conductor told us to move forward one car. This temporary humiliation turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Leaving the cramped and decrepit Chicago car, we entered the Toledo-bound compartment, which was mostly empty and populated by quiet and respectable sorts. I've been very hard on John for some of his more overtly racist comments, but today I felt the same way. I have encountered three black women today: the stewardess, the train-barger, and a woman at Penn Station who was very nasty to me when I stumbled around the corner to an ATM and overlooked the line of people standing back waiting to use it. That crass, grating, and pushy attitude which seems to be part and parcel of black femininity, combined with my already travel-worn nerves, is not helping me to be as unprejudiced as I'd like to be.
Dinner service was announced a bit ago, featuring several delicious-sounding entrées prepared by Chef Elijah Reese. These required a bit of decoding though, as the bored and undereducated-sounding announcer was not exactly up on his French. After listening to the third sales pitch for "Chicken Provinkull" (Provençal), I lay my head back and resumed napping.

I treat American change like most people treat hot coals. That is to say, I get it out of my possession as soon as possible. It's not going to burn me, to be sure, but with every coin in wide circulation worth comfortably less than a dollar there is little reason to keep it on hand. My traditional tactic is to set aside whatever change I collect during the day in a cup or tray, and when enough has amassed I take it to the bank and trade it for paper money. You would have had a hard time convincing me (or most Americans) that the Sacagawea dollar coin is anything more than a curiosity.
My experience in Britain was somewhat different. For the first few days I barely saw a bill, since everything less than £5 is available only in coinage. I was irritated by the rattle of change in my pocket as I walked, but gradually I came to appreciate the convenience of a coin that was actually worth something. Most days I could dig in my front pocket and bring out enough change to pay for lunch. Sometimes I could even manage dinner. Before long I came to regard my stack of coins as a vital possession.
Back in New York, I broke my first twenty-dollar bill and reviewed the change. In one hand I had a stack of coins, fairly large but only enough to buy a pack of gum. I considered with disdain the pile of grubby bills in my other hand, and now I understood the wry smile on George Washington's face; he was laughing at me. He knew that every time I wanted a bagel or a bottle of juice, I would be forced to reach in my pocket, open up my wallet, and fish out one or two of his dingy green brethren. The only alternative would be to carry around whole rolls of quarters. It takes at least twenty to buy a sandwich anywhere in Manhattan, you know. It seems like Old George has won this round. Bastard.

The train ride seems like it will never end. I've been onboard for five hours, and there are at least eight to go. We stopped at Albany to link up with the other half of the train coming in from Boston at 5:20. I disembarked and went up to the station café, a heartless plastic place called "The Beanery". There I traded the princely sum of $4.20 for a cold bagel with cream cheese and a cup of criminally weak Earl Grey. The Boston train was late in arriving, so we didn't leave Albany until 6:45. We stopped at Schenectady minutes later and I thought of Pat, who must by now have settled back into a routine of eating at Mallozzi's and living the good life. The train chugged slowly across upstate New York as daylight faded. A bit later the announcer came on again, tempting people to the dining car with more promises of delicious Chicken Provinkull. I took stock of my finances ($7 paper, $2 in quarters) and decided it was out of my league. Perhaps a visit to the lounge car.

In the lounge car I bought a packet of plain M&M's and a bottle of water and sat down in the only available spot, across from a wiry, grey-haired man with a nervous expression and a Manhattan Street-by-Street guide. His name was probably Roland, but maybe it was Rowan, or Roan. He didn't pronounce his name; rather he spat it, in one quick monosyllable. I asked him to repeat it, and he did the same thing again. Roland was a Chicago native, a Ford retiree who had worked much of his life in the auto industry. He was just vacationing in New York, he said, and although he often saw a Broadway show, he hadn't done so this time. We talked about old cars, the Studebaker Corporation, the Jeep Plant in Toledo, and my experiences as a passenger in Britain. He told me a story about an acquaintance who was a driver for a car dealership, sent out to pick up new cars from the factory or from other dealers and to deliver cars in stock to far-off places. I told him about our quest to have a car delivered from Heathrow Airport. Eventually the loud and rambunctious group behind us got on my nerves, and I shook his hand and left. During the long night I read and took intermittent naps. Upon waking I discovered several sore and aching spots from the hard train seat, and a thin coat of grease on my skin which is well-known to long-distance travelers without the benefit of a shower. The train ride has endured fourteen hours so far, but the end is in sight. John came and hit me on the shoulder about 6:00 and said, "We're almost there." I looked out and had my first beautiful eyeful of my homeland, with its neat lawns and fields fringed by tall grass and dark oak trees. A fragile blue sky peered out from beneath the grey rain clouds. Randal, assuming he got to the station on time, has been waiting for an hour and a half now. I feel rather bad, but he's a smart guy and I trust he'll have seen that the train is late and gone out for coffee and donuts.

The journal ends here, and so did the trip. Randal picked us up at the train station and drove us back in John's car, which he had kept much cleaner than John ever would. I hoisted my bags onto the back porch and went into my own house, where I had a sit in my own chair and an omelette cooked on my own stove. Later I had a sleep in my own bed, and all was well and good. The end of a travel book is always the hardest. The narrative relies on experiences had outside of the routine, so what can be said when one comes back and resumes ordinary life? I guess this is the part where I should sum up my accomplishments and tell you how the trip changed my life, and made me a stronger person. But I'm not going to do that. For twenty-one-and-a-half days, or 513 hours, I stepped outside of my world. I saw things I had never seen, and for brief periods knew people I will never know again. It was all very stimulating, and I have no doubt I'll go back to that quirky little isle sometime. But then, I knew that before I left.