So, sometimes when you travel (and this is the best way to travel) you’ll meet people. I mean, you’ll generally have a 100% chance of meeting people when you travel. And if you don’t, you’re doing it wrong. But most times the people you’ll meet will just be boring, everyday people that you meet every day. But every once in awhile you’ll meet people who will just be the most lovely people you’ll have ever met. The most warm, gentle, genuine human beings in the entire world. And you’ll leave the conversation thinking, “Gosh! If only all people were as wonderful, kind, and fantastic as that man, the world would be a much more kind and hospitable place to live in!”
Well, last night I met such a man. We wanted to find a pub to have some good old fashioned ales (and by the way, I’m going to miss the ales here, served out of a tap that you have to pump, served at a temperature most desirable, and served with so little carbonation) and some fine pub food. We stayed at a hotel in Ilminster, right outside Taunton. After a busy day traveling by various A and B routes and after a lengthy turn on the busy M5, we checked in in Ilminster, I yelped for a pub (because I wanted some ales and the food in the hotel was much too expensive), and I came across a pub with a suitably British name called the Dolphin.
We arrived after a 10 minute walk down some poorly little alleys (well, they’re actually streets over here), arrived at the bar, and I ordered some sausages and mash (that’s what they called them at this pub, not bangers and mash, as I would have expected) and my mum a ploughman’s lunch with cheese. The marvelous lady asked us where we were from, and naturally we told her from Minnesota.
A lovely gentleman was sitting just to our left as we were ordering and he remarked something like, “Are you tracin’ your roots? I’ve go’ fam’ly ‘n Massachusetts meself.”
I wanted to respond that no we weren’t, as our bar tender told us that she was going to put our order in and to have a seat.
After our order came, the man came over to our table and asked us, “So whereabouts are ye from?” I specified Minneapolis and my mother Avon. He then explained his interest in Massachusetts because his last name (well, surname) is Hawthorne, and he can trace his roots back to the Salem Witch Trials, and his ancestor was an infamous judge who undoubtedly put many women to death.
He then joked that if he were around during then that he would’ve been burnt at the stake too for being a transgender man, and I added that I would’ve been burnt along side him.
As it happened, we continued to have a fantastic conversation about people and labels and labels and people. He explained how he was a lesbian for many years and then transitioned to become a man. But all these labels seem so cumbersome after awhile, and that he’d much prefer it if we were just all people and all individuals.
I commented that all too often people want black and white answers, yes and no, yin and yang, and he said, “No, it’s a spectrum!” and I wholeheartedly agreed.
We talked about many other things from Angela Merkel and Obama and the horrid events in the Middle East, cold conservativism disguised as love in the face of hate in troubling Double Speak that would make mythical Jesus weep and role his eyes at his so-called followers (let’s be honest, atheists frequently make better Christians than Christians), to how when he first arrived at JFK he exclaimed, “Fabulous!” when his car took him towards signs that indicated, “Queens.”
In short, such a lovely man, and as we departed, he have us a hug and a kiss, and he wished us god bless and to be well.
What a lovely human being! And what a model to aspire to!
So now let me get you caught up in what we’ve all seen and done. And I promise I’ll get to that marvelous find I promised I’d talk about in my last post.
Before fully departing Weymouth and Portland Castle, we made a quick side stop at Chesil Beach to enjoy the sights and sounds of the English Channel (well, technically Lyme Bay which is a part of the English Channel, and Chesil Beach itself making up a part of the Jurassic Coast), and from afar, the beach itself looked quite inviting. However, upon closer inspection, the entire beach was composed of not find sand, but rocks upon rocks upon rocks usually all the size of about a golf ball and no bigger than a baseball, but every once in awhile there were a few rocks that bucked the trend in size. But all these rocks collectively were so smooth after millennia of wear and tear and sanding and smoothing from the never tired waves of the channel.
From the beach itself, you actually can’t see the channel, as it’s hidden by a giant natural barrier of these smoothed rocks. You first have to climb a kind of rocky dune shaped by water rather than wind of at least (I don’t know) 40 or 50 feet high. Once you make it to the other side, your ears become overcome with the sounds of waves. But not the sound of waves I ever heard before. Because of the littleish rocks that the waves crashes against, the crashing sound was all well and good and normal (as waves crashing do) but as the water retreated, between the small spaces between all the smoothed little rocks, it made a kind of fluffy, cold, sizzling sound. But not a sizzling sound like frying bacon. More like the sound of frying bacon if it was slowed down a tad and wrapped up in a pillow. And instead of smelling that gorgeous bacon smell, you smelled that fishless, blue-green smell of veiled salt.
My mother has long had this tradition of sticking her finger in whatever body of water she meets. It’s a tradition that’s worn off on me, too. As we approached the water, the grade of the slope was quite steep. And the waves were quite restless and unpredictable. As we tried to reach toward the water, the waves managed to invade the land unexpectedly closer and closer with each turn. So, we both clumsily tried to return to higher land, tripping over our own feet. I managed to stay dry from the ankles up, but my mother got a little more soaked, commenting, “Well, I didn’t quite get my finger in the English Channel, but I did get my ass in it.”
Indeed.
Following our wonderful moments at the beach (and by the way, if you ever come to a car park that is pay-and-display, you have to have exact change for whatever posted amount of time you need; in other words, over paying the 50p fee for an hour won’t give you more time unless you pay the full £1 for two hours, as an example) we made our way to Torquey (it’s pronounced Tor-Key).
In Torquey, our GPS directed us to our hotel: the Hotel Gleneagles. We chose this hotel because when we arrived in Weymouth just the day before, all the hotels along Greenhill (the main drag that runs along parallel to the coast, and by main drag I mean little backstreet with lots of traffic) were booked. A kind gentleman told us that there’s a Best Western away from the water down Dorchester that will probably have vacancies. While at this Best Western, we saw a book that listed all the Best Westerns in the UK. So, we knew we wanted to head to Torquey, and the cheapest Best Western in Torquey was the Gleneagles. So there you have it.
But, when we arrived at the Gleneagles, I noticed that there bar was called Basil’s Bar and Brasserie, labeled prominently outside the hotel. And then as we entered, there was various news clippings about Prunella Scales, Connie Booth, Andrew Sachs, and, naturally, John Cleese. (If you don’t recognize all these names, then you need to get out more. Or get in more. Take your pick.)
Apparently, just by happenstance, we picked THE hotel that inspired the greatest comedy series of all time, Fawlty Towers. And I mean THE greatest comedy series of all time. Ever. Until the end of time. It just is. And you’re wrong to disagree.
(Sorry… I’m forgetting my manners… We humans are a spectrum, as I mentioned earlier when I was writing about the man we had a conversation with at the Dolphin in Ilminster. But this might be the one case where it is black and white. Fawlty Towers is THE best comedy series ever.)
(I might just be joking.)
Anyway, how fantastic is this! Staying at the hotel whose manager with his horribly rude manners inspired comedy gold. Absolutely fantastic. Really, it is. And instead of room numbers, they’re named rooms like Tulip and Coral. We were staying in Lemon.
Also, there was a really handsome desk clerk who worked here. And he always greeted us with a cheery, “Hiya!” which I think is just so cute!
While we stayed in Torquey, we had a couple things that we wanted to see: Kent Cavern and at least another castle. Kent Cavern was first, as it was just a quick walk down the hill from our hotel. I’ve been to lots of caves and caverns, and I love going to caves and caverns. But even though Kent Cavern is on the small side, it was out tour guide who made if so, so memorable. Her name was Tara, and she had that suitably understated British humor where you tell jokes very dryly and with minimal facial expressions. As an example, at the very beginning, Tara said, “I’ll be right back in a minute with the wet suits, rope, and safety helmets.” Or on another occasion, she pointed out a certain stalagmite and stalactite will form a pillar in something like 20,000 years, and she added, “So I’ll take reservations now.”
Anyway, while down there you got to see the usual cave things, and they did the usual turn-off-all-the-lights-and-try-to-see-in-front-of-you thing (and one person seemed properly scared, but I always found total darkness in a controlled setting exhilarating), and of course there’s the usual spot-the-imaginary-animal-in-the-rock thing. But, it’s all terribly fun! Especially if you get guided around by a British tour guide with a sensibly British humor.
Beyond the cave, we had three options for castles in the Torquey region. There was Totnes Castle, an old Norman castle; the Berry Pomeroy Castle, a Tudor mansion layered in ghost stories; and Dartmouth Castle. We decided on Dartmouth because it was right on the coast in, er, Dartmouth. And we didn’t quite get our fill of the southern English coast quite yet.
So to Dartmouth we went. What struck me about this castle was that even though it had 600 years of history within it, because of the Victorian updating that happened with the Old Battery, it felt more like I was touring Fort Snelling or Fort Mackinac. Dartmouth Castle even had that smell that buildings like this from the 1800s have, a kind of subdued old wooden varnish smell mixed with dust and old chalk or dry limestone, and as if the varnish had been drying on and old piece of aromaless cedar, or something. And grey and white paint.
But it was still fascinating nonetheless. There was a video that displayed the process for preparing, loading, and firing the cannons, and it was just breathtaking imagining these things firing at enemy ships as they slowly made their way landward. It was also breathtaking, the views from the topmost tower, looking out over the town and Dart Estuary. While up top, we also had a wonderful conversation with a woman who had that marvelous British accent with ultra soft R sounds (the kind of R sounds where it turns into a W), and we spoke about differences in British and American home building. My mum and I have been marveling that we haven’t seen a single house built out of wood, yet, and this lady remarked that they refer to houses built out of wood as American style houses. Apparently they do exist over here. We just haven’t seen one yet. She also referred to our use of aluminum siding as very unusual.
A building next to Dartmouth Castle that missed the aluminum siding craze by about 900 years is a church called St. Petrox. This is a really, really old church. Quite small, but the floor is lined with gravestones of people long since dead, the earliest dates from the 1600s. It’s really very spooky, the idea if burying people in the church floor. Those above-ground tombs are really spooky too, so are the coffin shaped humps sprouting out of the ground, as if the coffin is willing itself to slowly rise back to the open air.
But honestly! My mother and I just can’t get over how OLD things over here are. It’s really quite remarkable. The accompanying graveyard was also old beyond words, with tombstones askew at angles out of some 1950s horror film. All you needed was to see in black and white, turn down the studio lights, flash some on and off a bit with stock recordings of thunderclaps, Bela Legosi clutching to one of the more giant, concrete crosses, and music by Bartok or Berg playing in the background.
As we drove back to our hotel in Ilminster, my mum and I continued to marvel at how old everything is and how old things just don’t get torn down over here. Even as we passed by village after village, gazing at the houses with thatch roofs, with timber frames filled in with plaster, and houses made of brick and churches made of stone, so much history here in a way that isn’t brand new in the way that 1666 is brand new but 1066 isn’t. It’s really quite remarkable.
And then after our drive home we discovered the Dolphin where we had a wonderful dinner with ales and lovely conversation with a beautiful human being. A beautiful person.
Gosh I would love to live here!
Now how can I make that happen?
(N.B. Our road driving will come to a close in my next post, and our exploration of London will begin.)