Dispatch #11In Which We Introduce Our Children To Our Life Abroad, Learn That Most of England Closes in November & Still Manage to Have A Good Time
I don’t know if there is a gene for tough luck or for hapless traveling, but if there is, then our kids certainly inherited it. As I mentioned in the last dispatch, we had spent a quiet week awaiting the arrival of Andrew and Elise on Sunday. The weather had been wonderful—clear and cool but dry—until the day their plane touched down. That morning, as we headed for the train to meet them at Gatwick Airport, the wind was sharp and strong and often accompanied by a stinging rain. Despite the gloominess, however, we were extremely happy to see those two familiar, slightly dazed faces among the other travelers who made their way through the arrivals gate.

On the ride back to Canterbury, the sky lightened a bit, and we were hopeful that the umbrellas we had brought wouldn’t be necessary for the walk from the station to our house on Monastery Street. The rain, in fact, did hold off for the rest of the day, but the wind and cold remained, which meant our introductory tour of the city was a bit abbreviated. Beth and Andrew did duck into the cathedral for a quick look around, while Elise and I waited in the cloisters for them to finish. (In addition to the gene for luck, we share a penchant for phobias. Mine is heights, Beth does not care for bridges, Elise is uncomfortable in vast interior spaces—like the cathedral—and Andrew fears turtleneck sweaters.) That night, after dinner, we played cards and laughed a lot, as we are wont to do when the four of us get together. It was a great way to end a gray day, and we looked forward to our first full day of exploring, even though the weather forecast once again called for rain.

We decided to let the kids sleep as long as they felt like sleeping, but, eventually, had to wake Andrew because the morning was nearly over. He said he had not slept soundly, which was why he was still in bed, but Elise made it through the night. She did arrive with a cold, though, so we made a quick side trip to a pharmacy to get the British equivalent of DayQuil on our way to the bus station. The night before, we had decided to go to Whitstable so that the kids could see the North Sea, and we could all enjoy seafood at the East Quay Restaurant where we had eaten in October when Beth’s sister, Ginger, was visiting. We tempted fate and did not take umbrellas despite the dark, ragged clouds.

The bus ride was a treat. We were on the top deck of a double-decker and could see the countryside in a way that is not possible from a train. We also had a better vantage point from which to see the narrowness of the roads and the wideness of the buses. On more than one occasion, I was sure we were going to hit something—an oncoming car, a pedestrian on the sidewalk next to us—but the driver maneuvered skillfully the entire route. I should note that the trip took us about thirty minutes, even though Whitstable and Canterbury are only about six miles apart. In addition to a number of stops along the way, it is the narrowness of the roads and the constant need to slow down or stop to avoid collisions that accounts for the sluggish pace. We were not in any hurry, though, and didn’t really note how much time had passed until we disembarked in Whitstable and headed for the seafront.

About the time we got off the bus, the sun came out. Like the day before, it was still cold, but the sun and only a mild wind promised a good day of walking on the beach, picking up shells and skipping rocks. We walked along cobblestone streets until there was a gap between houses, and we could get to the sea. At the point in time, we had not yet begun to realize the familiar pattern of our previous travels, so when we emerged to find ourselves next to the commercial fishing wharves rather than the public beach area, we still believed this was going to be a day filled with fun and wonder. As we stood and looked out at the sea, the first thing we saw was that the tide was out—way out—which meant that any rock-skipping would entail slogging across a hundred yards of seaweed-strewn, dead-fish-smelling, slimy sand to the water’s edge. It was at this point, with the sea breeze blowing in our faces, that Elise noted that she could, despite the congestion caused by her cold, smell the fish and mollusks—not only the ones on the beach but those in the great wooden crates a few yards away—with perfect clarity, and it was not good.

The roof of the East Quay Restaurant was visible above the warehouses, so we made our way around the docks—where fishing boats sat at a tilt on the sand and the aroma grew more intense—looking forward to lunch.

A note to any of you who plan to visit Whitstable: don’t do it in November. When we got to the door of the restaurant, not only was the door locked, it and the windows were shuttered and chained, giving us good reason to believe that we were just a few minutes early. So, with heavy hearts and rumbling stomachs, we turned away from the water and resigned ourselves to a less memorable repast. After deciding not to eat at the health club/restaurant or at the snooker club/restaurant, we settled, instead, for the Hotel Continental where we had rather ordinary sandwiches. The sky, by this time, was starting to darken and the wind was picking up, so we wandered up the hill to the main thoroughfare and caught a bus back to Canterbury where we visited the Roman museum on Butchery Lane and learned about the city at its earliest. Established around 43 A.D., the town of Durovernum Cantiacorum thrived on the spot of contemporary Canterbury for nearly 400 years. The museum is below street level and includes actual archaeological excavations. The most impressive is the mosaic floor from the house that had stood on that spot and a section beneath that floor where hot water circulated to heat the house. The site, along with an even larger part of the Roman town, was uncovered during wartime bombing.

After the museum, which is small but very much worth a visit, Andrew and I went back to the cathedral, so he could have a longer look at the place, while Beth and Elise went to climb up in the West Gate Tower at the other end of High Street. I was giving Andrew my tour of the cathedral (most of it accurate and true) when I got a phone call from Beth telling me that the tower had closed just five minutes before the two of them arrived. By this time, Elise—more than Andrew—had begun to understand what it was like to travel with her parents. Andrew’s turn to learn would come the next day.

Beth and I had to attend a meeting on Tuesday—the only meeting we’ve had to attend since we got here—so we put the kids on the bus to Dover to visit the castle and the Wartime Tunnels. Again, the weather was blustery, overcast and cold, but bolstered by my story about the ghost that we had seen down one of the corridors, they headed out on their adventure. The plan was for them to be back in time for dinner with Phil and Jo Vandrey, who had been here in 2004 doing what we were doing. Phil was a colleague of Beth’s before he retired and was, in fact, the first Kishwaukee faculty member to serve as mentor/instructor.

An hour into the meeting, my phone rang, and I excused myself, embarrassed that I hadn’t turned it off. I missed the call but saw that it was from Andrew, so I called him back.

“It’s closed,” he said, in that flat way he has of passing along bad news.

“What’s closed?”

“The castle. It’s closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays until March.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“I hope not.”

Not only was the castle closed, but the bus only took them to the bottom of the very high hill (actually the top of the famed White Cliffs) rather than at the ticket booth, and they were forced to trudge up the a long and steep stairway in a steady drizzle only to find the gates locked and no one to tell them when the next bus might be by. I suggested that they find the bus station rather than stand out in the rain and hung up, knowing that the next time I saw them they would be bedraggled and cranky and more than happy to denounce their kinship with their mother and me. I was pretty much on target, except that they weren’t as angry with us for sending them off on a misguided mission as they were at each other. Elise was angry at Andrew because he would not ask for directions to the bus station, resulting in their having to wait an extra hour because they missed a bus by four minutes; Andrew was angry at Elise for being angry at him. We thought we could placate them by feeding them—they hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was 2:30 p.m.—so we took them to the place our students said had the best fish and chips in the city, but neither they nor Beth were overly impressed, and I can’t eat food that greasy, so we went to the ruins of the Norman castle built next to the city walls then ducked in and out of shops to avoid the increasingly steady rain. Luckily, dinner with the Vandreys was such a pleasant outing that it salvaged the day, and we went to bed that night looking forward to an overnight trip to London on Wednesday.

The next morning, the kids and I boarded the train for London while Beth—who would meet us in the evening—prepared for her class. Everything went smoothly on the trip—except for one man who felt it was necessary to let us all hear his mobile phone conversation—and we pulled in at Victoria Station around 11:30 a.m. After a typical “What should we do now? I don’t know, what?” conversation—and after discovering I had forgotten to leave my little pen knife at home, the same one that got me kicked out of the Scottish Parliament and would get me into trouble when we rode the London Eye—we decided to check into out hotel to drop off backpacks and weaponry.

Our first stop of the day was going to be the Royal Mews—the Queen’s stables—at Buckingham Palace, a place at the top of Elise’s list. I remembered where it was from our previous visit and took us to the Visitors’ Entrance without a false step.

“It’s closed,” Andrew said, echoing his message of bad news from Dover.

“What?” This could not be happening again, could it?

Andrew pointed to a sign next to the locked door: Closed from November 2007-March 2008, which Elise photographed.

"This is my souvenir from England," she said in a voice not unlike her brother's. "A Closed sign."

I wish I could say that, at this point, we all chuckled about our tough luck—“Bad timing, innit?”—and pressed on bravely, but that was not the case. What’s next? I asked myself, as I led my two suspicious offspring around the wall to the front of Buckingham Palace. Will the Eye be shut down for repair? Is Westminster Abbey on fire? Did Big Ben collapse? Has the Thames dried up? At least, I thought, as we came around to the grand statue of Queen Victoria that fronts Buckingham Palace, this is all intact.

The sun was shining, so we were able to get good pictures of the palace, and I noticed that the Union Jack was flying, which meant that the Queen was not in. In keeping with my theory that she’s trailing me around England, I checked every few minutes to see if the Royal Standard would appear, and then I remembered an offhand comment I had made when someone asked where we were going when the kids arrived. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Uganda, maybe.” Well, guess where “E II R” spent last week?

We were about to move on when I heard the tramping of feet and orders being barked from somewhere inside the wall surrounding the palace, and I could see a group of gray-uniformed soldiers marching in our direction.

“Come on!” I shouted to the kids. “It’s the changing of the guard.”

There were probably 30 or 40 other people at the foot of Victoria’s statue when I made my announcement, and all of them apparently thought I knew what I was talking about and ran along with us. We wedged ourselves in close to the iron spikes of the fence and started snapping pictures. When they were only a few yards away, the squad stopped—which, in retrospect, should have been a clue that I had completely misread the situation; the guardhouses were well behind this little cluster of soldiers—and, at their leader’s command, fell out willy-nilly came over to the fence where they each picked up a music stand (left behind, no doubt, when the real changing of the guard had happened), returned to their formation and marched away, leaving me in the middle of a crowd which had just realized, as my children had come to realize many years ago, that I am just not to be listened to. Before any harm could come to any of us, I grabbed the kids by the arm and ran.

The rest of the afternoon was less disasterous. We visited Westminster Abbey, rode the Eye at dusk—where we watched the lights of London blink on—walked through Trafalgar Square and Picadilly Circus and then took the Underground back to Victoria Station. This was also the day of the big England-Croatia soccer match which would decide whether or not England would advance in the European championship tournament, and we had seen, all day long, gangs of Croatian fans dressed in red-and-white checked shirts roaming the city, most of them clutching giant cans of Foster’s Lager. As we walked through the tunnel to our tube line, we could hear them singing in one of the other tunnels, and we were glad that Wembley Stadium was located in a completely different direction from where we were staying.

Our hotel was one of several small hotels along Belgrave Road. They all appeared to have been built as private homes and converted into lodgings. Beth had booked a family room, so we had three single and one double bed crammed into a rather small, but comfortable room. Had Andrew and Elise been younger, they would have had a great time jumping from one bed to another, but, instead, we all lounged around and watched British game shows, waiting for Beth to call. When she did, I walked back to Victoria to meet her. The weather had taken a sharp downturn while we were in the hotel, and I had to hurry through a downpour without an umbrella or a hooded jacket. By the time we returned to the hotel, I was soaked to the skin, and I draped everything I was wearing over the radiators, hoping it would all be dry the next morning.

I went back to Canterbury on Thursday morning while Beth and the kids went to Windsor Castle. When I found out later that they had actually seen the changing of the guard there, I began to think maybe I’m the source of the hapless traveling gene. But I did get home in time for class without a hitch—and I met a priest from Dallas who trusted me to give him directions to the cathedral—so I’m not yet ready to accept full responsibility. When the trio left Windsor, they went back into London where Andrew went off on his own for a lightning-fast trip to the British Museum to see the Rosetta Stone and the Elgin Marbles, among a few other things he had time to see, and Beth and Elise went to King’s Cross so that Elise could get a photograph of Platform 9 ¾ (Harry Potter’s point of departure for Hogwarts School) and then they saw the changing of the horse guard near Whitehall. The three of them met up at the British Museum and got home to Canterbury in time for Thanksgiving dinner, which was provided by the university. While a couple of things weren't quite right--instead of stuffing, we had stuffing balls; the pumpkin pie lacked nutmeg--it was a very kind thing for the school to have for us and a very filling meal. Several of the students had family members and/or friends who flew over for the week, so there was a real holiday feel to the whole thing, and we were all appropriately thankful.

Friday was our last—and best—field trip: The Tower of London and The Globe Theatre. There was room on the bus, so Andrew and Elise were able to come along, and they, like all of the students, were completely taken with both places. The Tower, which sits at one end of the Tower Bridge—the one most Americans always assume is the London Bridge we used to sing about when we were kids—and is not really a tower but a palace. There are, in fact, 11 towers on the site and most of them house a museum of some kind. In St. Thomas’ Tower, for example, visitors get a look at how the royals lived in the Middle Ages, and in the White Tower, there is an armaments museum. The Tower is also home to the Beefeaters, a torture museum, a memorial to those who were beheaded over the years (Anne Boleyn among them) and, of course, the Crown Jewels, which you view from a treadmill that moves you along at a steady pace—an setup necessary, I’m sure, at the height of tourist season, but not in November. Interestingly, after viewing the jewels and other treasures, there’s a collection box where you can contribute a pound or two to the upkeep of the place. I’d recommend they sell just one of the two-foot high gold flagons, but I doubt if anyone would pay attention.

The Globe was equally worth the time. Completed in 1997, the theatre looks as close to the one torn down in 1642 by the Puritans as possible. An American actor, Sam Wanamaker, was the driving force behind the reconstruction—which includes not only the open air theatre but an exhibition hall and a restaurant as well—but he died in 1993 and never got to see a performance. Our guide explained to us that there are 900 seats in the three-story building and room around the stage for another 600 groundlings. Because authenticity is of utmost importance, modern-day groundlings are encouraged to act like those who would have paid a penny in Shakespeare’s time, so it is not uncommon for people to lean on the stage, to talk back to the actors and to come and go during a performance—a far cry from the formality of theatre in London’s West End or on Broadway, but it is, according to our guide, an exciting way to experience a play. Once the tour was ended, Beth and the kids and I spent another hour or so in the exhibition hall where displays told of the history of the theatre in London, the life of Shakespeare, life in Elizabethan times and in an Elizabethan theatre. We ended the day with a quick trip to the Tate Modern art gallery to see “Shibboleth,” which is a crack that runs the length of the ground floor—and it’s art not bad masonry—along a few paintings before it was time to catch the coach.

Saturday was the day we took Andrew and Elise to Gatwick for their flight back to the States. After we watched them head off to their gate, we returned to Canterbury and met up with Phil and Jo again and went to the German Christmas Market, which is set up in White Friars’ Plaza—an open air mall—and will remain there until December 24. Our lunch that day was “currywurst,” an odd, but delicious combination of German sausage and Indian spices on a bun. Phil and Jo were off to Paris and then Strasbourg and other places, so we said goodbye to them and went home to wash sheets and towels before our next guests arrived on Sunday.

We’re now in our final three weeks of the visit, which is a bit astonishing; it seems like we just arrived. I’m not sure how many more adventures we’ll have during these last days—I know I’ll be reading student essays for a few days, but who wants to hear about that?—so I’ve been compiling a Top 10 sort of list that I’ll post sometime in the next couple of weeks (I was chastised recently because I said I’d address some subjects but never did, so I’m hoping to make up for the oversight) in case we don’t do anything worth passing along.

Cheers!