England!

This story begins with an appealing looking conference taking place at University of Oxford. Scott was interested because it was a very high quality immunology conference, I was interested because it was in Oxford, England. So Scott applied for the conference and a grant to pay for it and-- yeah!-- he got both so off he went. And Scott can't go to England without me, so off I went too. Scott left Seattle for London on the 16th of August, and Susanna and I left for Salt Lake City a couple of days later on the 18th.


While Scott showed his fellow conference attendees his poster depicting some immunological research he's been doing for a few years (something about immune tolerance, I think) I took Susanna to her grandparents' home (thanks to my parents' recent and very convenient relocation her two sets of grandparents live only three houses apart), set up her home away from home, gave Scott's mother a document giving my parents medical power of attorney and my mom a document giving Scott's parents medical power of attorney (whoops!), told Susanna that I was going to get dad and then go on a long long trip to England, and, on the 20th of August, boarded my own plane for London.


At length, Friday the 29th of August arrived and we had to leave the beautiful land of sheep, cows, and very nice people: Scott boarded a plane to Seattle and I to Salt Lake City. And on Saturday August 30th we were all three together at last.

I want to pause here to offer thanks to our parents, they helped finance the trip and took care of Susanna while we travelled. We could not have made it happen if it weren't for them. Thank you so very very much.


Photographs and details below.

The rest of London and the end of our trip

I'll give you the rest of London in one post. I can pull this off because we spent most of our time in the National Gallery and we couldn't take photographs there. I can give you a thumbnail of a painting we both really liked though, it's Turner's "Dido Building Carthage" (on the left).

You'll also see photographs of Buckingham Palace and the famous palace guards. We stumbled upon Buckingham Palace roaming around Trafalgar Square before we went to the National Gallery for the first time.

We also spent some time (we could have spent weeks-- or who knows? maybe even years) at the British Museum. If you look closely at the photograph above, you'll see Scott on the other side of the room looking at the controversial Parthenon Marbles.

And here we are at beautiful London Bridge (it looked very sturdy to me).

On the right is a tower from the beautiful parlimentary buildings, of which Big Ben (not pictured) is a part.

Last but not least, here we are at the Globe Theatre (a replica of Shakespeare's Globe). We bought yard tickets (standing only) and saw "A Midsummer's Night Dream." It was hilarious.

We also saw Les Miserables while in London (Scott and I both love that musical and book). And we were not disappointed. Then we headed back for our last night at the Waltmans.

Which brings me to a very important part of our trip to England: my cousin Emily Waltman and her husband Tyler. They not only offered up their flat to us to sleep, but proved invaluable resources in the planning and execution of what turned out to be an absolutely fantastic trip. Unfortunatly, although I got a photograph of three nameless buckingham palace guards I don't really care about and saw only for fifteen seconds, I managed not to get a photograph of them (although you can look at their blog here to meet them for yourselves). We had a great time chatting with them and would have had a great time on Tuesday night hanging out with Emily (while Tyler was working in Spain) had we not gotten lost on the way into town and arrived three hours late.

Tower of London

First stop in London: Tower of London. Pictured above is me (obviously) standing in front of the Tower of London. I love thei photograph because it looks like I was pasted in. You decide: am I making this all up or did I really go to England.










Back to the tower: William the Conquerer started work on this building-- England's first castle-- in the eleventh century.

It is still one of the residences of the queen, but it also houses an armory museum as well as a display of the heavily protected crown jewels. Both of the above were fabulous-- the former entertaining and the latter simply astounding.

But the highlight was the Yoeman's Tour. The Tower of London Yoemans are palace guards that, after meeting very difficult and strict requirments and completing extensive training, become royal bodyguards and and move into the tower grounds.

Bath

This photograph is of the Royal Crescent in Bath. It doesn't look very exciting in this photograph, but it is really a beautiful piece of architecture. Just being in Bath, getting lost among all the beautiful buildings, was probably my favorite part of that town. But the Roman Baths were also lovely and educational. I knew about them solely because of my love of all things Austen (so I didn't even know about the Roman part) but more educated people may know not only it was an important sacred site for the Romans in Britain, but that it had been a sacred site for a long time for the Celtic peoples who were already there.

Basically it is a hot spring, and because hot springs were (and still are to people like me) mysterious, people attached great religious importance to the hot springs. Therefore, the Romans built a bathing complex and a temple around the hot spring. The baths make an appearance in Jane Austen's work because in Georgian times their supposed healing powers were very much in vogue and people spoke of "taking the waters" to help them recover from some malady. Although you are no longer allowed to bath in Bath's Roman Baths, you can still drink the disgusting water in the elegant pump room upstairs.

We also visited the beautiful Bath Abbey you will find photographed below. The flying buttresses on this church were particularly stunning because I have never seen ones like those in this building before. Beautiful.

Avebury and Stonehenge

We also visited two prehistoric sites, Avebury Stone Circle and Stonehenge. Both are composed of an earthwork as well as rings of stones, and in both cases the earthwork was in place before the stones were added.

The stones are huge at both sites and it is incredible to think about prehistoric peoples moving these stones to their current position-- in the case of stonehenge the stones came from a Welsh mountain range 200 miles away. And in both cases historians don't know what the function of these monuments were, although for various reasons it is clear that they were very important.

Both seem to date back to around 3000 B.C. (Avebury is supposedly a little older), but Avebury is much larger with a diameter over 1000 miles. A village has grown up in and around the Avebury stones and you can walk right up to the stones and touch them.

These were fascinating sites. Their size, mystery, significance, and antiquity made both of them wonderful places to visit.

(Note: the top two photographs are of Avebury, the bottom two of Stonehenge.)

The Rest of the Cotswolds

Here are some photographs from our three days in the Cotswolds that I love but have not made it into any of the other posts. The first is of a stately manor home near Stow-on-the-wold where she stayed (more information on that to come). I found a profile of this home--Chastleton House is its name-- in a National Trust book I checked out at the library and, for some reason, became very enamored with it.

Below Chastleton you'll find a photograph of a St. Mary's Church with the lovely Yew trees. This church is in a charming little village called Painswick.

Next down the line is St. John the Baptist Church, or Cathedral of the Cotswolds, from Cirencester.

And last is the picturesque parish church and graveyard of St. Peters Church in Upper Slaughter.

The three nights were slept in the Cotswolds were passed at the fantastic home of a sweet lady named Mrs. Crave. She was very kind and cheerful and looked after us in a grandmotherly sort of way. Having quickly discovered Scott's sweet tooth she was ready with a cup of hot chocolate whenever she saw him. I have imprinted on my mind the image of Mrs. Crave framed in the doorway of her cute cottage waving good-bye to us as we left her home for good. I wish I had gotten a photograph of her. I suppose I will have to find solace in the ridiculously useless photograph I took of our bedroom window there.

More Cotswolds: Berkeley and Uley

Scott made his own pilgrimage: we visited the home of Edward Jenner, the father of immunology. Dr. Jenner claim to fame is that he figured out that exposure cow pox could protect people from small pox and began using small doses of cow pox to vaccinate people against that terrible disease. Thanks to the good doctor's, the world is now free of Small Pox. His home now houses the Jenner museum which has interesting information on Jenner's life, small pox, and immunology in general.

The photograph on the right is of Scott in front of the Temple Vaccinia (I think that's what it was called) behind Edward Jenner's home. He vaccinated poor people for free there.

Just accross the way from the Jenner home we found Berkeley Castle. The Berkeley family still lives there (and has almost exclusively since it was built in about the twelfth century). which (obviously) made it a very different place than the ruins of Kenilworth we saw earlier.

After seeing Berkeley Castle we found a nearby iron age hill fort near the village of Uley called Uley Bury. As far as I know there has never been any building of any kind there, the fort is an earthwork: a man made hill dating from about 300 B.C. I found the site most interasting as a nice walk with spectacular views of the Severn Valley and across to Wales. We took this photograph by putting our camera on a watering stile (I made up that name-- it seemed like a stile from far away, but in the end was a watering trough for the cattle that now graze atop Uley Bury).

A Cotswolds Walk

England is a great place for walking. Established public footpaths run all over-- even cutting through private land-- giving walkers a wonderful netwark of byways on which they can see the country.

We went on a twelve mile walk in a charming area of England called the Cotswolds. We started in a beautiful village called Bourton-on-the-water and then walked through charming villages, swathes of woodland, fields of grain, and grazing pastures. It was a fantastic walk and probably the highlight of our trip.

Shakespeare Country

Above you'll see me at the conclusion of my pilgrimage to one of the great artists of all time: Shakespeare. I don't know nearly as much about Shakespeare, especially his poetic works, as I would like to, but what little I do know of is enough to have brought me pleasure, joy, and personal growth. He must have been an amazing person with a profound intellect and a great heart.

We visited an exhibit on him and his work, his birthplace (above), and his mother's childhood home (Mary Arden's Home, pictured on the right). Mary Arden's home was a wonderful open air folk museum that had little to do with Shakespeare but was a fun and educational look at life in that time period. They even have full time staff whose job it is to live the life of people of that period, they bake bread in earthen ovens, make shoes by hand, and live (by day) without running water or electricity.

Our first castle

The next morning we left Oxford for Shakespeare Country-- Stratford-upon-avon in Warwickshire. But on the way we felt the lure of the Warwickshire castles, and we ended up stopping at Kenilworth Castle.

It might have been nice to have a little more time to see Stratford-upon-avon and the Shakespeare sights. But I still don't feel bad at all that we went

to Kenilworth because the castle was just beautiful and we loved roaming around the towers and seeing England's history come to life.

Here's a photograph of a footpath we followed around the castle on our way back to our car.

England's Beginnings: Oxford

This trip was motivated and made possible by Scott's conference at the University of Oxford. Or, more correctly, Magdalen College, which is one of the many colleges that comprises University of Oxford. Here's a photograph of Scott at beautiful Magdalen College (above), and here are some more photographs he took of the college (below).

Here's a photograph of Scott punting with some fellow conference go-ers.

I arrived in London on the 21st of August in the morning and was planning to pick up a car at the Heathrow Airport, drive to Oxford, and meet Scott at 1:00 pm at the front of Magdalen College. Does anyone see a problem with this plan? Perhaps if I tell you that I've never driven a car on the left side of the road (or driven on huge roundabouts with several lanes and exits, or know anything about English freeways) and remind you that I was alone... It was a crazy thing to do, but after a traumatizing four hours (three hours longer than it should have been) I finally arrived.

I accomplished this amazing feat on nothing but a "light continental breakfast" served at 7:00 or 8:00 am on the plane. So, after finding my husband, my first priority was eating, after which we could only had enough time for one place. We chose to climb the many many stairs of the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. Here's what we saw at the top:

The Bodleian Library

and the town of Oxford.