A few months back I stumbled across $460 tickets to Dublin, and so we decided to go back to Ireland for the second time in 2022, and we invited our colleagues Regina Pykare and Meredith Neufeld (“Neuf” to distinguish her from the Meredith to whom I’m married) and Regina’s daughter, Shelby. We’ve all traveled together before, and Neuf had expressed a desire to get to Ireland at some point, so that was a nice bonus.

What was more of a surprise was the five feet of snow Buffalo got over the Thursday-Saturday time frame. Since we fly out of Toronto for these cheap flights, we usually go through Buffalo, but that wasn’t an option this time. We were grateful going west was a clear option, and so we went through Detroit, and because of the extra two hours that adds to the trip, we left on Friday night, a day before we were planning on heading out. We drove as far as Windsor, Canada, which is across from Detroit. I’m glad we had our travel phone working – when we hit traffic, we were able to look up that there was a ninety-minute backup of trucks to take the bridge to Canada, so we found the cars-only tunnel instead and only lost about fifteen minutes total. The Saturday portion to Toronto was smooth, and we ran into the others in the airport before we had to resort to texting them. The flight over was uneventful as well, which is a very good thing.

And so, Ireland. We picked up our car, which the company had bumped up to the next class for us, which was fortunate, since we filled the trunk completely and all the non-drivers had to hold a backpack (or, in Mer’s case, my fairly light suitcase). Not ideal, but it was the price for getting a car that I felt okay driving (aka, not a passenger van). We were never in the car for more than ninety minutes at a stretch, so I didn’t feel too bad, especially since Shelby and Neuf managed to fall asleep for the longest stretch.

We headed out into the Dublin dark – it was around 7:00 am, and sunrise was closer to 8:00. Our ultimate goal was to get to Waterford, in the south, but I wanted to show off some of rural Ireland along the way, so we detoured through the Wicklow Mountains. There is an old military road the British built that goes through some very unpopulated parts of the mountains, and they are starkly barren, with only low-lying brush growing. They are lovely, and we got to them just in time for the sun to come up – and the sun’s energy helped drive the thirty-mph winds in the mountains. Turns out the mid-forties are very cold with that kind of wind, but it was all worth it. We pulled off a few times to get out and take pictures and look around, and the light kept changing as the sun came up more fully. Next to a lake, there was one section of forest that was pitch black even after the sun was largely up – you can see (or not see, I suppose) why wild stories of the forest abound in Ireland.

After coming out of the Wicklow Mountains, which we had largely to ourselves (I think we saw four cars in an hour), we drove over to the old monastic settlement of Glendalough. Glendalough was an important site, founded in the sixth century, with most of the current buildings from the Irish ecclesiastical boom time of 1100-1200. There is a still-active cemetery with many Celtic crosses, several intact buildings (including an Irish round tower), and a few ruins. All of these are set in a beautiful setting of small mountains, a stream, two lakes, and thick forests. And it’s free to visit (except for a four-euro parking fee). It was very cold as the area clouded over, and the wind was fierce, but we escaped the rain that moved in just as we finished up. And then we drove out of it. Good timing.

I drove us the ninety minutes to Waterford, but I had to stop for caffeine and sugar along the way, as I was approaching twenty-four hours of no sleep. Waterford was pleasing to drive into – there is a Christmas fair going on right now, right on the river, and our hotel is downtown too, so I could drop the car and forget about it for awhile. The only unfortunate thing is that out hotel’s official check-in time was 4:00. Since Mer and I bank on getting a three-hour nap to help us shake jetlag, and we usually can get into rooms by 1:00 (or even earlier), that was a setback.

We strolled through the Christmas fair. It was fun to see Waterford out playing. The fair had a Ferris wheel, a carrousel, an ice rink, several smaller rides, and multiple booths selling food and wares. It was festive. We ate lunch back at the hotel (excellent), and then Meredith and I wandered the town in a mellow exploratory way while Neuf, Regina, and Shelby went to a timepiece museum and a silver museum. Mer and I finally got into our room just before 3:00, and we slept and then showered, getting out into the city around 7:00, feeling quite a bit better. We ran into our friends, who had just kept doing things. I know they were planning on riding the Ferris wheel and carrousel, but we didn’t get to catch up more to see what they had been up to for the three hours since we had seen them.

Mer and I rode the Ferris wheel, which gave decent views of the town and river, and in the dark, we could see the Christmas lights around town. We had planned on exploring the booths of the fair, but they were all shut down by 7:30 on this Sunday, so we went to a pub instead. We wanted supper and were hoping for music. While we ate supper, the waiter put a soccer game on, and it was Ireland versus Malta, which was funny since my brother, Shannon, his wife Jolene, and our friend Dubbs are in (or, for Dubbs, is on her way) to Malta this week. Ireland won, 1-0.

The music in the pub turned out to be two guys playing contempory covers of music, so we passed on that. We decided it was okay since we would get an earlier night, which will hopefully help us shake jetlag. But, even with our tiredness, it is great to be back on the old sod.

Catness came flying up the stairs from the lower level of our ranch home. I was standing at the top of that set of stairs and at the bottom of the stairs to the upper level. Catness stopped his dash, looked up at me with wild eyes, put his ears back, and bounded up the upper stairs at full speed. “Catness is wound,” I announced to Meredith.

Catness was our long-haired black and white kitty who amused us for the last ten years. He first got on our radar when he started living under the trailers in back of CVCA, the school where we both work. My first memory of Catness was I saw him across the grass near the building, I called to him, and he came bounding eagerly over to me and purred up a storm when I started petting him. I picked him up and showed him to Meredith through her classroom window, which was nearby.

In 2012, the Hunger Games movie had just come out, and since Catness had long hair, the students of the school assumed he was a girl and started calling him Katniss, after the hero of the book/movie. Most of the kids liked “Katniss,” but in a large school with students as young as eleven, there were bound to be a few who didn’t like cats, and Mer saw him get kicked one day. From that point, she was determined to find him a home. We already had five cats, so I encouraged her to find him a home with a student.

I forget the exact sequence now, but I think Mer found a student who took him home, but then the family dog didn’t like that, so Catness ended up somehow at a vet’s office waiting to be adopted. Mer was going on senior trip, and she let me know when she left that she “wanted THAT kitty.” My recollection is that the vet seemed suspicious of me until an assistant saw the cat stickers in our car’s window, and so Catness came home with me.

“Katniss” became Catness through my incompetent name memory. When we verified that “Katniss” was a boy, Mer wanted to change his name. I couldn’t remember what the name was, and Mer kept associating Katniss with the girl hero of The Hunger Games, so we came up with Catness instead. We figured Catness was the embodiment of being a cat – the essential nature of a cat. And I could remember his name.

Catness fit in well at home. He wasn’t chummy with any of our other cats, but they didn’t fight either. Catness turned out to be a superb athlete kitty, racing around the house and being flexible enough to fall asleep with his back paws in one direction and his front paws twisted 180 degrees in another direction. Catness very quickly discovered the “catwalk” – the top of the wall that separates our kitchen from our living room; it’s a standard wall, but we have a cathedral ceiling, so there is a six-inch-wide top to the wall that Catness enjoyed walking or sitting on. He would jump from the floor to the counter to the refrigerator to the catwalk. Other cats have done that as well, but Catness was up there quite often.

Catness never lost his outdoor nature. We had to watch for him when we went in and out of the house because he would try to sneak out in his younger years. I think he succeeded twice, and each time I caught him when he stopped to sniff at a plant. He would also sharpen his claws on anything – furniture, wood trim, and even metal heating registers. We expect some cat-related destruction in our home and are okay with that, but when Catness started making grooves in the wood in our music room, we knew we had to do something. We said we would never declaw a cat since we were okay with occasional claw pricks showing on the couches, but we had never had a cat starting to destroy parts of the actual house. We either had to get Catness declawed or give him up. So we reluctantly got him declawed. He seemed unfazed by that, and for most of his life he still tried to sharpen his now-missing claws on various parts of the house. The only downside we saw was the other cats eventually figured out that Catness couldn’t defend himself the same way as the other cats, so they would occasionally pick on him by chasing him around. Happily, that didn’t happen often, and Catness would usually just flee to something high in the house.

Catness was clearly the smartest cat we had ever had. Not only did he manage to escape a couple of times, but he was good at problem solving. Once, Mer made a pork roast in the oven, and because we had a house full of meat-loving animals, she pushed it to the back of the hot oven and left the door cracked about four inches to let the oven cool down some while she went to use the bathroom. She was gone for a couple of minutes, and when she came back, she found Catness with three paws on the open oven door, one paw on the oven, and a large chunk of pork in his mouth. We never figured out how he managed that in a hot oven, but he was a clever kitty.

Catness also loved chicken. Anytime I made chicken, he would come running into the kitchen and paw at my butt until I gave him some. I left a bowl of shredded chicken on the counter, wrapped in foil with a plate over the bowl. When I came back in to the kitchen, Catness was on the counter, had gotten the plate off the bowl without making any sound, and had peeled back the foil. Again, he was quite bright.

Catness liked me, but he loved Meredith. He liked to sit on her grading table for many of the hours she graded, and he would sleep near her on the bed. Sometimes he would wrap himself around her head, but that was fairly rare. He usually waited until Meredith moved in the morning, and she would stretch out an arm, and he would come and settle next to her with his head resting on her arm. It was very cute.

Catness was a joy to have around the house for nine years. When we got back from our summer trip to Iceland in 2021, we found he was hunched under the bed and had pooped on the bedroom floor in several places. Thus began a year of Catness finding new places he felt conformable – the bedroom, the corner of the office, the bathroom sink, and so on. Wherever he went, he would stay there for two or three weeks and then find somewhere new. In each place, he would find a corner to go to the bathroom in, so we started putting two litter boxes wherever he was. I still don’t know if the behavior shift was because we had introduced a new year-old female cat to the house (he was fine with her for two full months before we left for Iceland), or if he was beginning to feel poorly, or both. In the spring of this year (2022), Catness was finally diagnosed with some kidney issues and maybe a blood issue, so we put him on special food. He still would snuggle some with Meredith and even on rare occasions join us on the couch.

We took a summer trip to England this year in June, and left the cat sitter instructions on how to care for Catness. When we got home, Catness hadn’t touched his food from earlier in the day, so I gave him some fresh food. He sniffed at it and curled back up without eating. I left it with him all night and he didn’t eat it. I tried giving him another different food, and he wouldn’t eat that either, even when I put a little on my finger. We knew the time had come – he was very sick. The vet said his kidneys and his blood disease were fighting each other, and we were doing the right thing. So, on the day after we got home from England, on Wednesday, June 29th, we said goodbye to our clever, athletic snuggle baby.

I expect that Catness came flying up to St. Peter, looked at him with wild eyes, put his ears back, and bounded up to Meredith’s future heavenly mansion to wait for her outstretched arm to come to him. I’m sure Peter announced, “Catness is wound!”

As I was preparing for the school day, I heard a knock on my classroom window.  Opening the blinds, I saw my husband Matthew holding a beautiful long-haired tuxedo cat with a black nose and a white-tipped tail.  It turned out that the cat had taken up residence underneath the trailers behind our school, and since it had been discovered there around the same time that the Hunger Games movie was released, the students started calling the cat Katniss.

Many students were delighted to have a school cat.  She was friendly, not feral, and I can picture her running across the grass to greet Matthew when he called to her.  But with over eight hundred students in the building, I feared that there might be at least one or two who might try to hurt her.  Every morning when I came to work, I had trouble relaxing until I’d seen her and knew that she was all right.  Then one afternoon, when I came into my room before my next class was about to start, a couple girls were looking out the windows, and one of them gasped, “That boy is kicking the cat!”

I stormed back into the hall and out the door, and it’s God’s good grace that a) the cat appeared unharmed, and b) the boy was nowhere in sight … because I really don’t know what I’d have done if I’d found him mid-kick.  Something that could’ve gotten me fired, I suspect.  But the incident convinced me that the cat couldn’t keep living behind the school, and that we needed to bring her home.

Convincing Matthew was a little trickier.  We already had five cats, and he was reluctant to add a sixth.  Though I’m not a frequent crier, the thought of the cat’s falling prey to any more abuse got my waterworks going.  “I don’t want ‘another cat,’” I sobbed to Matthew, “but I want this one.”

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who thought Katniss needed to be rescued, because before we had a chance to claim her, we learned that one of my students, Lauren, had taken her in.  Yet Katniss didn’t get along with Lauren’s other pets, so Lauren took her to her local vet in hopes that someone there could find Katniss a better situation.  At this point, the school year was almost over, and I went out of town briefly for senior trip.  By the time I returned, Matthew had visited Lauren’s vet and brought Katniss home.  

Some of the students had claimed that since Katniss was living outdoors and didn’t look totally clean, she must have had fleas, but they were wrong — not only about the fleas, but also about the “she,” as it turned out.  I guess people think that fluffy cats look more feminine.  Now we had a problem, though:  we needed to find a new name.  We tried several, but we were so used to thinking of the cat as Katniss that none of them stuck.  Matthew said that since the name Katniss had been made up for The Hunger Games, it wasn’t inherently male or female.  Because I’d read the trilogy, it seemed female to me; however, I was willing to compromise by changing the spelling to “Catness.”  I figured that if, for example, “happiness” is “the condition of being happy,” “Catness” could mean “the condition of being a cat.”

Unfortunately, the condition to which Catness had grown accustomed was that of being an outdoor cat, and in his early days with us, he was something of a flight risk.  He wasn’t standoffish, but he was less affectionate than he’d seemed when at the school, and, most disturbingly, he liked to scratch everything.  As owners of clawed cats, we’d limited curtains and rugs and replaced our cloth chairs and couches with harder-to-shred leather ones … yet Catness also scratched metal and wood.  You can live in a house with minimal fabric, but it’s tough to eliminate metal and wood, and the gouges were adding up.  When we’d adopted our first two cats from a Chicago shelter, we’d had to promise to keep them as indoor-only cats and not to declaw them.  After having had Catness for a destructive year, though, we did finally decide that we’d never promised we wouldn’t have him declawed. 

To our relief, the surgery went smoothly, and besides healing quickly, Catness actually became more affectionate afterwards.  Nonetheless, he still had a mischievous streak, especially when it came to food.  Such as the time he figured out how to get into the cupboard above the counter so he could access his dry food.  Or the time Matthew had covered a bowl of shredded chicken with a heavy, fragile plate while he briefly left the room; while the bowl was unattended, Catness managed to get up on the counter and knock the plate off the bowl without breaking it or upsetting the bowl itself, and was happily mid-munch by the time I found him.  Such was his fondness for chicken that Matthew would usually just give him a little, in response to Catness’s plaintive wails.  We called him “Chicken Monster,” since I’d warned Matthew early on that by giving in to those wails, he was creating a monster.  

However, Catness’s crowning food-related achievement involved pork, not chicken.  I’d made some that was done cooking, so I opened the oven door, but to keep it safe while I went to the bathroom before dinner, I shoved the pan toward the back of the oven and only opened the oven door a little ways.  Returning to the kitchen a few minutes later, I was shocked to see Catness sitting on the counter with a large hunk of pork hanging from his mouth.  To this day, I have no idea how he managed that.  The oven was still quite hot, and Catness didn’t even have claws that could’ve aided him in snagging the meat.

Occasional acts of food thievery notwithstanding, Catness was a great cat, as corroborated by multiple visitors who expressed a wish to take him home.  He was so companionable with Sokhai, a young Cambodian man whom we hosted for a couple weeks, that in any of the sporadic e-mails we exchanged with Sokhai over the years, he always inquired about his “little friend.”

Catness was fond of most people, including Matthew, but he was my special baby.  Sometimes he liked to sit on the bathroom counter and help me get ready in the morning.  Sometimes he’d help me exercise — when I got out my floor mat, he’d roll around next to me as I stretched to pet him.  Sometimes he’d join me while I watched TV; though not much of a lap cat, he’d curl up right next to me.  However, my favorite snuggle times with Catness were on summer mornings when I could sleep in.  He’d often sleep by my feet, but when he’d sense that I was starting to wake up, he’d come closer.  If I lay on my side and stretched out my arm, he’d come rest his head on it, like a pillow, while curving his body against my torso.  He was my Fluffy Gorgeous, my Black-Nosed Cutie, my Little Mr. Fluffy Paws.  To the tune of “Papa Loves Mambo,” I’d sing, “Mama loves Catness — da da da daaa da da — Catness loves Mama — da da da daaa da da.”

During the first year of the pandemic, Matthew and I, like many other people, got to spend lots of quality time with our pets, but when we had the chance to take a trip to Iceland last summer, we were eager to go.  While we hate leaving the cats when we travel, we prefer it to the alternatives of not traveling or not having cats.  Returning from Iceland, though, we encountered something new to us:  Catness had not handled our absence well.  He’d always been a cat who’d find a certain spot that would be his preferred spot for a time, maybe a couple weeks or so, and then he’d find a different one … yet after Iceland, this behavior got more extreme.  He’d almost never leave his preferred spot, and seemed to have a particular aversion to being on the floor.  We took him to the vet, but no one found anything physically wrong with him, so we hoped that he’d return to normal soon.  A couple months later, he still hadn’t, so we took him to the vet again, but again, there was no indication of a health problem, and his appetite continued to be pretty good.  (He’d never had any past health issues, either, except for the year or so that he turned into Sneezy Cat — allergies, the vet said.  We weren’t sure what to do about this until Matthew had the radical idea that maybe it was time to have our furnace ductwork cleaned out, and that seemed to be the solution.)  

In lieu of physical explanations for Catness’s recent behavior, I considered psychological ones.  One time when Catness was leaving the litter box, I saw him get pounced on by Folio and Selkie, our newest additions to the family, both less than a year old.  They seemed playful rather than hostile, and Catness hadn’t had a problem with them before we left for Iceland, but perhaps because he was getting older as they were getting bolder, or perhaps because he didn’t have claws with which to defend himself, he saw them as a threat.  At the same time, when his preferred spot was one that had room for them too, such as on a couch or a bed, he rarely seemed bothered by their being near him.

To try to accommodate Catness’s determination to play “The Floor Is Lava,” Matthew and I responded with a determination to play “Musical Litter Boxes (and Food and Water Dishes).”  Whenever Catness would switch his preferred spot, we’d make sure he had food, water, and litter nearby, whether his spots were more obvious ones (like beds or couches) or quirkier ones (like my clothes hamper, a nook in Matthew’s roll top desk, or either of the bathroom sinks).  For a time, when we thought that the other cats might’ve been causing his stress, we tried keeping him in our bedroom with the doors shut, to give him a safe space — which meant that Matthew and I slept apart:  I stayed with Catness, and Matthew slept in the guest room, so that the other cats could be with him.  But eventually, Catness seemed restless, and we opened the room again.

For a few months, I kept hoping Catness would improve; however, a day came when he took a definite step in the wrong direction.  This was one of the times when my hamper was his preferred spot, and one day, while we were watching, he stood up and urinated on my clothes, despite there being a litter box in close proximity.  It was quick and easy enough to wash the clothes, but his willingness to foul his own nest was clearly a bad sign.  We bought puppy pee pads and layered them with old towels, changing out both regularly, and we took him back to the vet.  At this point, physical issues were becoming apparent, and he was starting to lose weight.  Even so, he continued to eat — and to be affectionate, purring when petted and rolling over so we could rub his belly.

While we knew that Catness wasn’t in great shape, he wasn’t in rapid decline, either, over the next few months.  During the winter, we’d bought tickets to go to England in the summer, so when June came, we went.  We’d explained to our cat sitter about keeping food, water, and litter near Catness’s preferred spot (the downstairs bathroom sink, at that time) and about changing out and washing the towels.  I felt a bit apprehensive about leaving him, yet wasn’t anticipating major changes in the couple weeks we’d be gone.  And there didn’t seem to be any.  Our cat sitter didn’t report any problems, and our friend Dubbs came over to visit the cats and took pictures of the ones who stuck around long enough to let her, which included Catness, now in the tub but looking otherwise unchanged.

Getting home, we found Catness in the tub; however, I felt a cold knot start to form in my stomach when I saw that the food near him was uneaten.  Thinking that perhaps it hadn’t been put close enough, I set it right next to him, and he still had no interest.  The next morning, after seeing that he hadn’t eaten anything in the night, Matthew made one more vet appointment.  I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t the final vet appointment, but when I saw my stoic husband’s red eyes and the crumpled tissues in his hands, I couldn’t lie to myself any longer:  I knew I only had a couple more hours with Catness.  We moved him down to the couch, where I stroked his still-silky fur, now wet with my tears, and told him how much I loved him.  When Catness’s eyes started to glaze and his breathing grew labored, Matthew called and begged the vet’s office to let us bring him in sooner, which they did.

Catness was a part of our home for ten years.  I cried in my yearning to have him, and I cried to have to let him go.  When we already had five cats, I’d never intended to get another … but I’m so glad I got that one.  

For the first time since summer of 2019, Mer and I were able to go home to Maine. A quick summary of our travels:

Sunday – We left Ohio Sunday morning, going as far as Manchester, Vermont. Manchester, like most of Vermont, is beautiful, nestled between two mountain ranges (the Green Mountains and the Taconic Mountains). We ate at Ye Olde Tavern (from 1790), but since they asked us to come back in fifteen minutes, we wandered the town, going down to the small river and falls. Along the way, we saw what looked to be a large pink-wire art installation taking up most of a two-story building. When we looked in the windows, we saw five kitties lounging around – it turns out the owner takes in found cats and lets them live in the building. Very cute.

Monday – We toured Hildene, the summer home of Robert Todd Lincoln. The house was large and elegant, but not huge. The gardens were pretty, especially with the mountains in the background. We also toured the Hildene farm, petting an enormously fluffy Angora rabbit. We left around 2:00 and went the rest of the way home to Livermore Falls.

Tuesday – We hiked nearby Mt. Pisgah with my stepmom Kellee. It has a fire tower at the top, and the views over the lakes and hills are worth the climb. Mer and I then headed to Lewiston/Auburn to eat at one of my favorite places to eat anywhere, Roy’s Hamburgers (and it was the ice cream stand branch, so I could get a frappe (shake) there!). After lunch, we met my brother Jeremy, who works for Bates, who then gave us a tour of the college, which I’m not sure I had ever gotten. It is a harmonious brick-building campus, with one large quad. They have done a lot despite being locked in by the city all around. Mer and I then did a short hike in a bird sanctuary in Lewiston about which I had never known.

Wednesday – Kellee, Meredith, and I went to the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, which, not surprisingly, is on the coast, or, more accurately, on a tidal river near the coast. Mer and I had been to the garden a few years ago, but it is a very pretty place to be, and since we were last there, the garden has added five huge wooden trolls designed by a Danish artist. Those were super cool, especially the ones holding full-sized trees. We spent about five hours there.

Thursday – Mer and I had a mellow day, getting massages at The Senator Inn in Augusta. If you get any spa services, you can use the spa facilities for the entire day, so we used the saltwater pool and the hot tub, and read our books for several mellow hours. We then went candlepin bowling (I managed an 81 for a high score), and finished the day by seeing an English translation of a Moliere play based on a Greek myth (Amphitryon) at the local Theater at Monmouth. The play was about Jupiter and Mercury taking on the forms of two humans so that Jupiter could sleep with the man’s wife. Since there were two doubles in the play, mistaken identity ensues. It was fun, even if Jupiter came across as REALLY creepy.

Friday – Mer and I went to Rockland, which is where, in past years, we spent many happy days visiting Mer’s grandfather Carleton, who passed away in 2017. We visited the graves of Mer’s parents and grandparents, then drove by the old house (largely unchanged), then walked downtown Rockland. We drove up the coast to Rockport, where we got out to tour the small harbor, which I don’t think I had ever done before. The coast is a pretty place to stroll. We spent the bulk of the afternoon and early evening visiting some of Mer’s remaining Maine family. Mer’s cousin is house-sitting a camp (i.e., a cabin, to non-Mainers) on the coast, so we got to visit and eat while looking out over the ocean and rocky coastline. Life is rough. After the visit, we drove up the nearby Mount Battie, where we lingered some time, and then we finished the evening by walking some of the Rockland Breakwater.

Saturday – We headed down to Brunswick to meet Mer’s college friend Julie (and her boyfriend) for lunch at an old woolen mill on an island in the Androscoggin River. We sat outside in the shade, which was pretty wonderful today. After lunch, Mer and I drove down to Bailey Island, all the way out to Land’s End. After we walked around a little, we drove a mile or so over to the Giant’s Steps, a small coastal park featuring huge rock “steps” down to the ocean, and lots of traditional dramatic Maine coastline. We drove back to Brunswick, and tried to find either of two nature preserves to hike, but we couldn’t find them (we didn’t see any signs).

Sunday – After going to church this morning, we drove north to the town of Weld, where Kellee and Jeremy and Jeremy’s girlfriend were all kayaking. I figured we would call them when we got there and see if they were near the beach. It never occurred to me we wouldn’t have cell service, but it is in western (rural and mountainous) Maine. So we kept on going to the lovely little town of Rangeley, where we sat and looked at the lake for some time. We finished the outing of the day by driving a few miles back the way we had come to see Smalls Falls, a rest stop next to a pretty waterfall area. We walked around in the woods and then sat by the falls, watching the water. We then headed home for the evening. We leave Maine tomorrow morning, but will only go as far as Syracuse in New York, and then go the rest of the way home Tuesday.

“All Kent hath yielded; nothing there holds out / But Dover castle: London hath received, / Like a kind host, the Dauphin and his powers.” – Philip the Bastard to King John in King John (Shakespeare)

One of the great things about travel in England is that in most places we go, something important happened there. Today, that somewhere was Dover Castle. Dover Castle was built (at least the central tower was built) by King Henry II starting in the 1180s, and the castle has been added on to and used for different purposes ever since. The castle was never taken by any attackers, so the tower is still the original one that Henry II built. Shakespeare’s play deals with Henry’s son, who lost much of the huge France/England/Wales/Ireland empire that dad had inherited or conquered. King John is also famous for ticking off his barons enough that they forced the Magna Carta on him.

At any rate, Dover Castle was Henry’s showpiece. It is huge, and the number thrown at us today was it cost about seven billion of today’s pounds ($8.6 billion) to build it, although comparisons of money across such a vast amount of time are notoriously bad. Since many pilgrims came through Dover on the way to Canterbury to see the shine of Thomas Becket, Henry wanted a PR piece to help smooth over his own part in having had Becket killed. The tower clearly stated who had the money and power in the region.

Since Henry’s time, the castle and grounds have been used to prepare against possible invasion by Napoleon, as a watch post and Royal Navy harbor during WW I, as the headquarters of the Royal Navy during WW II, and as a Cold War bunker through the early 1980s. The grounds of the castle are huge; there is much to see. We spent six hours there today.

We started with a guided tour of the underground WW II tunnels, used as the navy’s headquarters. The tunnels had been carved as barracks for men during Napoleon’s time, and the navy moved into them. They called out of retirement Admiral Ramsey, who masterminded Operation Dynamo, coming up with the entre thing in about one week. Dynamo was the plan to extract 45,000 British troops (of about 140,000) who were trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk. The admiralty didn’t think it possible to get more troops out. In the end, by using even fishing ships and yachts, 338,000 men of the British Army and their allies were rescued over eight days. It was a huge and unexpected success. To follow that up, Ramsey also coordinated other navy operations in the Mediterranean and  ran all the navy operations for D-Day. He was a remarkable man. Sadly, he died in a plane crash in 1945 before the end of the war.

We took the other guided tour offered, which was to tour the underground hospital, which was ultimately used as a dressing station. We “followed” (on audio speakers) a wounded pilot though the admission process, prep, and surgery, while the lights flickered on and off during an air raid. It was a much shorter tour, but gave a good overview of the difficulties of treating wounded underground; it’s hard to operate with little or no lighting, and space was cramped.

After that, we were free to wander around. We checked out the WW 1 watch post, which included a high platform for flag signals, as well as a bunker for telegraph operators. The men here watched the Channel for any boat and identified if it was a friend or foe. Since you can see France on a clear day (like today), it would have been hard for ships to hide from binoculars. The Channel is only twenty-three miles wide here.

The castle map had numbered buildings, so I decided to follow them more or less in order. The first stop was a Roman lighthouse from the first century that is still mostly intact (a top layer was added as a bell tower for the circa 1000 church). The church right next to it is still open for services, although they have blocked up the “Saxon door” without any commentary as to why.

After that was the magnificent Great Tower and surrounding walls. When I thought of castles when I was a kid, the pictures in my head matched this castle. It is giant and blocky and intact. The Tower has been restored inside to how it probably looked, based on manuscript pictures and descriptions. The layout was fairly simple – three main levels split in two – the kitchens, the guest sleeping areas and banqueting hall, and then the king’s bedroom and chambers. You could also go up on the roof, which had great views.

After a quick lunch, we explored the medieval tunnels. I think these were to help move men around while under cover, but there was no information given. The tunnels were outside the Tower and first walls, but were inside the second set of walls overlooking the moat between the walls. It doesn’t surprised me that the castle was never taken – it was defended to the teeth.

After the tunnels, we went up on the embankment and outer walls, where there were cannons from the nineteenth century next to anti-aircraft guns from the 1940s. There were also spectacular views of the inner walls and tower.

That took up our six hours, and so we wended our way back to Canterbury. We got a light supper at a bakery, and then went to the walled part of the city, where we walked through a small park, and then ambled along the High Street further than we had yesterday. We had some happy views of the cathedral down small alleys of old shops.

And so we wrapped up this tour of southern England. We couldn’t have asked for better weather – we only had about forty-five minutes of real rain when were were trying to tour, and that was over fifteen days. England hath received, like a kind host, Meredith and her tourer. A jolly good trip for us.

Today was one of the longer drives we have had on this trip – three hours (or so) from the Cotswolds to Canterbury, near the east coast.

So (more or less) wrote Geoffrey Chaucer in his prologue to the great Canterbury Tales, written in the late 1300s. Mer has taught selections from the Tales, so it seemed I should get her here. There was also T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, an event which happened in this cathedral.

Our B and B is a fifteen-minute walk to the old gate of the walled part of the city (the gate is still intact, but the walls are mostly gone). We grabbed one last Cornish pasty from a bakery, and walked down the tourist-consumer gauntlet that is High Street here. Many of the buildings are very cool, and there were certainly tons of people trying to spend money today.

We got into the cathedral, which was open until 5:00, around 2:30. We had missed the live tours for the day, but we had a guide in Mer’s tour book, which we followed. The cathedral was built (roughly) between 1100 and 1400, but the site goes back to about 600. The bishop’s chair (which is what makes a cathedral more than a church) is from around 1300. We found some graffiti carved on the wall from the late 1600s. It’s been around for some time.

The cathedral is the headquarters (for lack of better term) of the Anglican church, so it is important in that respect. But it was put on the “pilgrimages” map by being the place where St. Thomas Becket’s body was entombed. Thomas Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury, and he was murdered (somewhat by misunderstanding) in the church. Two years later, he was recognized as a saint, and the pilgrims started coming by the thousands.

Becket was the childhood pal of the prince who would become Henry II. Henry and Thomas liked to party, and so when Becket was made bishop, Henry thought he was going to have the run of the country with little or no church interference. But, to Henry’s shock and dismay, Becket turned out to be a faithful bishop and kept opposing things Henry wanted to do. At some point, Henry is reported to have wished something could be done about Becket, which four knights interpreted as a desire to have Becket murdered. Which they did. In a church. Nice men. The king was horrified, and walked down the streets of Canterbury barefoot to the cathedral as a sign of repentance. (So ends my recollection of the story, which may be flawed.)

The cathedral is also the burial place of Henry IV and his queen – I have no idea why they aren’t in Westminster, but they are here. Since Shakespeare has Henry IV as a character in a couple of his plays, Mer was interested in the tomb. They also have the grave of the Black Prince Edward. I have no idea why he is the Black Prince, but he was feared in battle, so that may have much to do with it. Amazingly, the church still has some parts of his armor, including a fabric shirt that went under the armor.

We were both moved by the Martyrs’ Chapel at the end of the church. It had a book listing multiple martyrs over the last 150 years. One group of whom we had not heard was a group of seven men in Melanesia (the Pacific islands toward Australia). They were in an area of hostilities, and they ignored the fronts to bring food and help to people trapped by rebels. When their leader was killed, the other six went to ask for his body. Three more were shot immediately and the other three were killed the next day after being tortured. Thousands of people came to the memorial service, and the leader of the rebels gave himself up to the authorities. It was a moving story among about twenty such.

There was a small chapel that had stained glass from after World War II, to replace broken windows. It was done by a Hungarian artist, and the windows were bright and modern and moving. One window showed Jesus welcoming a prisoner set free, and the other window showed an old Jesus (aged by the world ignoring him) welcoming people from all races. They were thought-provoking, and I really liked the prisoner one especially.

The crypt was open, and as we explored it, we heard an organ playing the contempory (2003) song “Here I Am to Worship.” It was a Christian pop song played on an organ in the crypt of a major cathedral, and it was for a French Huguenot service. There has been a French-language service in the church crypt for three hundred years, ever since French Huguenot Protestants fled France for religious reasons. They ended up here. And the confluence of so many things made us smile. Back up in the main part of the church, we heard the organist practicing “Pomp and Circumstance” – which Mer recognized even before the famous part; however, when the organist did get to that famous part, the first chord was so powerful that it drew Mer out of her seat.

We explored a few streets around the cathedral, but went back for the 5:30 evensong service. It was a special service, held in the nave (the big part of the church). They were celebrating the one hundred years of service of a group called the Royal British Legion, whose mission is to serve veterans and the families of those who have served in the British armed forces. It was a moving service, with flags of the different military branches being marched in and being lowered during two minutes of silence toward the end of the service. Our Aunt Mary would have loved it – they opened with a hymn she loves, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” which asks God to protect those on the sea, something about which England has typically cared. The service lasted for a full hour, and we felt it a good worship experience, although we did pass on the singing of “God Save the Queen.” It’s hard for an American to sing about the joys of monarchy. We respectfully stood for the anthem.

That was our day, more or less. We checked in to our B and B, and then had savory pies in a restaurant in a Tudor building next to a stream. But we were in literary company – the Frankeleyn (freeman) from the Tales:

One of the real joys in travel is experiencing serendipity, the unexpected, when the encounter is unplanned and a happy one. I had no real plans today other than to explore some cute Cotswolds towns. Add in one closed door and one open one, and things got interesting.

We got a bit of a late start because of our late night last night, so we didn’t get to our first town of the day, Chipping Campden, until a little before noon. After driving several one-lane roads, navigating the park-where-you-want-to busy and crowded High Street was stressful, but we found the local school parking lot, which allows public parking on the weekends.

Chipping Campden is known for its High Street, which is long and made up of uniformly designed row buildings, constructed between the 1300s to the 1600s. The buildings are all made of a local yellow stone that is so associated with the area that all new construction in the Cotswolds must use it to maintain the harmonious look. Campden made its money in the wool trade, and when that market collapsed, the town (along with much of the Cotswolds) sort of hit the pause button while the rest of the world went along. That is why the area is packed with tourists now – the old villages are cute and quaint.

We did a Rick Steves recommended walk down High Street, where we noticed lots of fancy-dressed people around. We had seen signs for a wedding, so we assumed they were guests. We later found out there were two weddings in the local church that day, so it seems the Cotswolds make for a good wedding destination.

My one disappointment on the walk was that the silversmith’s shop was closed. I like silver, and I like skilled tradespeople, so I had wanted to see the shop; it closed at noon, and we got there about 12:30. We did go into a shop that was run by the son and daughter of a famous designer in metal housewares. It was beautiful stuff, but very expensive (a salt and pepper mill ran over a hundred dollars). Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure can buy elegance and class.

The walk ended at the village church, where the wedding was. We thought it was over because we had seen guests in town, and there was no indication it was still going on. When I slowly tried to open the main door (the one with a sign that said, “Turn handle and push”), I got a frowning woman appearing in the crack in the door, indicating that the church was in use. That was fine as it went, but a sign would have worked well to prevent our attempted intrusion from happening.

On the way out, we swung by the side of the church to look at a headstone for the church cat who had passed away in 1986, when I saw an open door with a spiral staircase beyond. Of course I had to go look. We went up very quietly in case sound would transmit into the church, and we came to an open door and a platform where four retirement-aged people were sitting around talking. I asked if we could come in, and they said yes.

Thus began a delightful and happy hour or so. The people there were bell ringers. The church has eight bells, and they were there to ring them in specific patterns before and after the wedding. They had eight people to ring the bells, but since the wedding was going to take about an hour, four members had popped down to the pub for a drink. We chatted about bells and why the British are deeply honoring of WW I monuments (the theory put forward by one man was because towns sent their young men to fight in the same units, so many towns lost many of their young men all at once). We talked about real estate prices (very high in England – we rarely have seen stand-alone houses for under $500,000), and how young people don’t seem to be interested in learning about bell ringing.

Bell ringing is an art, it seems. You need to pull on the rope with the right force and with the right rhythm to get the bell swinging; the bells start upside down and rotate to a standard position (ringing once), then reverse in the other direction (ringing again). We learned that for funerals, one side of the clapper is muted, which means you get a muted ring every other ring. When a monarch dies, both sides of the clapper are muted. At least in theory – it hasn’t been done in seventy years. Oh, and when the bells are going full blast, we could feel the tower moving slightly; we had been warned that would happen and were told it was okay.

We were joined at some point by the other four ringers (one of whom turned out to be the eighty-four-year-old silversmith we had missed at the shop), and they let us stay to watch them ring after the wedding. One woman called out the various changes in the ringing patterns, and the others followed along. They rang two sets, each lasting four or five minutes. They then took a break since they had another wedding coming up in an hour. Meanwhile, one of the ringers offered to take us up to see the bells, to which we eagerly agreed.

We were shown the carillon that was built in 1789 and still works. It is designed to strike the bells when they are in the down position, so when the bells are up to be rung by ringers, the carillon can’t strike anything. The ringers leave the bells up if there are weddings coming up since it takes a lot of work to build up to slowly getting the bell into the upside-down position. We then got to stick our heads up a ladder to see the bells themselves, and then went up another level to see the old wooden bell frame. It was deemed unsafe for the bells in 1990, and a steel frame was constructed below. Because the wooden frame is so old, the law stated it had to be left untouched. The same went for one of the bells that cracked – it sits unused in the tower because it can’t be melted down and recast.

We were deeply touched at the kindness of these people who took so much time to talk to us about what they do. It’s one of the reasons I love nerds of all kinds – anyone who is passionate about something usually is pretty interesting. We thanked them profusely and went back into town for a late lunch.

After lunch, we drove forty minutes to the southern part of the Cotswolds, to the tiny village of Bibury. Everything I had read said it was cute, and it was. Nothing I had read mentioned it is four streets that can be seen in about fifteen minutes. But we did catch the church open, and happened to see the bell ringers at work in there, since these bell ropes came all the way to the ground floor.

Since I knew we would want supper, I decided we should eat it in a cute place that was a sure thing. So I drove back to Bouton-on-the-Water through a quick rain shower. By the time we got to the town thirty minutes later, the sun had come out. The town was fairly quiet at 5:00 in the evening, and even more so by 6:00 as we came out from supper. We strolled around, enjoying the evening sun hitting the water – we both think evening light is magical, and it is a pretty magical place to be on top of that. We finally headed back to the inn around 7:30.

Tomorrow we are off to Canterbury. Things may go according to plan, and I hope they do. But I will always try to be flexible to let blessings strike whenever they want to. What a good day.

In Shakespeare’s Richard III, when Richard cries out, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” I suspect he may have been familiar with some of England’s narrow back lanes and the challenges of getting a car down them in one piece. But that is a little later on.

I had no urgent time demands today, so Mer and I slept in, getting a rather needed ten hours of sleep. I wanted to go to the Cotswolds, an area of cute little villages west of London. We’re staying two days in the area, with a goal of just leisurely wandering around mellow little towns.

On our drive through a couple of these towns on the way to our first destination of the day, Mer declared that a single town must be “a Cotswold,” since the region name is plural. So, we got to out first Cotswold of the trip, Bourton-on-the-Water. I wanted to get to Bourton especially since it has a very shallow river running through it with a bunch of small pedestrian bridges over the river – it seemed like a mini English Venice. I wasn’t disappointed.

Being in a cute English village, the car park was on the edge of the town, which is fine, given how small the village is. But, given how there are stone walls and hedges and houses everywhere and no high landmarks, it was surprisingly hard to navigate our way into the town. What isn’t surprising is that I led us almost exactly the wrong way. The happy part of the detour is that we got to see a Cotswold kitty, who started flopping around in a look-at-me sort of way while her human kept trying to call her inside. Good kitty.

Bourton is mostly one street that parallels the river, although there are a few back lanes with shops and paths. The private homes do go back a few blocks, as our little scenic wander had already shown us. The village along the river was about four or five city blocks long, and we took our time. We ate some pastries on a bench looking at the water. And, since I am the son of a water-loving mother, I had to wade in the river. It was cold. Make-your-feet-ache cold. But Mom will be proud, cementing my status as Favorite Child.

We walked the river down and back, taking time on the way back to sit on a bench again. We poked down one back lane and took a footpath a couple hundred yards until it left the houses. Finally, we checked out the tourist-gauntlet main street, before going back to the car by a pedestrian direct route.

One of the challenges of driving in England is that the English rarely use street numbers for addresses. That can make programming a GPS challenging. I put in the town name for our B and B, and figured we would just see it. The GPS took us to Cheltenham, a small city of almost 120,000 people. These are not the Cotswolds I am looking for. Somehow, some city planner thought it was a good thing to erect a twenty-story building in a city that otherwise has no tall buildings. It is a bit of an eyesore in an otherwise decent, if overly busy, town. Our B and B wasn’t to be seen.

Starting with our March Ireland trip, I started carrying a smart phone on trips for situations like this. The phone showed us that there was a chain hotel near our B and B, and my GPS had that in it, so we got that far. On a whim, I tried typing our inn’s name in the GPS. It was in there, and I hadn’t bothered to check. That little detour cost us about a half hour. Happily, the inn is back in the Costwold area, and so it is quite pretty.

Having dumped the bags, we got back in the car and headed north to Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace and home of Shakespeare. You have to know how to kiss up to your English-loving wife. I had never been there before, and Mer hadn’t been since she was seven, so it was a good place to go and see. Except we made the mistake of ordering calzones for supper. We had two hours to see the town, and dinner took an hour and a half. Oops. We had seen the site of Shakespeare’s later-in-life home (which now seems to be a gated park which was closed), and had seen some cool timbered houses as well before supper. Afterwards, we just had time to walk down to the river next to the home of the RSC’s theater.

Oh – our welcome to the highbrow home of the Bard? A group of thirteen-year-old boys rode by on their bikes, and we overheard in a delightful accent, “‘Ee’s a looky maan – she ‘as some buns.” We held off laughing for as long as we could to lessen the chance they heard us.

We were tight on time because, as a surprise to Mer, I had 7:15 tickets to see Richard III. Mer knows my obsession with being on time so well that she was confused at supper. I kept checking my watch, and Mer thought it was odd because if I had to be somewhere at 7:00, she knew I’d be freaking out. If we had to be there at 7:30, she thought I’d be mellower. She said she should have known it was actually 7:15.

We got to the theater early. The theater wasn’t open yet.

We did spend some time happily browsing the gift shop. It was Shakespeare-nerd heaven., but we managed to get out with the credit card unscathed.

The RSC theater was renovated in 2011, and the seating is very intimate. We had seats in the front row of the first balcony, but there are no seats more than about fifty feet away from some part of the stage. The stage set was very minimal – there was one large stone monolith (like a memorial) toward the back of the stage, and that was it. While the actors would bring a few set pieces on (like a bed or table or such), it was a minimalist production.

The play was excellent, especially seeing how difficult Shakespeare can be – the Regional Stratford Community theater really nailed it. That was my best guess for what RSC stood for.

Richard was brilliant, but I’m a bit ashamed to say he was distracting for the first few minutes. The actor is a qualified actor with a solid career in movies and TV, but he is also disabled in that his right arm is missing a radius bone and so is shortened, and his hand is bent and smaller, missing the thumb. It was a great choice to cast a man with a withered hand to play Richard (who was humpbacked and had a withered arm), but both Mer and I spent a little time trying to figure out if the arm was prosthetic, made by the costume department. It wasn’t, and our confusion only lasted a few minutes.

The play was mostly cast as traditional, with armor and swords and such, but oddly the director chose to broadcast the rally-the-troops speeches given by Richard and Richmond at the end of the play, using an on-stage camera to project a larger-than-life image on the monument block. Modern technology in a traditional play felt jarring.

Right before the final battle, Richard has a dream in which all his victims come on stage to curse him. They physically interacted with him, then later formed the troops against whom Richard had to fight (by himself), and lastly formed his “horse” that dumps him to the ground, where he is finally killed by Richmond. That all worked very well.

So I scored huge wife-points today. The downside was we got back close to midnight. Oddly, on the way TO the theater, my GPS picked every dinky one-lane road it could find. On the way back, it got me on major highways for all but the last four or five miles. I guess I don’t need to trade out my kingdom quite yet.

We stuck with water-feature towns today as we left Wells and came to Bath. Bath has England’s only hot water thermal spring, where rainwater in the nearby hills takes thousands of years to seep down into the earth, where it gets heated up, and the hot water, which is now under pressure, finds a fault here in Bath and comes up to the surface here in three very close-to-each-other springs. The water varies from spring to spring, but sounds as if it ranges from about 120 degrees to about 145 degrees.

Mer had gotten us 10:00 tickets to the Roman baths here. Rome invaded and settled this area around 40 AD, and the Romans were very impressed at finding this hot spring. They set up a Roman bath, one of the largest outside of Rome, and built a temple to the goddess Minerva, whom the Romans merged with the local Celtic goddess of the spring, Sulis, to make Sulis Minerva. Eventually the bath complex became huge, with the spring, the bath, several smaller pools, several saunas and cold pools, exercise areas, changing rooms, and other rooms that could have been used for massage. Then, around 400 AD, Rome had some Goth trouble, and the Roman settlement was abandoned, and the baths were forgotten and lost until the 1700s. The great bath itself wasn’t found until the 1800s when water started seeping into the basements of the houses built over it.

Anyway, the Roman bath was returned to as close as we can get it to original shape. The Victorians added a terrace overlooking the bath and added statues of Roman emperors and generals. But the bath itself is original, and much of the floor around it is original. Some of the larger complex has been excavated, and the museum does an excellent job of presenting the finds. Foundations are where they were found, and other bits have been remounted on the walls of the museum in the best-guess position of where they should be, and the missing parts are drawn in or, more commonly, projected in by a computer projector so that the extra filled-in stuff can cycle on and off.

There are several multimedia film clips showing actors playing people who actually existed, which is known through dedications of altars or on tombstones. You can follow the people around and see them interact with each other. One of them paid a scribe to write out a curse on a sheet of lead so he could get the goddess to get revenge on a thief. It seems it was the practice to write out a curse on lead sheets, fold it up, and throw it into the spring for the goddess to read. The museum said that these curses are our main source for seeing the way that common Latin was used by ordinary people.

The two major finds in the museum are the head of a “gorgon” and Minerva’s head. The gorgon is a male face that is intact, and was probably the central figure of the decorations on top of the facade of the temple. One possibility is that it is actually Neptune, and therefore the snakes in his hair are actually sea serpents. The head is mounted with other fragments of the facade, and a projector fills in the missing bits as well as adding possible colors.

Minerva’s head would have been from her statue in the temple. In what can only be described as a good day at work, a man unearthed the head while digging a sewer line back in the late 1800s. The gilded bronze head is in excellent condition.

Touring the baths took us a little over two hours, which took us to lunch. After lunch, we made our way down to the train station, only to be greeted by a sign proclaiming a train strike. Mer had wanted to go to Bristol, but we decided we didn’t want to risk possibly getting stuck in a city away from our hotel and car. So, Mer came up with a quick plan B – we walked back to the square where the baths are and the cathedral is, and there we picked up a 2:30 guided tour of the city.

It was just the guide and eight of us in all, so a nice-sized group. We started by the cathedral and baths, and she covered much about the baths we had already learned. The cathedral is one of the latest and last of the Gothic cathedrals, getting started in the late 1400s. The good part of that was that the builders knew how to maximize windows, so the glass in the church is huge and impressive. The bad part was that the church wasn’t finished by the time Henry VIII came along, so the formerly Catholic church wasn’t finished, and it sat slowly decaying for about one hundred years. Then, Elizabeth I came to town and saw that the cathedral was in poor shape, so she made the local officials organize a lottery to help pay for finishing the building. It turned out well, at least from the outside.

We proceeded to go see the locations of the other two springs; spas are located there, and both are swanky and expensive. We walked up to Queen’s Square to see one of the first buildings to have a beautiful block-long unified facade. It was actually many homes behind the facade, but it looked like a single palace. It seems this is a common thing in Bath – much of the town was rebuilt in the 1700s using similar Georgian architecture, and the fronts were always beautiful. The backs could be a jumble.

We kept going up the hill, with a quick swing into a restored 1700s garden to see what that would have looked like. We got up to the top to the Royal Crescent, which  is a long, sweeping building facade that features in almost every Jane Austen film. In fact, there were lots of people setting things up to shoot for something tomorrow; the crew is tight-lipped about what they’re filming. It seems as if the residents of the Royal Crescent cooperate with films because the films pay them for the use and it helps to defray the cost of maintaining the building and grounds.

We proceeded back toward the main part of town, stopping at the Circus, a group of homes that form a circle with the same Georgian facade. Mer and I both agreed we liked the Crescent better, but these were nice homes, and perhaps slightly more affordable – especially since the last Crescent home that came up for sale went for 5.75 million pounds (7 million dollars).

After a brief swing by the Assembly Rooms, where balls were held, we finished the ninety-minute tour down by the very cool Pulteney Bridge, which is a bridge over the river that has shops all along it. From the topside, it looks like a street – you can’t tell that the bridge is there at all apart from the shops all being very shallow. The bridge leads to a uniformly house-lined street and ends in a mansion that stands at the front of a large public garden. The river was very pretty here as well, so it made for a good ending.

We checked into our hotel finally, and then went back to the bridge. Our guide had recommended walking down the street to the park, so we did that. It was a pleasant place to walk, but we did turn back a little into the park to go get supper back near the hotel.

That wrapped up our Bath exploration for the day. After multiple days of busy touring, it was good to get a fairly early evening back in the room. Since tomorrow is my day, and I had planned for a mellow-wandering kind of day, I think we’ll sleep in. Which is what we should do in a spa town.

Since Jesus talks about believers becoming “a spring of water welling up to eternal life,” it makes perfect sense that the city of Wells became home to a cathedral, back to at least 900. Wells is home to multiple “wells,” which are areas where an underground river found fissures in rock and so water is forced up to the surface. There is endlessly flowing water right next to the cathedral, which flows in small gutters down the main street of the old part of town.

It seems that to be classified as a city, the town needs to have a cathedral. Since Wells has one, it is a city, and is the smallest city in England at about twelve thousand people. Our tour of Wells consisted of the cathedral, the Bishop’s Palace next door, and a street next to the church where people have lived continuously since the 1300s. And we took about eleven hours just exploring those three areas. We’re thorough people, and the cathedral has much to see.

We started with the morning prayer and communion service in the small Lady Chapel at 8:00 am. I think there were about six of us (not counting the dog – England has gone nuts for dogs in a way I hadn’t remembered – they are allowed everywhere now). The service was Church of England, and thus highly liturgical, and that fit the grand surroundings well. It was a pretty service and a nice break from hard-core tourism. We chatted with the priest for about ten minuets afterward, and he kindly pointed out a few things to us and invited us to evensong later in the day.

Happily, after the service, we were told the cathedral was open already for visitors, and so we ended up having the entire enormous space completely to ourselves for forty-five minutes (other than running into Basil, a kitty who visits the cathedral every day – very cute and friendly). That was a new experience to us – usually cathedrals are crowded with tourists taking photos and taking tours. Even after one or two people showed up, it was only a few people. We felt like important guests.

We did the walking tour out of Mer’s guide book, which took us around the place. My favorite object was the interior clock, which has a clock face dating back to the 1300s. It tells the time and the phase of the moon, and has a little clockwork display at the top where four horsemen joust with each other. The same poor guy gets whacked down every time. Meanwhile, the clock also activates a full-sized “man” sitting next to the clock, and he kicks the bells at his feet every fifteen minutes, and he hits a main bell every hour. Clever stuff from seven hundred years ago.

Next door to the church is the Bishop’s Palace, which is where the bishop lived. Over time, the various bishops built a fortified residence, complete with moat. The main dining hall fell into ruin a couple of hundred years ago after the roof started leaking, and a garden has been planted there. One of the main wells springs up on the grounds, and so there are small streams around the property, along with more gardens. Our ticket to the palace is good for a year, so we cut our tour short to go back to the cathedral because Mer had booked us for the “High Places” tour.

This is very technical, but in simple terms, the High Places tour takes you upstairs in the cathedral to the high places around the church where people aren’t usually allowed to go. I’m terrible with heights, so it was a bit of a risk, but I love engineering stuff about what holds up big buildings, so that was good. It turned out to be okay – just one terrifyingly high place from which I hung back. The rest was high up, but well protected.

Wells has a lot of water. Cathedrals weigh quite a lot. The original cathedral had a stumpy little main tower. A hundred years later, the bishop decided that this wasn’t good enough, and got people to build a much higher, and heavier, tower. Well and good. Until the stone columns under the tower started to deform – you can see the straight lines of decorative features bend near the tower. The front of the tower sank six inches, and the back sank four. So the cathedral added hidden buttresses to shore up the tower, and added four beautiful scissor arches visible in the main part of the church. These are rare anywhere, and Wells pulled them off superbly. The cathedral is known for the feature now. Our guide said there is some debate as to if they are even needed for the structure anymore, but no one cares. They’re staying put.

We clambered around in back spaces and on top of ceilings and such. It was great. We got to see the guts of the clock working, and we saw rough-worked stone that isn’t public-facing. We saw seven-hundred-year-old oak timbers that get stronger as they age (as long as the bugs leave them alone). We got to see a demonstration of choir holes in the front of the church where choir members would sing, making it sound as if the angel statues in front of the church were singing. We got to see the eight trumpet holes at the very top of the façade, where trumpets would be thrust through and played on processional days. I had a ball. Good stuff.

Back on the main floor, we thanked our guide and went to get lunch. We finished with that just in time to catch a free guided tour of the cathedral. For those keeping count, this was our third tour of some kind for the day. The guide shored up some of our newfound knowledge, as well as added a few new bits of information: for instance, no one knows how or why the main thirteenth-century stained glass window survived the Reformation and the English Civil War, when most of the glass in the church was destroyed. We finished the tour in the spectacular Chapter House, which is held up by a central pillar that fans out across the whole ceiling. It is a “wow” moment when you see it.

We thanked our guide, but we weren’t quite done with church yet. The library is only open from 2:00 to 4:00, so we popped in there to look around. We couldn’t get back to the oldest section, but we could see it, and it still had multiple books with chains attached, which is when books were so valuable they were chained down.

Having finally seen all of the cathedral we could see, we went back to the Bishop’s Palace to finish off the gardens and the house. The house is pretty small, actually – two floors and maybe eight rooms. I think some of the grandeur of the place fell in with the collapse of the great hall.

We walked around the cathedral to get to Vicars’ Close, the street where the staff of the church used to live. It still is largely used that way, although now it houses families instead of single men. The street is very uniform and is in excellent repair.

Not quite done with the church, we went back in for evensong. The cathedral school attached to the church is one of only three special music schools in England. As the priest told us in the morning, once you see a thirteen-year-old playing Rachmaninoff, it makes you want to give up playing the piano. There is serious talent. Tonight, the evensong was sung by a men’s choir (with one woman), and the harmonies were beautiful. They sang in both English and some old dead language, and it all took place in the choir stalls of the church, so the service felt intimate. It was, as the English are fond of saying, lovely.

That finally ended our touring day, other than having to go to four restaurants to find one open on a Wednesday. It seems a bit odd to me to have spent nearly eleven hours mostly exploring one building, but as I told Mer, I don’t know what I would have cut out. We got to taste a little bit of the living water today in Wells.