England Travel Journal – Day One

England Travel Journal

            For four weeks in 2018 my daughter Rosie and I toured England on the vacation of a lifetime to the earthly place we wanted most to visit. My husband Ralph accompanied us for the first two weeks. We took Rosie to celebrate her graduation with a degree in music and worship from Moody Bible Institute. The day after her ceremony, Rosie took off on a two-week choir tour of Romania. Then we flew her directly from Germany to meet us in London. By the grace of God, I finished chemotherapy and then radiation for breast cancer in time to attend Rosie’s voice recital and graduation ceremony. Unless I had gone through all the treatments without a glitch, I would most likely have missed these important events and the trip to England that we had planned so long for would also have been in jeopardy. God was so very good to me in all this!

Ours was a literary journey in search of Jane Austen and CS Lewis so beloved by the three of us. The central destination Oxford represented to Rosie the beauties and truths of JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Lewis’s Narnia and the shining barrier broken through in Sheldon Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy. Oxford was evensong in ancient chapels. Britain was the place from which Shakespeare’s plays took their timeless shapes and their musical words. Britain was for all of us the first home of the glorious and rich English language in which Ralph had read to us uncounted classics by our Hemet fireside.

Our wayfaring was not without its hardships and small disasters, recorded here along with its delights. Like squirrels for the winter, on our summer road through England, we gathered its particular national riches for our memories. We ate, drank, and slept as British as we could. We took in the land, its history, its people, and its charm.

This travel journal is dedicated to Rosie.

London — May 26, 2018 Saturday

Here I sit in the darkened room of the hotel called The Grange Rochester in the heart of London. We have turned out the lights to bask in the lightning flashes and heavy rain through our tall white-framed windows. Our room is cozy and old-fashioned with dark wooden doors, end tables, desk, and dresser, but it is a bit overloaded with two double beds. A wooden box attached to the wall holds the little quick-boiling electric teapot, tea bags, cream cups, and biscuits that we would find in all our accommodations except the hostels. Some mornings we snatched a cuppa before heading out, but without fail we partook of this charming English ritual before bed. P G Tips, Tetley, and English Breakfast all taste better than American Lipton, and the sweet biscuits — ginger, lemon, shortbread, never the same flavor twice– pair excellently with the tea. We discovered that the shower in our bathroom did not use curtains so that the floor got soggy. Rosie said that is just how it goes in Europe.

Our first actions after touching down on English soil underscore both our status as novice travelers and the helplessness of coping with problems when you don’t know the system. On exiting the gate with our luggage, we took my cousin Josh’s advice and used the ATM machine to withdraw $300 from our checking account. The machine spit out a receipt for the withdrawal but no cash. An attendant passing by informed me that another traveler had the same problem earlier at this ATM. There was nothing to be done about this, the clerk at another money exchange booth informed us, except to dispute this with our bank at home. Ralph is still working on straightening this out. Later, after we waited the four hours for Rosie’s flight from Germany to arrive, she phoned to say that she was standing in front of the M & S store we had designated as a meeting place. “I am standing directly in front of the entrance,” she said. “Where are you?”

“I am standing directly in front of the place,” I said, “and there is only one entrance.”

I described the surroundings, the cordoned aisle and other restaurants and she said she could see all just as I described it. Rosie calls this her “alternative universe moment.” We finally realized that we were in different, but identical terminals.

At Heathrow Airport, Ralph and I sampled specifically British cuisine while  waiting for Rosie: bangers and mash (sausage and mashed potatoes), and shepherd’s pie, respectively. As we had heard-tell of English cooking, these dishes were very little spiced, but we found them hearty and tasty nonetheless. The fewer the spices, the more you taste the food itself. After checking in the hotel, we wandered several streets over and ate fish and chips. The friendly Samoan-looking server said he had lived in both Britain and the U.S., but we could hardly make out a word he said.