On the first day after we flew into London’s Heathrow airport, we rented a car, drove to Stonehenge, went on to Stourhead, and then drove to Bath.
Though I’ve been to England many times on business, almost all my time there has been spent near London. This last year I went to Cambridge for the first time and during the 90s I traveled to Oxford several times to meet with the Numerical Algorithms Group, the company that purchased our AXIOM computer algebra system out of IBM Research. IBM’s Hursley Lab is near Winchester, so I’ve been down that way a few times. Beyond these places, I’ve only been to one or two other locations in the UK. I did speak at a conference in Cardiff once, played golf, and then haven’t played since.
Aside from planning a nice and varied vacation for my family, I wanted to use this trip to get myself to a lot of places in southern England that I’ve never seen. One of those locations was Bath because I’ve had several colleagues through the years that either taught or studied at the University, but also because of the Roman Baths (hence the name).
The Roman Baths were just a 20 minute walk from our hotel and it was a lovely, sunny, but cool day. This was our first day walking around a city in England, so we were extra careful about looking around before stepping into any road. Personally I look left, right, and up, just to watch out for that piano falling from the sky.
Our British Heritage passes were valid for the Baths and after entering we each picked up our audio guides. Many of the historical sites we visited had these guides and they were very useful. If I could offer any criticism, sometimes the commentary went on too long. We found ourselves manually moving ahead before the discussion was finished.
At Bath they had the usual description of the history of the site as well as commentary on individual items or locations. They went beyond this and also had special audio stories for children and comments by Bill Bryson. I listened to many of Bryson’s remarks. They gave a nice personal perspective but were somehow less funny than I expected. That’s ok, of course.
The Baths are quite extensive and you could easily spend perhaps three hours there if you examined everything in detail. After touring the site and walking around town, we settled on a pub in which to have lunch. I learned that I needed to order the food and drinks at the bar and not look for a waiter to come to the table for our order.
I also learned that “lemonade” means “Sprite” or “7-Up” or something similar. With all due respect to the nation and its people, this is just wrong. You get lemonade by squeezing lemons, adding water, maybe filtering out some of the pulp, and adding sugar. If you are really adventurous you add some other flavor like raspberry. This was important to us because my son will not drink anything that is carbonated and so he had a lot of apple juice on the trip. At least we discovered this oddity of nomenclature on the second day of the trip.
From Bath we set out for our next destination: Liverpool. For this trip we rented a car and a GPS/navigation system. The car was great throughout the trip, the navigation system was not. The ways in which it failed us included:
- Falling off its mount (maybe some user error there)
- Having a power plug connection that was not always secure, causing the battery to drain quickly and the device to shut off
- Having the software crash (its own version of the blue screen of death)
- Not always routing us in the best or most logical way
This particular device had three choices for routing: shortest distance, shortest time, and pedestrian. I used the last mode later in the trip and it was pretty much useless. I would always recommend the shortest time mode given what I learned on this trip.
The first map shows such a routing. The trip should have taken about 3 hours and have been about 191 miles. We would have gone up the motorways. It would not have been that scenic, but we had a lot of ground to cover.
Somehow in the midst of the device falling on the floor and losing battery charge, I must have chosen the “shortest route” option. Ok, ok, user error perhaps. This routing saved a total of 4 miles yet was supposed to take fully one hour more. Given the sophistication of software programming, did it really think this is what I meant? Moreover, though it may not be clear from the second map, we went through Wales. This was unexpected but the rest of the family liked this side trip.
This routing took us down some of the smallest roads on which I have ever driven, roads on which two cars can not pass without pulling way over to the left and crawling past each other. Aside from my having little experience driving on the left, this part of the trip still could have been fun and an adventure. It was an adventure because aside from wandering around the western UK, I was coming down with food poisoning from something I must have eaten at lunch.
The 187 miles seemed like a thousand. The 4 hours seemed like 12. We eventually did get to Liverpool where I mostly needed to recover from my sickness for the next day and one-half.
Before I got too sick and we realized the extent of the trip being off the beaten path, we were able to visit Tintern Abbey in Wales. It was absolutely stunning.
The British Heritage passes were valid and the visitor information was extensive. The original Abbey was founded in 1131 by Cistercian monks from France. Although a ruin, extensive portions of the structures remain. Much more than just a bunch of stone foundations, many of the walls are intact and you can tell who did what in the different buildings.
The rest of the day for me was a blur of small roads, hedgerows, roundabouts, and really, really wishing we would just get to Liverpool.
On Wednesday morning my wife and kids went down to Albert Dock in Liverpool and visited The Beatles Story. They had lunch and were nice enough to bring me back a Gatorade-like drink (Sportzade??), the first of many I would have over the next few days.
By the afternoon I was feeling well enough to go down to Albert Dock with my family to get the bus for the Magical Mystery Tour of Liverpool. As you might guess, this focused on the Beatles and went out to the suburbs to show where the lads lived when they were young. The tour guide was the DJ for The Cavern so he had a wealth of stories and was quite entertaining.
Once of the stops was at the gate of Strawberry Field and here is Katie there.
There were several other stops including one on Penny Lane where we could photograph the famous street signs that, evidently, have a very short lifespan once installed. This is one of the better bus tours I have taken.
The next morning I was still quite tired from being ill so Judith went down to the International Slavery Museum by herself and the kids stayed in the hotel and relaxed. There was a lot more that we could have done in Liverpool but it was time to leave for our next destination, York. Of all the places we visited, Liverpool is the one I really want to go back and explore in more detail and in full health. If only I could wangle an invitation to give a talk on open source and standards there …
Judith has offered to do a guest blog entry on Liverpool since I was so out of it. Consider this a public challenge for her to follow though on that offer!
Next up: York, a tower, and laundry.
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