Anchored off The Isle of Wight, UK

9 September 2012

Because the travel time from Southampton to Antwerp is only slightly longer than it takes to get from Libertyville to Lake Forest, we’re anchored off the south coast of England to give us one class day before we arrive in Antwerp for our 6-day visit to the European continent. We’ll sail around 13:00 (1pm) this afternoon and maintain what I’m sure will be a very leisurely pace until arriving in Belgium tomorrow morning at 8.

This schedule—3 days in a port then a class day; 5 days in another port then a class day; 6 days in a third port followed by only 3 class days . . .—wreaks havoc with any semblance of academic continuity. I feel like I have to reintroduce myself to my students each time I walk into class. And as for my memorizing their names: fogedaboudit! We’ll pay the price when we face a week at sea between Ghana and Cape Town, and 11 days between Cape Town and Buenos Aires. But, for now, the pace is exhausting. And I’m already 2 papers behind in my grading. I may be spending time sitting in my room in Bayeaux, France, reading papers on intercultural communication. Not a prospect I’m looking forward to.

The 4 days in England were wonderful, as much for the spectacularly beautiful weather as for the many new sights and experiences I enjoyed. The daytime temperatures were in the low to mid 70s each day (21-22 degrees Celsius), and the few clouds I saw were of the high, wispy variety . . . “high, thin cirrus” in flying lingo. Very atypical English weather.

I had originally planned simply to hang out in London, other than the day of golf on Thursday. I’ve never been disappointed in time spent in London, so arriving there with no concrete plans felt fine.  My favorite visit to London, in fact, was Christmas, 1999, when, on a whim, I decided to burn up some frequent-flyer and hotel-stay miles on a 4-day from December 23^rd to the 27^th. I discovered that London shuts down completely on Christmas Day and the day after—“Boxing Day.” I mean completely: no tube, no cabs, no busses, no people. And the only place open that Christmas Day was, of all (perfect) places, Charles Dickens’s house: the place where he wrote most of his novels, including A Christmas Carol. I walked the several miles from my hotel to his house on Christmas Day and spent a couple of hours wandering around with the docents, after which I enjoyed a couple of cups of warm Christmas cheer in Dickens’s kitchen. That was perhaps my favorite Christmas since I received my Red Rider b-b gun when I was 12. (That’s true, not borrowed from a Christmas movie.)

But as we were crossing the North Atlantic, I changed my mind and decided to stay in a town close to the golf course and see some sights I hadn’t seen on previous trips to the UK. I booked a room at a hotel in a London suburb: Kingston-Upon-Thames, which is only a few miles from the golf course and an easy train ride into the city . . . in case I decided to go to a show or visit a museum.

As it turned out, I did neither. Instead, on Wednesday, after docking at Southampton on the dot at 08:00, I went with Jim and Shamim to the U-Drive car rental office a few blocks away from the docks. There, I picked up my right-hand-drive (to drive on the left) Ford and headed off to find Salisbury and Stonehenge. They left to visit friends in Windsor and Oxford.

Road signage in England is very good . . . as long as you’re someone who has lived his entire life in England. In the US, I pay attention to highway numbers: IL176, IL21, I-94, etc. In England, it’s much more important to know where the road is going. In fact, I found that the people I stopped to ask for directions had, in most cases, not the foggiest idea what the road numbers are. But they know exactly where they’re going.

So, for example, to return from the golf course on Thursday back to my hotel in Kingston, the woman told me to “go to Hersham, Esher, pass Littleworth Common, and on to Kingston.” But she couldn’t tell me what road numbers to follow. That might be fine except that there are several different ways to get to Hersham, Esher, Littleworth Common, and Kingston.

I picture an English farmer in the 12^th Century taking his products to the faire in Kingston. He’s following the well-worn cart path one day when he spots an opening in the trees that looks like a shortcut. So he turns the cart and bushwhacks through the clearing, creating a route he decides he prefers. Now there are two routes to Kingston. And, over the centuries, other cart paths to Kingston are created the same way by other farmers, and those are followed by still other farmers. Then the 19^th Century comes along, and all the cart paths are paved. And where they intersect, the pavers create roundabouts.

So today, I enter the roundabout—watching intently to the right for vehicles already in the roundabout—and when I look up, I see at least two different exits to take me to Kingston. Trying to keep cool and watch for other cars in a roundabout is not the time to also be deciding which of several exits I should take.

All this is my way of saying that the drive to Salisbury and Stonehenge on Wednesday took longer than it should have. But I made it.

Salisbury is a beautiful English city: mid-sized centered around a large market place and a magnificent cathedral completed in the mid 13^th Century, around the time the Magna Carta was signed. In fact, the cathedral houses one of the four remaining copies. King John signed 13 originals in Runnymede, but only the 4 survive.

I visited the cathedral after lunching on a Cornwall pasty—an English meat pie, probably one of the unhealthiest meals I’ve had in a long time. But it was delicious and fulfilled my pasty requirement ‘til the next time I come back to England. On a full stomach, then, I visited the Cathedral, spending a few minutes staring at the indecipherable text on the 800-year-old Magna Carta.

After the historical and gastronomic treats of Salisbury, I drove another 10 miles or so further north to Stonehenge. The ancient ritual site—archaeologists still are unsure exactly what purpose it served—sits in an open field just a hundred yards or so off the highway to Ainsley(?). Visitors can only walk around the site, getting no closer than about 30 yards. They can’t go into the circle because, over its almost 5,000-year history, the place has been scavenged by many thousands of souvenir hunters and home builders. Scientists believe that residents of the Salisbury Plain over the centuries chipped away at the rocks for building materials. Besides, seeing the spot filled with visitors climbing on the rocks or just wandering among them would destroy the magic the place holds. It is an amazing spot: mysterious, wonderful in its precise placement of stones to mark the annual travel of the sun, and miraculous in its construction. How did those ancient people build the thing? Lots of theories exist, but no one knows for sure. Archaeologists haven’t yet found the blueprints.

I left Stonehenge about 3pm and took the easy way into London: the M4 motorway, part of the UK’s Interstate-like highway system.

Kingston is a pleasant town, founded over 1,000 years ago, on the Thames River, about 10 miles—maybe less—south of central London. I chose it because not only is it close to St. George’s Hill, the golf course Jim Cooper and I played on Thursday, but it’s also just downriver from Hampton Court, the home of the Tudor kings and queens, most famous as the principal residence for Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. Kingston also has a very nice assortment of restaurants and pubs arranged along a river walk on the north bank of the Thames. I sampled several during the three days I stayed there.

My hotel was The White Hart (meaning white deer), with a 500-year-old pub facing a roundabout immediately on the south bank of the Thames, and an expansion of modern hotel rooms extending to the back around a parking lot. So it was a very convenient location, complete with parking and pub. Best of all, however, was very strong internet in the rooms. I spent several hours of my stay uploading, downloading, and Skyping, things that are impossible onboard.

On Thursday, Jim and I met at St. George’s Hill Golf Club for our 1:45pm tee time. Getting to the club was as much adventure as playing the course, because the roads in and around London are the result of thousands of those farmers carting their wares to the faire. A roadmap of London and its environs resembles a plate of partially eaten spaghetti, with strands of roads and highways winding around, intersecting, bending, and twisting. I took several wrong turns before finally finding the club.

But what a club! St George’s Hill is my new “favorite course.” True, the weather was perfect: sunny and about 73 degrees. But the course is magnificent: Hills, wide fairways, magnificent ancient trees, and blue-flowered heather everywhere. Even the bunkers—the deep sand traps with steep walls between the entry point and the next fair shot—are lined with the blue heather, making them look like tan eyes with blue lids staring back at you as you stand on the tees or approach the greens. Fortunately, I spent more time admiring the heather than I did trying to hit shots out of it. But I did have several opportunities to try to dig out of those bunkers—some successful, a couple not.

The course is lined with massive homes—estates, really. A few of them have obviously been in place for many decades. But many are brand new, garish reproductions of Italian mansions. My caddie (Terry) simply mumbled, with great distain, “Russians.” Apparently, London is where a lot of that new Russian wealth is ending up. Interesting that the Russians are letting so much of their money pour out of the country while the Chinese are being very restrictive about their non-Chinese investments, especially in things like huge homes in world capitals. Caddie Terry told me that China is now the largest market for Rolls Royce and Bentley. But the Chinese are driving them around the streets of Shanghai and Beijing, not London and New York.

On Friday, I spent the day at Hampton Court. The court itself is about a 2-mile walk from the roundabout in front of the White Hart. The walk follows the 500-year-old highway—actually a tree-lined, grassy thoroughfare—that served as the principal approach to the palace from King’s Town. I was alone on the highway except for the herds of deer that wander through the fields surrounding the court. These were the royal hunting grounds, and I could imagine, as I looked ahead to the large iron gates guarding the east entrance, seeing fat Henry riding out the gates followed by his entourage, all decked out in their red and gold hunting garb.

Hampton Court is a very interesting place. It was the home of English monarchs from the early 16^th Century, starting with Henry, through the 1730s, when George II lived there. George III—the Founding Fathers’ “fat George”—abandoned the place and moved his principle residence to Buckingham Palace, where Elizabeth and Philip still live today. Windsor Castle was also home to all of them, as it is today. In medieval and renaissance times, the kings and their courtiers would consume so much meat and vegetables that they’d have to abandon one palace and move to another occasionally to give the farms and forests a chance to replenish their stocks. It’s no wonder most of the kings were portly.

I spent 5 hours at Hampton Court and could have spent even more time, but instead I took a boat along the Thames back to Kingston. It was my royal barge.

Friday evening, I visited another pub along the river, where I was surrounded by young British professionals celebrating the end of the work week. They were all talking loudly and quickly, and I was thinking what a lousy imitation of British accents these folks are demonstrating. The fish and chips were delicious. So were the gin and tonics.

On Saturday, I spent a leisurely morning in my hotel room catching up on some final internet work, then left Kingston for the drive back to Southampton and the ship. After leaving the greater London area, I exited the motorway and took back roads—a few of those paved-over cart paths—through Farnborough, Avon, and other small towns all the way to the south coast of England. Again, it was a spectacularly beautiful day, and when I wasn’t driving through green tunnels carved from the massive trees and shrubs that lined the roads, I was looking up at the rolling hills of southeast England, covered with farm fields and grazing lands. I wanted to stop many times to have a pint at a pub that seemed taken directly from a travel brochure, or to check into one of the inns and B&Bs along the way. But I did neither. I just enjoyed the passage of the countryside.

I was back onboard by 16:00 (4pm). Jim and Shamim joined me on the balcony of my room as we sailed out of Southampton at 8pm. And now, after just one day, we arrive in Antwerp tomorrow morning. There’s no time to decompress!