Hemel Hempstead, UK

Phew! No Pirates!  We survived the crossing, disembarked in Oscar and started to look for the way south.  Our first destination was to be Whitby, but having seen some photos posted on Facebook by a friend, we decided to make a detour to Durham.

Durham made it easy to visit because they had a Park & Ride just on the ring-road around the city.  Parking was free for Motorhomes so we just had to pay for our bus tickets – if you are in a car, then you pay for parking but your bus tickets are free!  When we were on the bus, Nick got chatting with another passenger who, when we arrived in the city, pointed out the various places to go and visit.  We were also approached by a volunteer “Meet & Greet” person who gave us a free map and pointed us in the direction of the Cathedral.

So Durham gets our vote as the friendliest and most helpful city thus far!  Durham Cathedral is rather old – over 900 years old and managed to survive the Dissolution (Henry VIII) and the period of the Commonwealth (life under Cromwell).  Durham Cathedral is also the resting place of The Venerable Bede who died in 735AD and is renowned as writing the first history of the English Church.  And so, on to Whitby to see Dave & Bidi!

At Whitby, there is a huge car-park near the train station, along the river.  In the past, we have parked there in Oscar for the night and that was what we had planned for this visit.  However, when we arrived, we were warned by our friend, Dave Wharton, that they had taken to booking motorhomes parked up overnight.  Dave very kindly organized a safe parking area for us and so we had our own personal, secure campground for the days that we were in Whitby.

We’ve been to Whitby a number of time but finally, we got to visit the Abbey which overlooks the harbour.  The location is amazing and there has been a monastery up there since the mid-7^th Century!  But the Abbey grew and flourished after the Norman Invasion until the Dissolution – thanks Henry VIII!  After the Dissolution, the land that the Abbey was on was bought by the Chomley family who proceeded to recycle the stone from the Monastery buildings and built a large and rather grand house.  Apparently, Whitby suffered during the Civil War as the Chomley family supported King Charles I but they managed to survive and after the Restoration, added a new wing to the house, making it even grander!

Sorry about the history lesson, but the Abbey is a beautiful spot and quite imposing.  The other main claim to fame is that the author, Bram Stoker visited Whitby a couple of times and he was inspired by the atmosphere of the Abbey ruins and provided inspiration for his famous novel, “Dracula”.  It is quite evident that the “Dracula”-connection is big-business in Whitby with the number of “Dracula” Tours available to do!  We didn’t do a single one!

Instead, we went back up to the Moors with Dave & Bidi and visited several of the spots which were places where Bidi remembers from her life on the Moors as a child/teenager.  We found one spot where she showed up where she lived and where she and her brothers & sisters used to play as children.  It would have been a remote life but in an idyllic setting.  We also found a spot where there were old lime kilns and the whole area was surrounded by the heather in bloom.  It was such a beautiful spot – thanks for taking us there Dave & Bidi.  Our last night was dinner at the Duke of York pub at the bottom of the steps to the Abbey.  As usual, Nick ordered a Crabbes Alcoholic Ginger Beer and it came in a branded “Crabbes” glass.  Now this is something that is quite common in Europe – that beer or cider will come in a special branded glass.  We were admiring the glass, so Dave went to talk to the Pub manager to see if we could keep the glass and came back with two “Crabbes” glasses – just for Nick!!  Provided we get them home safely, the glasses will always be a reminder of our visit to Whitby, a great meal with some wonderful friends!

Sadly, it was time to say “goodbye” to Whitby and Dave & Bidi and head on to York.  On a previous visit, we had visited the York Minster and the Jorvik Viking Centre – the Viking Museum was actually closed during our visit due to flood damage.  For this visit, we thought that we would head to the York Castle Museum, but we were fooled!  This Museum has nothing to do with York Castle, which no longer exists.  The York Castle Museum is in the old York Gaol which was built on the remains of the old York Castle. 

Having said all that, the Museum was interesting.  The majority of items in the Museum were collected by a North Yorkshire Doctor who accepted unusual items or things that he admired when visiting his patients in lieu of payment!  It is an amazing hodge-podge mixture which gives a brilliant snapshot of how people lived no matter what their circumstances.  The Museum is also fun because it has lots of different exhibitions – when we visited, they had a WW1 exhibit, an exhibition about fashion through the years and how people have tortured their bodies just to look fashionable.  They also had displays on the Sixties (we had a good laugh are the fashion and such), a Victorian streetscape and Toys through the years.  Nick and I were showing our age because we could remember quite a few of the toys – either because we had one or we had really, really wanted one, or because our kids had one!  Anther great day was finished with a picnic lunch in the York Botanical Gardens which has some amazing old trees and a Abbey ruin to explore.

Our next stop was for two nights in a spot near Manchester called Crowden.  We were there because we were hoping to get some mechanical repairs done on Oscar – so far, on this trip, he had been belching black smoke every time we accelerated or drove up a hill.  It was quite embarrassing and we wanted it fixed before we took Oscar home.  We found a lovely spot to camp surrounded by hills, sheep and lots of heather however, it turned out that the repair that we were hoping would help Oscar was not suitable for this particular problem.  We certainly appreciated the honesty of the mechanic because it saved us a couple of hundred pounds but we still had a smoke-belching motorhome that needed to be fixed!!  Time for Nick to do some more reading and research!

As we were on this side of England, we finally got to visit Stoke-on-Trent and some of the Potteries in the areas.  The big name in this area is Wedgwood but when I was engaged to be married to my first fiancé, my parents bought a dinner service for us as a wedding present and it was from Spode.  Sadly, today, the Porcelain industry has suffered due to people not spending money on beautiful crockery and both Wedgwood and Spode have suffered.  Wedgwood now has a great Visitor’s Centre where you can see Wedgwood through the years and do a Factory Tour to see the difference (or is that the similarities) in how things are made.  After the Factory Tour, I can say that I would never have been able to get a job there – the talent and skill of the artists who have to hand-paint the pieces at the different stages of the firings.  We watched as the gold paint was applied to a 40,000+ piece special order for the Emir of Abu Dhabi!  All I could say was “Wow!”.

After seeing Wedgwood, I was keen to visit Spode as that was where my Blue Italian dinner service was made and talk about chalk & cheese!  Whilst Wedgwood have a very flash Visitors Centre and is still in production, Spode was shut down in 2008 but thankfully, the Spode Trust was set up which preserved the history of the brand.  Sadly, today, there isn’t a lot there but the Friends of Spode, in conjunction with the Spode Trust, have opened a museum in the grounds of the Spode Factory in the heart of Stoke-on-Trent.  The museum is manned by members of the Friends of Spode who are either ex-craftsmen or just love Spode.  We watch a man who was hand-painting a plate as a demonstration of the job that he had done for decades when Spode in business.  We were lucky that we were there just before the “Blue Room” was to be officially opened and they let us into the Blue Room to have a look at the vast array of Blue Italian and their other “Blue” ranges.

After visiting the two brands, Wedgwood and Spode, we can say that visiting World of Wedgwood is good because you can do the Factory Tour to see how the porcelain is made and decorated but a visit to the Spode Works Visitor Centre will introduce you to people who have a passion for porcelain and are happy to share their knowledge with you.  And sadly (happily for Nick), not a single piece of porcelain was purchased!

Heading down towards Stratford-upon-Avon, we found a National Trust property called “Little Moreton Hall” which is a black & white Tudor Manor house that was built in the early 1500s and added to until 1610.  It has remained in the same family since it was built until it was given to the National Trust in 1938.  We learnt a lot about the old houses that were built with oak – did you know that the houses had to be built with green oak (freshly cut) because one it had dried it was too hard to work with.  And as the timber dried, it would warp and twist the house into an odd angle, which is why the old houses always look wonky!  And that someone’s bright idea to paint the oak with pitch to give the black and white effect was the death signature for the building – when left open to the elements, the timber seasons and breathes but when painted with pitch, it couldn’t breathe and therefore damp would build up and future problems for the buildings would begin.

Another feature at Little Moreton Hall was a knot garden laid out in box.  Whilst we were there, the gardener was in the middle of his annual 80 hours of hedge-trimming, using old-fashioned hand secateurs.  And he wasn’t using a string-line but doing it all by eye!  Now that is skill!!

And now we were camping near Stratford-upon-Avon.  One of the problems with a motorhome is that when using a campground, you can often find yourself a bit remote from the place you want to visit.  We were camping at a place called Aston-Cantlow which was about 5 miles from Stratford but thankfully, there was a bus service that we could use to get into town.  We spent an entire Saturday in Stratford and we visited Shakespeare’s Birthplace, and the New Place, which is a new Museum that opened this year on the site of house where Shakespeare lived for about 18 years.  The house is gone but the neighbours house is still there and that is incorporated into “The New Place” museum.  We enjoyed visited his Birthplace and seeing all the history of his life.

As there is no bus service on a Sunday and Mary Arden’s Farm (Shakespeare’s mother) was only 2½ miles from our campground, we thought that we would go for a walk to visit the farm.  After consulting with the locals, we had directions to walk through fields, which is quite a common practice in the UK, but they don’t put up signposts!  Nick was concerned that we had missed a turn but we finally managed to reach the farm and, when looking back where we had walked, I felt confident that we had managed to follow all the directions given to us successfully!  Mary Arden’s Farm is a working Tudor farm, which means that everything is done the way that it would have been done in the 16^th Century.

When travelling in Croatia, we met Stephen & Janet Biddy, an English couple who live somewhere between Coventry and Stratford, so we contacted them to see if they wanted to have lunch with us at the local pub.  We had a chuckle though because when we contacted them, we asked if they wanted to have lunch at the pub in Aston-Cantlow, and Stephen immediately came back with “Oh, at the King’s Head”.  Who knows the name of the pub in a small village some 60 kilometres away from where you live?  But they came down and, in fact, kindly picked us up from the Farm (Nick had sore feet because he was wearing new boots) and took us to the Pub where we enjoyed a lovely meal and great catch-up.  Thanks for being prepared to drive so far (by Pommy standards) for lunch.

When you watch English period dramas on TV that include lots of village scenes, then it is a good bet that the village scenes were filmed at Laycock.  Laycock is a village that is owned by the National Trust and has been used as Merton (in BBC mini-series, Pride & Prejudice) and Cranford (TV series of the same name).  It has also appeared in a couple of Harry Potter films as well as Downton Abbey.  Laycock is not far from Chippenham, which is just down the road from Bath, so guess where we went next!  Our day in Bath was spent at the Jane Austen Centre – when her father retired as a Vicar, the family moved to Bath, where he died, and his widow and daughters (Jane & Cassandra) continued to live in Bath until they could move back to a rural environment.  Jane Austen didn’t write whilst living in Bath, but it was certainly inspiration as it features strongly in her first and last books – Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.

We spent some time walking around Bath, admiring the architecture, especially the symmetry of the Royal Crescent and then headed down to the Roman Baths to be further edu-ma-cated.  This was one of the good days, in terms of weather, and we enjoyed walking around in the sunshine – especially thankful that we not have to wear all the clothes that were the fashion when Bath was in its heyday.

Time for a new destination – the New Forest.  Why is it called the New Forest?  Because when William the Conqueror visited Winchester, he was taken hunting in the nearby Forest and he so impressed with it that he made it his “new” royal forest.  When I hear the term “the New Forest” I always think of horses because the New Forest is renowned for its horses.  We discovered that the horses are actually owned by the Commoners (people who live in the New Forest) and that each horse has a mark and a special tail cut that identifies who the horse belongs to.  Also in the New Forest is Beaulieu which is the home of the National Motor Museum.  We continued to be confused with English pronunciation – apparently the correct pronunciation of Beaulieu is “Bewley”.

As well as the National Motor Museum, Beaulieu is also home of the Top Gear World where vehicles that have survived Jeremy, James & Richard come to live out their days and to be admired by the scores of visitors that come to Top Gear World.  We managed to gaze in wonder at the “Indestructible Hilux”, laugh at their homebuilt limousines, ambulances, amphibious vehicles as well as some of the vehicles that survived their Special adventures, like the motor-scooter ridden by Jeremy through Vietnam.

We were staying just outside of Lyndhurst which is home of the New Forest Information Centre.  As we didn’t know much about the New Forest (at that stage) we decided to go there for a look and discovered that Lyndhurst has a connection with Sir Arthur Phillip, the first Governor of the Colony of New South Wales.  Before he came to Australia, he married and lived in Lyndhurst and, it is said that the farming skills that he gained there were of benefit to him when he was setting up the new Colony.

When we left the New Forest, as we were just down the road from Winchester, we decided to make a bit of a detour to have a look.  I had visited Winchester in 2003, when I went there for a daytrip to catch up with a friend, Joanna but all I could remember from that visit was the Cathedral (as I’m typing this, I’m singing “Winchester Cathedral” in my head) and the Round Table.  Well, we couldn’t see the Round Table as there was a wedding in the Great Hall, so we decided to visit the Gurkha Museum – but it was closed as it was Sunday!  So that left a visit to the City Mill (a National Trust property), a walk along the oldest High Street in England and a visit to the West Gate.

Is it winter? Is it snowing?  No to both – so we are off to see Arundel Castle! We tried to see this place last year but it was closed because it was winter, so we headed across to Arundel and discovered that the last weekend of summer was also the Arundel Festival!  Bugger!  So that meant no free camping but at least we knew that the Castle would be open.  These days, Arundel Castle is the home of the Duke of Norfolk who is also the highest ranking Catholic in the UK.  When you visit Arundel Castle, you can go to the Fitzalan Chapel which is the burial place of countless Earls of Arundel and Dukes of Norfolk. 

Historically, the Norfolks and Arundels have been up there making regular appearances in history – the 3^rd Duke of Norfolk was the uncle of both Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard (Henry VIII’s 2^nd & 5^th wives), was imprisoned for treason but escaped execution beause Henry VIII died, and then was released from the Tower by Queen Mary.

From Arundel, it was up to Hertford, where we stopped for a couple of nights at a campground associated with Lord Robert Baden-Powell (of Scouting fame), and after 13 years of waiting, finally got to visit Hatfield House.  This is the Palace where Henry VIII three children were sent to live as children, but it is probably most famous for being the main home of Queen Elizabeth I.  It was at Hatfield that she was told that she was the Queen of England.  We managed to get onto a tour of the house and saw a couple of portraits of QEI, but we discovered that the Hatfield House of today was not Elizabeth’s Hatfield House!  The current Hatfield House was built in 1611 by Robert Cecil, 1^st Earl of Salisbury (son of Robert Cecil, QEI’s Chief Minister). Hatfield House was a Royal Palace but when James I came to the throne, he visited the Earl of Salisbury at his home of Theobalds (near Cheshunt), admired it and offered to swap the Old Palace and Manor of Hatfield for Theobalds. Now who can say “No” to the King?  These days, about a quarter of the Old Palace still stands but the main tourist attraction is the Jacobean House, which is pretty impressive.

We are down to the last couple of weeks, so it’s time to head to Upper Basildon to pack our gear, sort through what is left in Oscar, wash and clean (inside & outside) ready for Australian Quarantine, and finally to do some last minute fixes.  Remember the problem of the black smoke I mentioned earlier??  Well, we have to give a huge vote of thanks to Chris Jones of STJ Motorhomes who spent quite of bit of time thinking about the problem, talking to Nick and finally identifying and repairing the problem.  It turned that there was a broken something in the Turbo.  But it is now fixed and Oscar has given up smoking!!

We have driven Oscar down to Southampton and found that we had to do a last minute turf of my spices and some cooking ingredients and liquids, but thankfully, we had been able to leave our big bags with friends at Hemel Hempstead so we didn’t have to try and manhandle two big bags on and off trains as we head for Oxford for our last weekend in England and catching up with Diane & Kevin Sinden.  Kevin & Di live in Brisbane but were coming over to the UK for a holiday, so they arrived just before we left and we had a weekend together.

We experienced our first Air BNB which was pretty good and spent a day at Blenheim Palace – home of the Duke of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill.  They have a very good exhibition on Winnie’s life as part of the house tour but as 2016 is the 300^th Anniversary of Capability Brown who was a famous garden designer during the 1700s, they had a display on the work done on the garden at Blenheim Palace by Capability Brown.  Who wants to have a LARGE lake dug out by hand with a fake river and waterfall?  The job that was done was superb because  even all these years later, it still looks natural!

We also had a great day walking around Oxford – we did one of the free walking tours and as that particular Sunday was “Open Oxford” days, which meant that a lot of things were free, we managed to get onto a free tour of the Oxford Castle.  Oxford Castle held by the Royalists during the Civil War and when Cromwell was finally in charge, he had a number of Castles dismantled so that there not so many rallying points for the Royalists, which included Oxford Castle.  It was then used as a gaol right up to 1996.

And, now, today, is our last day in the UK!  We are staying with Rob & Linda, our friends in Hemel Hempstead. All final admin has been done (including this Blog), all washing done, dried and packed carefully (shoved) into our bags. Home, via a short stopover in Dubai and then we will be flying in Brisbane and heading home to the farm.

Thank you to all our friends and family who put up with us dropping in and to all our followers – we hope that you have enjoyed travelling along with us, via this Blog.