Trull: Home away from home (10th to 17th April)

Monday evening April 10 through to Monday morning April 17th our home was with our wonderful and hospitable host Alison.  This is like a holiday within a holiday, appropriately in the very centre of the trip.  Been a lovely stay here and enjoyed the friendship and food and getting to know her delightful children, not to mention our little hero Toffee the Border Terrier (also known locally as Wonder-Dog - see previous blog for his famous exploits).


The 7 days here have been a fair bit of taking it easy, eating too much, some local sight-seeing, re-finding bits of Taunton town and Trull village, drives through Churchinford area.  Martha gets herself a cold/flu and hence slows her down, likely due to an arduous trek from Beer to Seaton and back.  I did Longrun Meadow (Taunton) ParkRun and find that ParkRun is very popular here as shown by the 400+ attendance.  Easter-time now with Church services and Easter eggs, family dinners, children home from University, school holidays.  Catching up with several friends from our days here in 2004.


Couple of pictures of beautiful Trull and here-abouts, will add some more later:

Vivary Park, Taunton



Sherford Stream, near Trull

Traffic jam near Churchinford

Plymouth (9th April)

First sight of land in Devon

Took the Brittany Ferries' Pont Aven from Roscoff to Plymouth during the day Sunday 9th.  Six-hour trip, this being our boat cruise for the trip.  Very nice, big boat that travels between Roscoff and Plymouth at least daily.  Carries cars and foot passengers and has cafe's and bars, cinema and shops etc.  Made it into Plymouth with plenty of time for some exploring, found a good church service in St Andrew's, in the centre of the town.

Warm sunny day at the Hoe

Comfortable and friendly stay at The Caraneal B&B, took a trip for a couple of hours over to Cornwall on the Cremyll Ferry, which crosses the Tamar to Mount Edgcumbe.  Fun little boat ride that takes just a few minutes, then wander around the gardens there.  A friendly old volunteer man took us on a ride around the grounds and up to the old house on his little buggy.  Rushed lunch at pub in order to catch the boat back to meet time objectives but then possible disaster struck in that my backpack (complete with all the important things we didn't want to leave unlocked in the B&B, like passports, laptop, tickets etc.) had mysteriously disappeared.  Of great relief to us, I had left the bag an hour before in an ice-cream shop at the top of the hill, and our volunteer buggy driver came to the rescue and scooted us up the hill to find the bag intact and complete.  Losing bags with everything in it is not a recommended travel tip, so I have come to learn.

First sightings of the Promised Land across the Tamar -
See the sign in the middle?

The rest of the day was travel fun not without challenge but we took train to Exeter, taxi to airport from where we picked up a hire car and drove across the Blackdown Hills to what feels like our second home:  Trull, Taunton, Somerset.

Hire car came with a bonus, achieved through the combination of a Caramel Koala and my charm and wit, in that we had the car upgraded to a nice Seat Ibiza automatic for only a few extra pounds.  Martha happy to have an auto at last.

 

Toffee the Wonder-Dog

One moonlit night in Trull’s fair streets

There lurked a fearsome foe

All ready to torment the folk

Who evening stroll would go

This foe appeared upon the street

The play-thing of a cat

But after cat did run away

It showed itself: A rat!

A mighty rat, a foot in size,

(At least appeared to be)

No wonder cat did run away

And climb up high in tree*

How could the village life be good

And people walk at ease,

When such a fiendish villain roams

And scare whoe’er it sees?

But just when darkness seemed to loom

And hope be far away

There rose a hero, full of fur

To stand and save the day!

No knight on horse, no sirened car

Did rush with doubled speed

But hero Toffee “Wonder-Dog”

Was there to do the deed.

Now some malign our canine friend

And call him nasty names

And misinterpret all the fur

That covers his lean frame

And think that just because his run

Is leisurely at best

That Toffee isn’t quite the dog

For a triumphant quest.

But Toffee showed the scoffers what

A dog of his kind does

And showed the muscle and the grit

That lurked beneath that fuzz

He jumped upon the helpless rat

At supersonic pace

And very soon the rodent, bad,

Had given up the race

His owner proud let out a squeal

Unscathed but not unshook

And went back home to tell the tale

Or even write a book.

For surely this brave deed of dog

With neither fear nor fret

Is worthy of a story in

The Somerset Gazette.

So there be ended up our tale

Of Toffee and the Rat

So proving that our Toffee’s size

Is muscle, fur … not fat!

* (actually a wall but it didn’t rhyme)



Toffee the Wonder-Dog, graciously letting me
carry him after he conquered Mount Beer in Devon

Caen to Roscoff (7th and 8th April)

Friday morning exploring Caen before the long journey to the ferry port village of Roscoff, way out west in Brittany.  Caen was great - we found a market, first real market we've experienced in France and it had stalls and stalls of everything.  Pastel de Nata pastries (Portuguese custard tart) my favourite, every sort of seafood still wriggling, cheese, vegetables, cooked food, books, etc.

Long train to Roscoff via Rennes where we picked up our suitcases in exchange for a Caramel Koala.  We figured that a Caramel Koala would be good universal currency.


Roscoff is a nice place.  Ferry port is on one side of it and clearly contributes to the flow of people through the village and the many restaurants with English-speaking friendly menus.  But still the same sort of beautiful French village experienced all across Normandy and Brittany with its exceptional patisseries and beautiful houses and friendly people.  Walked our legs off once again, saw boats coming in laden with crabs and witnessed the fun of the unloading and filling crates full of the crawling things.  Nice big shiny brown crab for 6 Euro ($9) per kilo sold live on the jetty direct from the boat.  Wonder what similar crab costs in Aus?

Roscoff harbour at low tide, imagine the water up to a few metres from the top within 6 hours.
Note the really interesting bell tower of the church on the right, though probably too hard to see in this picture.

Rouen-Lisieux-Caen (6th April)

Ambitious travel day leaving Vernon and spending time in each of Rouen and Lisieux before overnighting at Caen.  Travel challenges all went well, and enjoyed each of the towns.


Rouen was a quick cathedral visit, morning tea, art gallery.  Plenty of Monet works here, including one of his famous Rouen Cathedral pictures.  Joan of Arc a popular figure, interesting life story that I had never taken time to read: much original primary material available due to the fact that she was tried and convicted, then a few years later retried and acquitted (a little late for poor Joan).  As notes and interviews from both the first trial and retrial were taken and not lost, a fair bit of the real story came to light after the documents were dug up centuries after.

Interesting detail in Rouen Cathedral 

Lisieux was of interest to me because I have a favourite cup from which I drink tea that has a picture of a church from Taunton on one side, and a picture from Lisieux on the other, the town and city being sister cities and all.  So, amused me to drop in on the place.  A nice visit, good lunch, patisseries everywhere etc. as has come to be expected in Normandy.  Lisieux happens to be the second most visited place, as a destination for pilgrimage, in France.  St Therese of Lisieux was from here and an enormous Basilica built, appears she has gathered quite a following.

Basilica at Lisieux 

Caen was the destination for the night and we stayed in a hotel near the centre of town.  What was amusing was that this evening, for whatever reason known only to the citizens of the town, the required dress-code appeared to be onesies and fancy dress.  Some "students let their hair down and behave badly" event.  Well, there were literally thousands of them and the small percentage that did behave badly created a lot of noise and mess.

Vernon/Giverny - Monet's garden (4th and 5th April)

After a stay in Bayeux we took the train to Vernon.


Vernon is adjacent to Giverny, which is a small village famous for being the home of Claude Monet for several years.  We took a bus to Giverny and spent a few hours at the garden and village, which was very pretty, it being in flower with spring flowers and the water-lily pond looking nice and all.  Lovely weather appears to follow us and days have been bright and cool - but warm in the sun.

Water-Lily Pond at Monet's Garden

The bridge over the water-lily pond

A gallery of French impressionist painters was there in Giverny close to the famous house and gardens and took our attention.  We were bemused by the fact that the gallery didn't actually have any Monet paintings and I was interested in having a look at a few to see if his popularity was backed up by any actual substance.  I lie slightly in the fact that it did display a single Monet work, but likely only the one the gallery could afford because it was frankly not very good, and the paintings of other artists whose names I knew (Manet, Renoir, Pissarro) and those I didn't, were clearly superior.  Odd that tickets to a gallery was sold in conjunction with tickets to Monet's garden and house but actually contained only a work that appeared to be produced between afternoon tea and supper by dipping a croissant into a bottle of paint mixed with white wine and applying liberally to a board ... but what would a philistine like I know?  (Later evidence at the Rouen and Caen galleries show what the hype and fame of the man really is about ... but not this token hanging and sham tourist seduction).  It is, to me, somewhat comforting that not every work by a clear genius is actually good.  Perhaps by reverse extension, is it possible that we non-geniuses could actually produce something that is good?

Norman Conquest: Bayeux

We stayed two nights at Rennes.  Very nice city, beautiful cathedral which was a bright and cheerful neo-classical building from the 1700's, very helpful and friendly hotel staff, tasty creperie restaurants and patisseries.

Bayeux

The hotel was kind enough to allow us to dump our suitcases on them, and I think the elephant from the train had stowed away in one of the cases as they are getting increasingly heavy.  This dumping of cases and elephant meant that we were freed up to wander around Normandy with only back-packs.  Very liberating.

First trip from Rennes was to Bayeux, home of the tapestry and a lovely little city.



Window in the Cathedral at Bayeux

 

 

Bayeux Cathedral

For those who are unaware of the history that all English schoolboys learn, the Bayeux Tapestry was an embroidered pictorial record of the story of the conquest of England by the Normans in 1066.  The tapestry (or embroidery it actually is) is displayed in a museum in Bayeux and is a wonder.  A wonder in that it has survived these nearly 1000 years without being bombed or burnt or cut up into little pieces and sold.  It is a wonder in that it is some 68 metres long, and that it tells in beautiful pictures the history of the reason why William the Duke of Normandy came over the English Channel and battled the Anglo-Saxon armies of King Harold and took the throne.  It explains why and how it actually happened.  Let me explain and give you a hysterical lesson. ...

Our B&B in Bayeux

William the Conqueror was named such because the French for the word "conker" is "conquer".  So, William was actually a really good conker player.  He was promised the throne of England because he was the fourth cousin twice removed of the existing but dying king.  Now, his mate Harold who was fifth cousin once removed from the dying king was sent over to tell William that he should pop over and be crowned but later Harold decided it would be fun to be king himself and so did so.

Now, William thought this wasn't all cricket and so he came over to England hastily and met Harold and beat him at a game of conkers, took the throne and asked his uncle Norman to go around and do a stocktaking of the all the conkers in the country and write them up in a book called the Domesday Book.  Hence the name Norman Conker-quest.


Now you know.


Bayeux showed all this on the tapestry, all the horses and boats and battles and conker matches. 



Painting in the gallery showing the legend of Queen Mathilde and her friends sewing the tapestry. 
They all look sad because they really wanted to be outside playing conkers.  From what I read the tapestry is
actually technically an embroidery and was made in England by retired conker salesmen.

It also displayed a wonderful art museum that displayed essentially a history of art over the ages, also had a museum dedicated to the Normandy D-day invasion of 1944.  Lovely stay at Bayeux and well worth a visit if you get there one day.

Trains

Ever been on one of your children's school excursions where the travelling itself is the excursion and the fun?  Well, this last week or so has been just like that, a travel excursion where each day presented another interesting challenge about how to get from A to B, and what to see (both anticipated and unexpected) along the way.  It has indeed been fun.


We started in Madrid and I booked train tickets to get to France.  The original idea was to get into France and then hire a car and drive without much planning nor aim and then make sure we get to the Roscoff ferry port in Brittany to catch the boat to Plymouth on the 9th April.  However, three days of driving on the wrong side of the road in Spain gave me other ideas and I lost the enthusiasm to negotiate all the roundabouts and freeways and slip roads.  A phone app called trainline.eu came to the rescue and this made it easy to plot a path through France and end up in the right place for our ferry.


With this app we booked and bought train tickets to, in turn, Hendaye to Rennes; Rennes to Bayeux; Bayeux to Vernon/Giverny; Vernon to Caen via Rouen and Lisieux; Caen to Roscoff.  We are now good at catching the French trains and can hum the SNCF train station announcement jingle in our sleep.  I must say, the French and Spanish train systems, the information available on the screens, the facilities at the stations, the ticketing systems, are outstanding.


I find there are lots of things to worry about with trains.  For example, in case you are about to catch trains and are calm and comfortable, I'll give you a list of worry options to change your disposition:

• You buy a ticket and don't print it
• You print your ticket but lose it
• You forget to validate your ticket
• You cannot find the right platform
• The train doesn't arrive
• The train arrives but you are at the bus station
• The train arrives but doesn't open its doors
• The train opens its doors but then closes them on you while you are half way through the door
• The train arrives, opens its doors, you are there at the right place to jump on the train but an elephant is on the train and is blocking the door so you can't get on
• The train takes a wrong turn at the roundabout and ends up in Santiago, Chile, not Santiago de Compostela
• You are late for the train and the lift doesn't work and you have to carry your suitcases up the stairs and there's an elephant stuck in the way
• You get on the wrong carriage and cannot find your allocated seat
• You eventually find your seat but is occupied by an elephant who had eventually managed to get up the stairs

See?  There are many different reasons to worry about catching trains.  Only a few of the above proved to be more than just imaginary worries but all in all, we caught every train and each train made its way successfully to its nominated destination.

What is especially fun about the train travel excursion is that the actual catching of each train was a little fun challenge in itself, each successful boarding a little win.  An unfamiliar journey to nowhere we have been to before which on the strength of the information on a ticket and following a series of numbers means that we get off the train and into another new unfamiliar world: First Rennes, then Bayeux, then Vernon etc. etc.


Enjoying the journeys here ... tell you more about the destinations next.

Leaving Spain, off to France; Hendaye and Rennes

View from Hendaye toward San Sebastian (?)

A few days behind blogging here, I have half an excuse but have worked out now how to clumsily write blog on the mobile phone. Story from a few days ago (currently we are in Vernon/Giverny, France)...

Returned to Madrid from Siguenza on train, checked in hotel and took bus into Madrid centre.

Found an excellent cheap restaurant called Puerto Rico where more than we could eat and plenty to drink cost $35 for the two of us.  Learning finally a few little things about ordering food in Spanish restaurants, like a half Sangria for seven Euros means a jug of it, enough for a few glasses each.

Madrid is home to some guitar making shops and the most famous, that of Jose Ramirez, was in the centre of Madrid... and closed as we got to the door.  Alas.

Interior of Rennes Cathedral

Lots of train travel - Madrid to Hendaye (with overnight stay); Hendaye to Rennes via Bordeaux.


From Hendaye we walked from France and Spain and back again!