We had a nice time in Hartlepool, despite the fact it’s been voted the 20th worst place to live in England.  (The distinction of #1 worst place to live goes to Middlesborough, just a couple miles away — looks like the Detroit of England.  It would take a herculean effort to make it any uglier, but I suppose anything is possible.)

Hartlepool (most famous for producing the guy who wrote the Andy Capp cartoon) is situated right on the North Sea, which makes it freezing cold and constantly buffeted by high winds.  The guy making Adam’s car told us we were lucky to have such uncommonly fantastic weather for our visit, as last year’s Christmas they were all snowed in.  If the weather we were treated to is an example of Hartlepool at it’s best, I can only imagine how bleak and tough life must be even now, much less back in the past.  You’d have to come from hearty stock, indeed, just to survive.

Our hotel, right across from the water.

Beach, very cold and windy in late December. It’s probably delightful in the summer.

We visited the Hartlepool Museum, mostly because it was so unpleasant outside we needed something indoorsy to do.

Life in Hartlepool revolves almost exclusively around the sea, and nearly every display in the museum had something to do with the ocean.  The remaining non-marine information dealt mostly with wool.  They have a vocabulary for wool much like the Eskimos have a vocabulary for snow.

I thought one of the most interesting exhibits was of wool seamans’ sweaters.  They were pretty things.  The description of how they were made was several paragraphs long, and I didn’t understand a whole lot of it because they assumed readers would already possess a good working knowledge of all things wool.  Each town along the coast had it’s own knitted sweater pattern, and this was for the sole purpose of identifying corpses when they washed up on the beach.  Sailors would fall overboard, and by the time the bodies washed up they were usually unrecognizable.  Wool, however, is quite sturdy and doesn’t rot, so the sweaters were generally still intact.  Whoever stumbled upon a corpse could look at the sweater and know which town to deliver the body to.  By doing head-counts of sailors from that town who were known to still be alive, they could figure out the identity of the dead guy by process of elimination.  Such a morbid history for pretty sweater designs, and telling as to just how rough life must have been.

Braving the wind in Hartlepool. This is St. Hilda’s church – this has been both a church and rectory site since 648 A.D.

Andy Capp – Hartlepool is the birthplace and hometown of cartoonist Reg Smyth.

We had a great meeting with Colin, the man rebuilding Adam’s car.  He’s a  jolly guy, and he knows everything there is to know about Land Rovers.  He spent two full hours with us discussing our car, which right now is a huge pile of rubble in the middle of his garage.  He had several other cars in various states of repair, so we were able to get a really good look at his process and the kind of work he does.  Top notch, all the way.  He came highly recommended by several people in the United States who imported cars he’d rebuilt, mostly in Massachusetts.  About 18 months ago, a doctor bought one and drove it to his Yacht Club to show off.  Not to be outdone, his envious buddies ordered a bunch more.  Colin suddenly found himself positioned as “The Land Rover Guy” for the United States market, despite having never set foot on the North American continent.  He has more work than he can keep up with now.

Adam picked out all the stuff he wants on his car, so it is truly going to be customized to our specific needs.  We decided on painting it white (cooler in Georgia heat) which is the only thing I cared much about.  There are a million other details which Adam can itemize in another email.  Colin thinks he can have the car ready for shipping in April, but it might be a little longer.  He’s down a mechanic because his best guy recently was hired by the US government to go maintain Humvees in Afghanistan for a year.  The guy is getting £70,000, which I think is about 1/4th the amount I’d demand to spend a year in Afghanistan.

Current status of Adam’s car.

Today we are back in the car, headed to Canterbury, a little bit south and west of London.  Tomorrow morning we have chunnel tickets and will cross the English Channel into France.

It’s about a 5 hour drive to cross England from north to south.  The bartender in our Hartlepool hotel told us he’d never been to London, and that just blew my mind.  How can you live 4 hours drive away from one of the most famous cities on the planet and never bop over there to see it?!  We’ve crossed twice in three days and it’s not a big deal.  The roads are good and everything.  England really is such a small place, and yet so jam packed with things of historical significance.

Later ……

We just spent the afternoon in Canterbury and I hardly know how to describe the experience.  Words are simply inadequate.  It is the coolest place I’ve ever seen, without a doubt.

We arrived in town around lunchtime (that’s how long it took to drive from the far North of England to the far South; late breakfast in Hartlepool, and late lunch in Canterbury.)

We had a hard time finding parking because the place is packed with people here to see the Canterbury Cathedral, one of the oldest Christian churches in England.  People have been making pilgrimages here for more than 1500 years; this is the place Geoffrey Chaucer wrote about in “The Canterbury Tales.”  The cathedral is enormous and surprisingly awe-inspiring even to modern eyes … what must such a structure have meant to people more than a thousand years ago?

But before we headed to the Cathedral, we needed to eat lunch.  We found a little tea shop, in an old house squashed between two bigger buildings. (The Moat Tea Room, Kent & Canterbury; they have a website if you type that into google.  And yes, Canterbury is so awesome they have an actual moat, too.)

I’ve never seen anything like it; imagine if Dr. Seuss had designed a house for Alice in Wonderland.  The waitress (who delightfully looked exactly as I’ve always pictured the Wife of Bath) seated us in what I think was probably once an upstairs bedroom.  The ceilings were only about 6 feet high and there wasn’t a straight line to be seen in the entire structure.  The rooms were tiny and oh! so cozy!  (Josie said, “I love this house!  It’s just my size!”)  I don’t know how old the house was, but it had to be at least 500 years if it was a day.  Anyway, we ordered tea and buttered crumpets, along with bacon-and-brie sandwiches and poached eggs on toast.  I felt like we had stepped into a fairy tale.

Tea room on Canterbury – old, old house wedged between other buildings… not a square angle to be found, creaks, groans, doorways only about 5 1/2 feet high and just lousy with charm.

Getting ready for afternoon tea and crumpets!

With lunch done, we headed over to the cathedral.  We didn’t go into the main part of the building because they wanted £9 per adult and £6 per kid, and it was already past 4:00 p.m.  You can still walk around a huge part of the cathedral … it’s actually a large series of interconnected buildings; the apartments for the monks, several libraries and archives, a nave, courtyards, etc. as well as the parts used for services.  We saw more than enough just wandering around the grounds and in the free buildings.  Adam took a bunch of photos, but I haven’t seen if they came out or not.  It was already dark by 4:30 so the light wasn’t very good.

Cathedral gate – entrance to the Cathedral grounds.. note Starbucks at lower right.

Nativity scene in front of the Cathedral – consecrated in 1070. Every location is fecund with history and overwhelming with names and “so and so did this on such and such date”. Too much to take in unless you have several days to work through it methodically. The first Archbishop arrived here in 596. This is the site of Thomas Beckett’s murder, Kings Henry II and IV, and the destination of the pilgrims in Chaucer’s Tales.

As impressive as the Cathedral is, though, the best part of Canterbury is the town itself.  It’s one ancient, storybook building after the next; crooked cobblestone streets, tea shops, candy shops (“confectionaries”) pubs, pawn shops, houses, apartments, butcher shops, cobblers (they actually have cobblers!), jewelry shops … it seems to go forever, each thing more fairy tale unreal than the next.  Walking through Canterbury is like stepping back a thousand years in time and landing in a fictional literary wonderland.  It doesn’t seem possible that it’s real, and yet here it is.  I desperately want to rent a little Hogwarts-esque flat here and write and paint and sculpt and buy meat from the shops on the street named “Butchery Way” and get my shoes fixed by an authentic cobbler with a leather-working bench.

Houses around Canterbury

Shopping in the evening.

Tomorrow morning we head out at 6:30 a.m. for France.  I’m sure France is wonderful, too, but I’m feeling heartsick right now that we don’t get to spend more time in Canterbury.

Adam and I are, for the third time in less than a year, scheming about how to arrange our lives so that we can come back to England.  Next summer is already planned out, but the following summer might be the perfect time to rent an apartment in London for 12 weeks.  We could use that as a home base and spend three months exploring the U.K.  It killed me that we drove straight past Sherwood Forest and Nottingham (twice!!) and didn’t have time to stop.  Yesterday we were just an hour or two away from Scotland and didn’t have time to go up there, either.  We still haven’t been inside Westminster Abbey …. well, I can’t even list all the things we didn’t have time to do.  It’s endless.

We have an early day tomorrow.  The chunnel ride is only 34 minutes long (which seems weirdly precise, but that’s what they say) so we’ll get dumped in France while it’s still morning.

We’re planning to drive 2 hours to Rouen for a brief viewing of the cathedral Monet painted over and over (thereby making it world-famous) and then another two hours into the outskirts of Paris.

Our hotel is at the Disney complex … not the most romantic of hotels, but the only one we could find that would accept 5 people in one room.  The past three nights we’ve had to rent two rooms — boys in one, girls in the other — and that’s mighty expensive.  So, Disney it is.  We promised the kids one day at the Disney park, and we’ll probably do that later in the week.

Unfortunately, the weather is supposed to be bad for the next several days.  We’ll have to race from one indoor activity to the next, but that shouldn’t be too terrible since one of the things we really want to do in Paris is visit the art museums.  The weather doesn’t bode well for the New Year’s Eve fireworks at the Eiffel Tower, though.  It’s forecasted for heavy rains and 40-mph winds.

Now it’s time for bed.  Until tomorrow!