June 30, Monday

The house we’ve rented in Wirksworth is only OK, but has a couple of really great perks.  The first is a park with big playground directly across the street, which is fantastic for the kids and for us.  They can go over there and play on their own, leaving the house to Adam and me.  Ahhhhhhh!  Peace and quiet!  They went over yesterday evening and made friends with a little local girl.  She made them promise they would come play again this evening, so they have that to look forward to.

The other bonus is that this house has a kitty!  His name is Jasper and he only has three legs, which for some reason makes him even more endearing.  He spends most of his day outside catting around, but comes home in the evenings.  He spent the night bed-hopping … he at some point slept with all of us.  We love him.

Today we have plans to visit the only remaining blue Police Call box that is of the same type as the Doctor Who TARDIS.  We thought it was just sitting in it’s original location, but it isn’t.  It was rescued and moved to a little town much like Beamish, called Crich Tramway Village and Museum.  It’s a collection of rescued old buildings from around England that have been set up as a small old-timey town.

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Today turned out to be thoroughly shitty.

First, we had an incredibly hard time finding the Crich Tramway Museum.  Our GPS didn’t recognize the address, so we had to pick something nearby and rely on roadside signs, which were few, and not particularly helpful.  We finally found the right place, but the road to it was closed for construction.  We had to walk more than a mile up a very steep hill to get there.

Once we arrived in the parking lot, hot and sweaty and grumpy, we found out they had an alternate route on the other side of the hill that we could have driven on.  Everyone else there had managed to find it.

We tried to put a good spin on it …. “It’s great exercise!” but that was sour grapes and everyone knew it.  Anyway, at least we got to see the police call box.  It’s the only original one left in the world that’s the same as the one used in Doctor Who.  The tour guide pointed it out and sighed, “And NO, it’s not bigger on the inside.”  I’m guessing he’s thoroughly sick of hearing that question and now just heads it off at the pass.

They also had another rescued old telephone booth.

Working antique tramway car.

That green thing was a station clock used for the trams.  Each tram operator had a key with his identification number on it, and when they pulled into the station, the operator would stick his key in that lock and turn it.  Inside the machine, a piece of paper was pressed into the side of the key, embossing it with the Tram number and the time.  That’s how they kept track of their schedules.

The street lamp is also a rescue from a bygone era.  I don’t remember what he said about it.

“Hello?  Doctor?”

A bride having her wedding photo shoot.

Holden having yet another problem with his shoe.

Old water fountain.  They used to be quite a bit more stylish.

Aside from the police call box, the museum was kind of a dud.  It might have been really interesting for a tramway enthusiast, but there wasn’t much else to see.  It was a pretty small venue.

The walk back to our car was more pleasant because it was all downhill.  We found these horses and I just happened to have an apple in my bag.  Josie really, really wanted to feed apple bits to the horses but was scared of getting bitten by accident.  I showed her the proper technique.

She was still skeptical.  The horses were really excited about the apple and doing a bit of aggressive shoving to make sure they got their fair share.

The forecast was for 40% chance of rain, and the sky darkened up quite a bit after lunch, but it never did rain.  The weather was pretty good all day, and even got a little on the hot side.  That was nice.

Some guy’s brand new mansion.  That whole thing is one property.

Our next stop for the day was Haddon Hall.  It’s still a private residence for Lord Edward Manners (brother of the Duke of Rutland), but parts of it are open to the public and it’s been used in a whole bunch of movies, including The Princess Bride.

Holden surveying the domain.

I thought the interior was fascinating.  It was still furnished with original items.  That tapestry hanging on the wall (below) was a gift to the owners of the house by Henry VIII.  “It has been described as “the most complete and most interesting house of [its] period”.”

This plaque was in the kitchen.  I had no idea they used to put dogs on big hamster wheels to turn the meat spits.  This is where the expression “It’s a dog’s life” came from.  (And not specified, but maybe “worked like a dog” came from something like this, too?)  I love the part of this sign that reads, “Several dogs would be worked in shifts of about an hour.  The dogs were very conscious of the time they had been working, and if not relieved at the appropriate moment, would leap out of the wheel, and force one of the other dogs to take their place.  They could be quite nasty if made to work when they thought they should not.”  I’m glad the dogs were able to stand up for their rights, even if just a little bit.

Adam proving he is also on this trip.  That mirror was ancient and framed in red tortoise shell.

The long hall, built so that Victorian ladies and gents could go for walks without exposing their skin to the sun or their fancy clothes to the rain.  Victorians were obsessed with the health benefits of regular walking.  Sometimes they got things exactly right.

Gardens outside the long hall.  (The long hall is those big windows.)

Josie sitting in a little picnic nook.

Pretty fountain.

And then everything fell completely apart.  Isabella was running around in the garden and tripped over a stone edging piece around the grass.  She injured her ankle so badly she couldn’t even hobble over to a bench to sit down … and we’d parked nearly 1/2 mile from the entrance of the castle.  She was never going to make it.  Adam went to find someone in charge to find out what we could do.

They sent out a docent who had first-aid training to examine Isabella’s ankle.  The docent, Polly, didn’t think it was broken and probably didn’t need an ambulance or paramedic attention, so they arranged for Adam to be able to drive our car onto the property to pick Isabella up, and they gave us directions to the nearest hospital.

We are all devastated.  I’m worried sick because my baby is injured and nothing else matters.  She’s vulnerable, in pain, embarrassed, and scared.  I’d trade places with her in a heartbeat if I could.

Our plans for the next few days, at the very least, are totally ruined.  We were planning to go to Alton Towers, the biggest theme park in the UK, tomorrow.  The kids have been looking forward to it for weeks, and to be honest, so have I.

We came back to the house and Isabella is laying on the couch with her ankle elevated.  It hasn’t swelled too much, so we’re waiting until tomorrow morning before deciding on whether or not we need to go get x-rays.  Isabella really didn’t want to go to the hospital and thinks resting it will be good enough.  If she still can’t put any weight on it in the morning, we’ll head over to the urgent care.

So, our plans for tomorrow have been scrapped and we’re going to hang out at the house for a day.  There is a Land Rover mechanic right down the street from our house, so Adam is going to take our car over tomorrow and have the oil changed.  He also wants to find a car wash.  We may or may not end up spending some time at the hospital.

Thank goodness for the park across the street — at least Holden and Josie aren’t trapped in the house.

 July 1, Tuesday

We woke up this morning to find a sheep in our back yard.  She had somehow jumped over or crawled under the fence and was happily eating weeds right next to this guy’s vegetable garden.  I guess the sheep see those fences as merely suggestions.

Isabella’s ankle looks and feels quite a bit better this morning.  She is desperate for it to heal enough that we can still go to Alton Towers tomorrow.  We either go tomorrow or we don’t go at all … we’re leaving the area on Thursday morning and already have the next house lined up, so no changing it now.  She hopped down the stairs and said it doesn’t hurt to hop anymore — yesterday, the jarring movement was enough to cause pain.  Then she stood on it in the kitchen and was able to put her weight on it, so we’re pretty sure we don’t need to go in for x-rays today.  If it was broken, I don’t think it would have improved that much overnight.  She also said it no longer hurts when she’s just sitting around …. another big improvement.

We are all breathing a big sigh of relief.  It looks like she’s going to be OK in a few days’ time without needing medical care.  Last night Adam and I were making tentative contingency plans for going home early.  If she had broken it and needed a cast and crutches, our trip would be over.  England is NOT handicap accessible.  Everything is made of uneven stone that’s been in place for 1000 years.  It’s gorgeous and historic and incredibly cool … but pretty much only for people who can walk.

I love the UK, which is probably fairly obvious to anyone paying attention to how many times we’ve managed to come over here in the past 4 years.  London is my favorite city in the world, bar none.  However, there are some things they do here that are weird/don’t make sense.  Last night Adam revealed that he’s been keeping a list, so my writing about it here is probably stealing his thunder, but I don’t have much to do right now.  It’s a staying-in day.

1.) I’ve already mentioned their aversion to top sheets on the beds.  This phenomenon has continued to play out in every single house we’ve rented.  You get the fitted sheet and a bulky comforter — nothing else.  It’s weird.  They sell blankets all over the place, so why do they make their beds this way?

2.) Nearly every bathroom has the light switch on the wall outside the bathroom.  You have to remember to turn the light on before you go in.  We thought this was a consequence of retrofitting electricity into really old buildings, but we’ve noticed this light switch placement is on all the newly constructed and newly renovated places, too.  Why?  Also, they almost never have ventilation fans.  The few that do also put the operating switch outside the bathroom.  That means if you work up quite a stink during your bathroom visit, and didn’t plan ahead on making the stink, you have to open the door and search for the fan switch which lets all the embarrassing stink cloud out into the hallway.  It seems like such an easy thing to put those switches inside the bathroom itself so you can use them while in there.

3.) Washing clothes.  This is probably my biggest beef with the way they do things in the UK.  First of all, the washing machines tend to be very, very small.  It’s hard to wash the clothes for a family of 5 with loads that only hold a couple of shirts and a pair of jeans.  It makes sense to have small machines in tiny houses, like the city apartments where space is hard to come by, but the places with big, grand laundry rooms also have the tiny capacity washing machines.  It seems to me like it would save more water and energy by being able to wash fewer, larger loads.  My machine at home holds 5 times what these do here, and as a result I only have to run the machine at home 1/5th the number of times.  Maybe there is some magic mathematical thing going on here that I don’t know about, like these small machines use 1/20th the water and energy or something — don’t know, and really don’t care.  These small-capacity machines suck.

4.) Which brings me to the dryers.  Usually there isn’t one.  Occasionally there is, and they are as bad as the washers.  The all-in-one units don’t do a good job of either washing or drying, so there’s that.  And the stand-alone dryers don’t vent to the outside of buildings.  I think in the US it’s in the building codes that dryers must vent to the outside, but here they have condensing dryers.  These machines have a reservoir that collects all the moisture from your laundry, and you have to empty it out after every load.  Not only is this inconvenient, but they don’t dry as well, either.  The clothes are always still slightly damp, no matter how long you run the machine, and the dryers all have a slightly mildewy smell that is gross.  Maybe that’s why everyone is still using the outdoor clothes lines?  (The one exception to this rule was the dryer out in the spider shed in Inverness … that one got so hot you couldn’t touch the clothes for a few minutes and had to leave the door open for a cooling-off period.  The clothes were not only dry, they were practically desiccated.  How could that thing not have been a fire hazard?  Maybe that’s why it was out in the spider shed.)  I simply do not understand why folks in the UK put up with these terrible laundry facilities. It seems like such an easy thing to fix.

5.)  The garbage bags are all about 1/4th of a millimeter thick, and they rip if you merely look at them wrong.  They have about the thickness and strength of kleenex.  The garbage is always leaking out, and I’m constantly having to double-or-triple bag all the rubbish just to get it to the outside bin without ruining the floors.  I think this is a concession to environmentalism, which is good and I applaud their dedication to minimize carbon footprints, but it doesn’t really help if you have to use twice as many bags and then use cleaning products to take care of the mess they invariably leave behind.  I miss garbage bags that actually hold the garbage in.

6.)  Oven gloves.  They look like this …

… and they are terrible.  They combine the worst elements of three different things:  the anti-dexterity of a flat pot holder, the range-of-movement limitations of handcuffs, and the awkward handling of a kitchen towel doing double-duty as an oven mitt because you can’t find anything else to use.  I hate these things.  They are one of the worst kitchen inventions ever.  They have also been the only type of oven mitt in every single house we’ve visited.  I know for a fact that British stores sell the good kind of oven mitts because I see them for sale all the time, and have even purchased a couple as souvenirs on previous trips.  Why are all these English homeowners dedicated to these horrible oven gloves??  They are the worst.

Having listed all my complaints, I will now point out what they do in the UK that is far superior to what we do in the USA.

1.)  FOOD.  I can’t go on long enough about how much better their food supply is.  From what little research I’ve done, this is a result of their having much stricter laws in place about what is allowed in their food supply.  For example, tea:  the UK has far, far higher standards about the levels of pesticide residue that is allowed on imported tea.  Who gets the tea that doesn’t pass the UK’s rigorous standards?  We do.  The unacceptably contaminated tea rejected by the UK is sold to the US market.

This goes on and on and on.  Their fruit and produce is so much better it’s impossible to describe; you’d have to taste it to believe it.  The strawberries and peaches and grapes are sweeter, the carrots and greens have deeper, fresher and more complex flavors.  Eating here is kind of like doing for your tastebuds what taking out a pair of ear plugs does for your hearing.  Everything is so clear and sharp and gloriously deep and complex.  I didn’t know food could taste this way.  It’s also far healthier than the produce we get at home.

I also believe that restaurants don’t use pre-packaged food like they do in most US restaurants.  I am convinced that restaurant food in the US contains a whole lot of chemicals, and there is really no way of knowing what you’re eating.  Breads and baked goods are especially chemical-laden.  I don’t think that is case here.  Last summer on our trip through the US, we all felt bloated and kind of icky the entire time, no matter how carefully we tried to eat.  That has never once happened to us in the UK after four years’ worth of trips. (This has also been the case in every other country we’ve visited.  The whole entire world has higher quality food than we do.)  In any case, the food in the UK is just BETTER.  Higher quality, cleaner, better standards for products intended for human consumption.

I know that my conservative friends will not like what I say next, but I think this is exactly the kind of thing a government should be used for.  Food producers NEED regulations.  Consumer behavior is unable to address this problem.  For one thing, there are too many instances where a consumer is unable to find out where the food has been sourced.  How is a consumer to know what levels of pesticide residues are allowed in things like imported tea?  Those guidelines need to be MUCH stricter.

For another thing, most people don’t know (or care) enough about nutrition to do this research.  So, people continue buying crappy, chemical-laden products that are making us all fat and sick.  When it comes to food, I think it’s pretty clear that humans, in general, are very, very bad at making good decisions, for a whole variety of reasons — ranging from weak will-power, to ignorance, to lack of money and/or availability of high-quality goods.

I think that by demanding much stricter limitations on what chemicals are allowed in foods on the production/importation end, even if people still want to eat “bad” foods, they will get a much lighter chemical load.  I think this would likely result in an overall healthier populace and lower health-care costs in the long run.  As they say over here, “Every little helps.”   It’s worked here in the UK … it would work in the US, too.

2.) This one fits under the food category also, but I’ll give it a separate line item:  cream.  They use Jersey cows for a lot of their milk and cream, and it’s so good!  Jersey cows produce less milk per cow than Holsteins, which is the most common dairy breed in the US, and this higher production is probably the reason US farmers elected to focus on Holsteins.

The Jersey milk has a higher butterfat content which produces a much richer milk.  (It’s also higher in calcium and protein than Holstein milk.)  The cream and butter from this milk is unbelievably tasty.  My grandma used to bake the best cinnamon rolls in the world (so I’m told … I never got any!) but quit making them because she could no longer get Jersey cream in the US.  According to her, the cinnamon rolls were simply not worth the effort without the Jersey cream.  Yes … it’s that good and makes that much of a difference.  With the amount of cattle land we have in the US, why aren’t some farmers specializing in Jersey herds?  I’d think they could sell that stuff at triple the price of our heavy whipping cream and still have a hard time keeping up with demand.

3.) Sunscreen.  (Fair warning:  this is going to be another slam on the US government, specifically the FDA. I’m not particularly happy with the US FDA.)

The three most safe and effective sunscreen chemicals (aside from zinc oxide, which is a mineral) are Tinsorb S, Tinsorb M, and Mexoryl SX (also known as emcapsule.)  They are especially effective against long-wave UVA rays, which are the ones that cause aging and cancer.

The FDA has approved none of these for the US market, although they are widely available in every other country on the planet.  The reason (from the admittedly small amount of research that I am able to do on the internet) is that the (French) L’Oreal corporation has a patent on at least one of these drugs.  No US pharmaceutical companies are allowed to make them or use them in their products.  Therefore, US companies successfully lobbied the FDA to simply not approve those drugs for the US market.  Problem solved.  They don’t lose their US marketshare because nobody can sell products with those chemicals in them, and the US consumer gets screwed out of a superior product.

This kind of unholy alliance between capitalist interests and the US government is a huge problem.  I think government should be for the people and assume the role of referee or umpire — an official who watches a game or match closely to enforce the rules and arbitrate on matters arising from the play; the entity in charge of making sure everyone plays by the rules, and making sure that the rules are fair.  The good of the people should always be put well ahead of what is good for businesses if there is a conflict of interest between the two.

I think the bottom line is that we’re getting poorer food and poorer sunscreen (and probably poorer other things, as well) because food and pharmaceutical/cosmetic companies want it that way, and our government caters to corporate interests rather than consumer needs.

Anyway, I always stock up on the good sunscreen when I’m out of the US.

3.)  There are precious few “No Trespassing” signs in the UK.  They are a nation of pleasure walkers and hikers, and pretty much all land — privately held or national — is fair game for walking.  As long as you don’t bother the animals or poke into people’s gardens or windows, you can go wherever you want.  There are “public foot path” signs all over the place.  You will have to hop over sheep fences every once in a while, but the beautiful English countryside is available to everyone to enjoy.

4.) Scotland, in particular, wins for friendliest people in the entire world.

5.) As I mentioned in another post, the UK has done a fantastic job of keeping out the big box stores that kill local individuality.  It makes for a much more interesting country to tour through.

6.) The incredible recorded history found here.  It really underscores how very young the US is.  As far as countries go, we are still in the snot-nosed adolescent stage.  I start wincing when I hear Americans talk about the United States being the best country in the world because we simply have not stood the test of time yet.  European history dates back to the BCs, and China has a culture more than 8,000 years old …. ours is 250 years old.  It’s too soon to declare our government/way of life a grand success.  So far it’s pretty good … but lets check back in around 2776 or 3776 to see how our Grand Experiment is holding up before we insist that our way of doing things is the best in the history of the world.

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Later this afternoon:  Isabella’s ankle swelling has gone down quite a bit and she can hobble around over short distances.  We have decided to alter our itinerary a bit.  At the end of July, we have to go back to Edinburgh for our flight back home and can make another pass through this area.  We will try to do the Alton Towers amusement park in a couple of weeks.

Tomorrow we will leave Isabella home by herself (we are in a particularly safe area) while the rest of us go visit some of the local National Trust sites.  We bought the special passes and now can get into all of them for free.  Isabella doesn’t mind missing those things, and the rest of us won’t be stuck in the house.  The following day will mostly be traveling to our next location, so she should get a good 4 days of resting her foot.  Hopefully she’ll be walking more normally by Friday.