A Stonehenge Pitstop

Our time in Mike's homeland of Cornwall was drawing to a close, and by this point we were just mopping up the last couple to-do's on our list before the long drive back to London.

One such minor to-do was a visit to Healey's Cornish Cyder Farm(AKA Scrumpy Town). I've done the whole brewery/distillery/other awesome product factory visit thing quite a few times now, so that's why this was a secondary trip. It was pretty cool but as was becoming the rule, the actual tour of the place cost something. We both agreed that seeing a bunch of apple trees and such was not worth the money so we amused ourselves by wandering around a bit unattended. There was free scrumpy and cider tasting galore, which was a nice way to expand my knowledge of the stuff. I even picked up some scrumpy jam for my mom.

I like to pick up t-shirts from my travels, but only if they look cool on their own. I've suffered through vacation buyer's remorse enough times to be pretty picky about what I buy and lug home. I thought getting a t-shirt with "scrumpy" on it would be completely cool, so I looked through the gift-shop's wares searching for a good one.

This was one of the few I could find that had the magic word on it, with two country looking gents laughing and enjoying some scrumpy. Pretty killer right? I was halfway ready to buy the thing when I read the little caption: "Legless but Smiling". "Legless" in English English means drunk, but among my people it just means "he who has no legs". The fact that the men pictured are only seen from the waist up made the whole thing a little too creepy for me. I'd be doing a lot of explaining if I wore this shirt around town.

Sign for the men's bathroom.

We took one last trip to the grocery store for goodies.

I didn't know what a crumpet was before Cornwall, and I left loving the damn things.

Pork pie sounds like it should be awesome. "Cornish pasties are great", I thought, "so this is probably just like that but with pork". False. First of all, you're supposed to eat them cold. The pie consists of a delicious crust and a meaty delicious pork filling. Separating delicious filling from delicious crust is a very unfortunate layer of pork jelly. Pork jelly that's really congealed due to the fact I was eating it cold. I couldn't finish it.

A really random side note is that in one of my favorite movies ever, Snatch, there's a lot of difficult to understand Cockney Rhyming Slang. In this coded dialect porky pie= lie. Here's a clip where Bullet Tooth Tony warns "you better not be telling me porky pies".

The road from Mike's house to Stonehenge was fraught with dangers.

A very cool and everpresent feature of the Cornish countryside were the hedges. Apparently there is a difference between Cornish hedges and others because they have their own wikipedia page. They are basically stone strutctures with dirt in the center that are covered in grass and plants, and were used to dileneate field boundaries.

Driving on country roads often meant navigating through tall walls of grass.

Well, our good friend Keeble was doing some sort of landscaping for the summer, and so he sounded like he knew more about the hedges than the average dude. He said that the hedges had been certified as a protected habitat, and permission was needed from some level of government in order to destroy one. He also said the grass on them couldn't be cut until the wild flowers had all died in order to preserve hedge species.

Mini-hedges were used to separate people's yards in Mike's neighborhood.

British speed bumps are known simply as "humps". As in, "my humps, my humps my humps my humps". That little blue whirlpool sign is another warning: "Here, There Be Roundabouts".

One feature of driving on the highway in the US is you can pretty much put your brain on autopilot.  You get on the road you need to be on, set a mental timer for the next time you need to make a directional decision, and just zone out. At least that's how I do it, especially when I've done the drive lots of times before. I'm pretty much an expert on the triangle of highways between St. Louis, Edwardsville, and Springfield at this point. I feel like I do a good amount of driving. In the UK, at least In Devon and Cornwall, this is not the way the game is played. This is roundabout country.

So, roundabouts are cute.  There weren't just nice clean intersections like there are in the square cornfields of Illinois. Every time two roads decided to touch, they did it in this whirly spriral of confusion and regret. Yes, Mike had a Garmin navi computer that told us where to go in a hilarious female British robot voice. No, we didn't use it. For whatever reason he had deemed it useless and didn't trust its assistance. We didn't have some highly topical state map to guide us, either. We had this big phone book atlas of the entire country. The kind of book where when you get to the edge of the page it tells you to turn to some other random page to find yourself again. Kinda like a sick game of Choose Your Own Adventure.

Spotty signage made every roundabout encounter stressful and unpredictable. There was yelling.

Stonehenge was guarded on all sides.

When we finally reached our goal, it was really just sitting in the middle of a big field. No visitor center around or anything fancy like that in sight. What was there was a chain link fence around the perimeter of the landmark, with a little path that looped around which was full of tourists. Long story short, I didn't want to pay to get 10 feet closer, and the parking lot cost as well.  So Mike dropped me off, I went and took lots of pictures and gazed at the majestic, ancient stones I'd seen and heard so much about, and then hopped back in the car on his way back. A short bit later we bought a small carton of strawberries from a little table on the side of the otherwise deserted road, and proceeded to eat them and whip the green tops out the window as we went. It was a great day. 

St. Michael's Mount: Castles, Cockles, and More

We joined forces with Mike's friend Keeble who I had the pleasure of meeting back in the Ashikaga, Japan days. And then it was road trip time.

Jammie Dodgers really are Jamtastic.

For Mike, St. Michael's Mount was one of those tourist locations that you live close to but never get around to checking out. Basically it is a castle sitting atop a little island. It has a great view and a lot of good history.

There was a beach, but the wind was cold enough that people set up these little shelters while they laid in the sand. I'm so glad we decided not to go surfing. Hehe

On a couple of occasions I tried to do that thing where you take a picture mid jump and it looks super cool. Mike managed to always take the picture too early though, so I have several of these "me taking a dump" shots in lovely settings.

One thing that was really cool about this place was the walk to the castle. There was a man-made stone walkway that was barely above water. I had a bit of a walking on the ocean feeling after getting a little ways from shore.

This was low tide, so now it just looks like a big mud pit.

There were lots of weird plants around that really looked out of place on dry land.

Mike and Keeble exploring up a storm.

The black field with the white cross is the flag of Cornwall.

While the outside of the place looked awesome, the inside was less compelling at times. Coats of arms, sets of armor, and other pretty standard fare covered many of the interior walls.

The history of St. Michael's Mount was way cooler. According to the website, in 1588 the mount was where the first "beacon was lit to warn of the arrival of the Spanish Armada".

Even earlier than that, the fortress was under siege during the Wars of the Roses. I recently watched the crap out of The Tudors on Netflix and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It gave me a deeper understanding of British history than I had accumulated in my life previously(although it's probably a bit embellished for TV). Some completely awesome characters belonged to the Tudor dynasty such as Henry VIII, Mary I(aka Bloody Mary), and Elizabeth I. In summary the Wars of the Roses were fought between the houses of Lancaster and York over the throne. Their symbols were the red and white rose, respectively. When Henry Tudor scratched his way to the top and married Elizabeth of York from the opposing house, he created the House of Tudor which ruled for 117 years. Because of this the badge for the house became a double rose, combining the symbols of the two previous houses. Pretty cool.

The Tudor rose has been used as the "traditional floral heraldic emblem of England" ever since. Bang.

Former Nazi foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop is rumored to having wished to retire at St. Michael's Mount after wrapping up world domination, and the castle can be seen in 1983 James Bond film Never Say Never Again. What the heck else could you ask for?

There were some interesting pieces of art here and there as well.

Drinking enough wine to then make a scale model of your own house from the corks is the sort of multi-layered accomplishment that really impresses people.

A little chapel in the compound had a couple of my favorite pieces.

I'd like to entitle this work either: "St. Michael says "BOOM"" or "Demons be Trippin'".

I'm not sure this picture does it justice, but this was my favorite thing in the whole place.

The Lantern Cross

This fifteenth-century cross is believed to have been made for the Mount. The good condition of the carvings suggest it was kept indoors, perhaps in the Lady Chapel(now the Blue Drawing Room). It was moved to the balustrade outside the Church door in the nineteenth century, where it stood until 2008.

It is carved from a single piece of stone, probably from Padstow. The pinnacles date from a nineteenth century restoration.

A king, probably Edward the Confessor, who is said to have founded the monastery here (before it was given to Mont St. Michel). He is wearing a crown, and holds a staff and charter or book.

We were finishing up a very thorough tour of this great place, and I'm thinking it's time to check out the gift shops we ignored on the way in, or take a little rest and do some people watching. One of my gallant guides asks a random employee what time it is, and we all started jogging to the exit. Why I couldn't tell you.

Well that awesome walk way we used to cross the bay the first time is above a mud pit at low tide, and completely under the damn ocean at high tide. And the ocean clock was ticking. There were other ways to get back to shore, but they all cost money. And money is for beer. The water wasn't such a big problem when we began our return trip, but before it was over I had to take off my shoes and socks and roll up my pant legs to avoid a squishy afternoon. It's amazing to me how fast the water rises.

The whole thing turned into this epic tourist evacuation, with parents carrying children. Towards the end the waves made keeping my feet on the slippery stones much more difficult. Once we were safely ashore, we turned and watched people deal with the rising water. The last stragglers pretty much had to swim.

Even the damn roof moss here was cool. Bright orange!

View michales mount in a larger map

Next we drove across the thin tip of the island and walked along the pier in touristy St. Ives.

There were lots of seafoods available, and I saw cockles for sale, which I had to try. Not much different than really tiny clams. They seemed to be about half sand though. They were so sandy I was forced to donate them to Keeble, who didn't seem to mind one bit.

Here's a better understanding of the wide range of pasty flavors available.

We ended the night at this super old school pub back in Callington. It was a lot like I imagined a neighborhood pub would be like. Everyone seemed real familiar with each other, and we were the only two under probably mid-fifties. The owner of the places was serving us drinks, and it seemed half the reason he opened the place was so that he would have people to drink with. He was really slurry, but he would constantly refer to the both of us as "my sons" which I can't relate how much I loved. There was a lot of old school Cornish accent happening here which I hadn't heard much of previously. If there's ever been a form of English that I understood less clearly than Japanese, this was it.

So we were having a few and talking about something that I'm sure was profound when closing time approached. Rather than announce "last call" or do something else to induce us to leave, they simply turned most of the lights out and locked the doors, continuing in pretty much the same fashion otherwise. Mike explained that this was pretty standard in small towns, that at official closing time they would have a little "lock in", and that was enough to satisfy the local authorities that they were closed. Closed or not, sitting in close to darkness with a bunch of drunk old locals was plenty uncomfortable, and we soon walked on home.

Cornwall

Mike was kind enough to use a couple of his vacation days while I was in country, and we took the opportunity to drive to his hometown, Callington. He even had a work related meeting in the area, so his employer was covering the gas. Can't hardly beat that. He is a solicitor, which I humorously assumed meant that he was some kind of salesman. The only time we use that word in the US is usually the "No Soliciting" signs in the parking lots of businesses. Well there it means lawyer of some type. It's really complicated, but the practice of law there is divided between solicitors and barristers. I'm not going to go further into it here, but the solicitor wikipedia page explains it in detail.

Anyway, back on topic. Callington is in Cornwall county, and it was a nice change from the noise of London.

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The clothing company Lands' End is named after the western most point of the English mainland, where... the land ends. It happens to be located in Cornwall.

So we packed up the car and hit the road. Just getting out of London seemed to take forever.

St. Pancras railway station


When I told Mike our signs simply read "yield" he thought that sounded too bossy.

The traffic on the highway ground to a halt, and we were a bit hungry by this point, so we decided to take a country road detour and rustle up some food while we were at it. It was at this point I learned that people in these parts had really strict eating schedules. It was around 3, and we likely tried four restaurants and tea houses. All of them were open, and not one of them would serve us hot food. Mike kept calling it "the lacuna" which I assumed meant Twilight Zone, but it means "the gap". Like the hungry, hungry few hours that occur between lunch and dinner. So we had an elegant meal procured from a gas station.

Rarely does a untried flavor of candy bar escape my grasp.

England seems to have completely ditched the old magnetic strip type of credit card in favor of cards with a chip in them that have a matching pin code. At first I was annoyed by my lack of this type of card, but I began to enjoy confounding the locals with my ancient credit card. Most stores had the hardware to accept standard credit cards but on several occasions the staff didn't know how to use it! While trying to buy a sandwich and a candy bar at this gas station I signed my receipt, waited while the attendant compared the signature to that on the back of my card, asked for picture ID, then called her manager over to confirm. "It looks enough like him, he's just shaved his head." OK.

I really enjoyed the scenery on the drive. Cities are one thing, but the country is where real culture is hiding. We stayed on the back roads so long that this trip took longer than flying from Chicago to London.


I was rewarded for my endurance with a delicious Cornish Pasty. It's basically a hot pocket that doesn't make your stomach sad. The traditional ones have steak and potatoes, but there were tons of other flavors. It's hard to say if the pasty has won out over my love of Australian meat pies, but they were damn good anyway.