Butler Family Travels

Vacation from our vacation? Yes, yes it was. Tons of fun. Thank you, Sakakinis!  

Bath is beautiful.  I followed Sarah around all day. The scenery was nice also. They (Rebekah and Sarah) went to charity shops, a fashion museum and then revisited the charity shops again.  Actually, Levi and I didn’t follow to the fashion museum.  We went to a pub to read the paper and have a drink.  Oh yeah, we kicked some pigeons around.

I am a lifelong fan of the writing of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis, but these three gems have shaped who I am and my day to day behavior and attitudes more than any other non-inspired writing.  Our first day driving through the English countryside awakened a resolve to reread them as soon as possible.  Thankfully our hosts here in England own a set and over the last week I did so.  This firmly set our visit to Oxford, home of both these authors, into the category of pilgrimage. “My happiest hours are spent with 3 or 4 old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs.”-CS Lewis. This is how we approached our day in Oxford.  A visit to Lewis house at the Kilns, lunch at the Eagle and the Child and dinner at The Turf with an appropriate amount of wandering about the streets and bookstores of Oxford made a perfect day.

Sarah the Logistics Queen had quite a load of work arranging visit dates and the transport between them for the last bit of our trip.  As time draws shorter, arrangement of the last destinations becomes more interconnected, so a flurry of research and reservations have been necessary. Visits to England, Prague, Amy in Hamburg, Therese, Tobias and kids in Ostersund, and Sofia and the girls in Stockholm, then our final departure from Paris are finalized and the kids and I are so grateful for a Queen who has cheerfully accomplished it for us!

We are learning that the attempt to see and do it all can be counterproductive to our desire to experience a place.  Making a list of the things we would like to do or see before arrival in a city or place is helpful.  Especially if we then do just barely enough of those activities to keep us occupied until our next appointment with a pub.

We caught the train early in the morning from Basingstoke to Waterloo Station – just a 40 minute ride and we were in the heart of the city where England swings like a pendulum do Bobbies on bicycles, two by two Westminster Abbey, the tower of Big Ben The rosy red cheeks of the little children –Roger Miller The last part was particularly true! I have to say that it was so much fun taking Jeb and the kids into London, a place I have been many times. In fact, I spent part of a summer in London the year I met Jeb. It isn’t an overwhelming city as long as you figure out the metro and what you want to see. By now, we are quite museumed out so we chose just a thing or two to see like the wing in the National Gallery featuring the likes of Monet, Serat, Manet, and Van Gogh. What else does one do in London? Go to the theater of course! How could we not see Monte Python’s Spamalot in the land of King Arthur and his Knights? London was one of the places where I booked a hotel in advance since I knew it would be very late by the time we got out of the play. We did arrive late to the hotel. The power was out and they had forgotten to make the second and extra bed, which actually didn’t even exist. The nice lady who was working the counter couldn’t even find extra blankets – strange since it was a nice place. Politely, we demanded our money back the following morning (because of the bed situation, not the power outage) and they actually gave it all back. Wow! What did we do with an extra 60 pounds in our pockets? Go to the movies in Leicester Square, eat out, and shop at Harrods where we didn’t actually buy anything, but had a great time looking. Can you believe Levi didn’t even want to go in? “Do we have to shop?” It didn’t take more than an escalator ride and Harrods had him spellbound. He was the one that we had to pull away.

“Cheers, lovely, smashing!” Yep. We are in England and they really say it just like that. At least the elderly lady beside me said it as she was handed a hot coffee. We went to church with the Sakakinis on Mothering Sunday and had coffee and cake after the service. Mothering Sunday is the European version of Mother’s Day, but it is celebrated throughout Europe on the 4^th Sunday of lent and is rooted in Christianity more than greeting card marketing. It is a day when you take a break from “fasting” and enjoy a slice of delicious Simnel Cake, a traditional confection served on Mothering Sunday. It is fruity with a marzipan layer in the middle and top. Rebekah helped decorate theirs. The rounds balls on top represent the 11 apostles. And, just like in America, flowers were handed out, mothers were honored, and florists made a small fortune. As you’ll see in the photos, Old Basing is a wonderfully quaint town – very old with a long history.

Finding lodging each place we go always proves to be an adventure. We’ve booked places in advance and had the dates all wrong. We’ve showed up cold turkey other places and found better prices than if we had booked. You just really never know. One thing is always the same, however, and that is that when we are “shopping around” for a place to stay, we’ve learned to ALWAYS pick the place with the nice people regardless of price. We do learn and on the occasion of arriving on the Isle of Bute, we went from B&B to hotel to B&B. We chose Battery Lodge on the waterfront because the lady of the house seemed so nice. We are glad we did! Lorraine and Martin were wonderful hosts, lighting the fire at night, letting us use the big, old kitchen for preparing food, and best of all, taking Rebekah out to the farm to have a ride on their horse, Finn, an honest to goodness English hunting horse. The Lady Bute (wife to the 7^th Marquess of the Stuart Mansion) even hires the horse a few weeks a year to ride on her private mansion grounds. http://www.mountstuart.com Totally cool! Lorraine and Martin, if you are reading this post, we want to thank you again for such a lovely stay.

Turns out we traveled to England so that Sarah and Rebekah could go to the thrift store.  Here they call them charity shops and they are everywhere.  Starbucks and McDonalds don’t have a prayer in the race to be on every corner.  Who wants to see Stonehenge or the tower of Big Ben when there is another charity shop just right there?!

Purpose is medicine for a family habitually driven to do something!  Don’t misunderstand, while we are sure that the passive intake of tourism is therapeutic for us, change of pattern is also difficult. One of our goals in the UK was to visit the Isle of Bute in Scotland.  Sarah’s great, great Grandfather Peter Barr, owned a smokehouse and fishmonger shop in Rothesay that was, and is a successful venture. His son Duncan helped develop the Rothesay Golf Club’s course and was its professional. Our adventures on the journey north from London via the left side of the highway, although extremely stressful for the driver, involved no damage to the car.  We sought lodging at an Inn in a little town that appeared deserted. With the exception of one man on the sidewalk smoking and talking to his phone, we had to assume that in Scotland also, the inhabitants are mainly occupied with Netflix on a Sunday evening. Pulling the pub’s door for Sarah proved us completely wrong.  The place was loudly packed full of Scots, still in their church clothes, preparing for a new week.  We pushed in, contemplated how long we might have to wait just to ask the bar/innkeeper about a room, then returned to the car laughing at how we had just stepped out of the scene of a movie and discussing with the kids how we might be able to bring this bit of culture back to Plain.   After a very pleasant night at a B&B on the mainland, we caught a ferry to the Isle of Bute. We brought our hostess’ greetings to her brother in law who, it turns out, is one of the two employees of Ritchie’s.  Peter Barr opened his fish shop in 1888, operated it for 68 years, and sold it to the Ritchies in 1956. The store changed hands again last year and is now owned by Lord Bute.  Alistair, who was very hospitable, sold us some salmon and invited us to meet him at the smokehouse after lunch. The smoke house has remained unchanged over the 125 years that it has been in operation.  They burn the sawdust of recycled scotch whiskey barrels under racks of fish, and our lunch confirmed that the resulting product is delicious! Rothesay Golf Club, it seems, doesn’t see many visitors during winter.  There was, however, an older gentleman on the practice green who asked if he could help us.  He had read of Duncan Barr in a book and told us that he was playing a round in the morning and that someone might be around to help us if we came back then.  At 9:30 we returned to find a whole group of folks interested in meeting Duncan Barr’s great granddaughter.  They had held a meeting of the club membership the night before to discuss our visit and determined that they would like us to play a round courtesy of the club.  They had also dug into the storeroom and found old blueprints of the course revisions that had been done by Duncan Barr along with the history book of the club that was mentioned earlier.  The hospitality of the http://www.rothesaygolfclub.co.uk/ and our round of golf there was wonderful. The weather that day was one of the most beautiful during our entire stay in the UK!  One of the fellows also remembered seeing the gravestone of Sarah’s ancestors down in the church yard and was able to point us in the right direction to visit it and the home in which the Barrs had lived. So after two days honest toil and discovery of roots accomplished, we return to the life of leisure.  Westminster Abby, everyone?