Eyam, Chatsworth and the Cotswolds

I have recently done a couple of day trips to a few nice places in the English countryside. Yesterday I visited Eyam and Chatsworth in Derbyshire, and a couple of weeks ago I did a whirlwind bus tour through the Cotswolds.

I'll start with the most recent (and freshest in my memory) day out. Yesterday was a bank holiday in the UK so I decided to do a London Walks trip to Derbyshire. I really had no idea what I was getting into, just that I needed to go to St Pancras train station for 8 a.m.

Just going to St Pancras was neat in itself. The station is in the process of being restored and remodeled to become the new home of Eurostar in November this year. I always change trains on the underground here (I think of it as St Pancreas) but I have never actually been to the station and it is quite beautiful already. It will be amazing when it is finished and I will be about 20 minutes closer to Paris.

Luckily I turned up a bit early, some prospective walkers got turned away because so many people joined the tour. We followed our guide(s) Hilary and her husband David onto our train for a two hour journey to Chesterfield, which is in the heart of Derbyshire, north of London. Once we got there we boarded a coach which took us to our first stop, the town of Eyam.

Eyam has the unfortunate moniker of 'the plague village.' It is quite an amazing story actually. During the plagues in the 17th century a merchant accidentally brought the plague up to Eyam and infected the residents. Once the town realized what was going on they took very brave steps to contain it within their town, by doing things like burying people in their own gardens, moving church services to an open field and quarantining themselves from the other villagers. Almost the whole town died, according to wikipedia only 83 survived out 350. We walked around the town and saw the church, the plague cottages (marked with the number of dead family members) and some of us walked up to see one of the boundary stones that marked the edge of the town.

The only bad part about Eyam is that since they were having a festival, the Tea Room was overwhelmed and did not serve us our lunch. We were pretty hungry so we were pretty disappointed when we had to leave early to catch our bus. I guess I didn't really need that Steak pie after all.

Next we moved on to Chatsworth, a huge estate and home to the 12th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. I am not sure why they are called Devonshire when the home is in Derbyshire, but who knows. I guess the Cavendish family owns land all over, including London and Ireland, so it probably doesn't really much matter.

The estate is unbelievably beautiful, not so much for the house but because of the amazing gardens and land surrounding the house. Two head gardeners were pretty much responsible for it all, one guy called Capability Brown in the 17th century, who sculpted amazing landscapes with rolling grass and trees, and another called Joseph Paxton in the 19th century, who took over at the age of 23 and created amazing fountains, conservatories and a wonderful rock garden. While the house was impressive, to be honest it didn't look much different from the different royal palaces I have seen before, even though this one didn't really house kings and queens.

I guess for a time the estate was used as a girls school during world war II and in the middle of our tour we actually ran into a couple of sisters who lived there during the war and had come back for a visit. That was really neat, especially since we found them near a painting of that time.

Like most London walks, Hilary and her guide did an amazing job organising it, entertaining us during the walk and looking after us in general, even running up and down the train carriages to make sure we were all okay. It was a great day out.

The trip to the Cotswolds was equally as fun but a totally different experience. AM found a tour that took us out on a coach and was only 12 pounds...such an amazing deal. This tour was pretty basic, we met near Victoria station, boarded a bit an older bus, and shuttled back and forth between three Cotswold villages. Our guide did read us a bit of background on each place, but basically our main goal was to get as much sightseeing and shopping in as possible at all three spots.

We saw three villages - Burford, Bourton-on-the-Water and Stow-on-the-Wold. We spent the most time in Bourton-on-the-Water, which bills itself as the Venice of England. I haven't been to Venice myself, but I think this is a bit of a stretch. We had a lovely English lunch of fish pie and some very nice wine, which made the last bit of the trip a bit of a blur for me. But I did enjoy the trip and was glad I finally got to see the Cotswolds after a couple years of being here.

Both sets of photos are up on the flickr page - Chatsworth/Eyam and Cotswolds.

The Grand Depart

This year the Tour de France started in London. I have to admit I don't much follow the tour or cycling in general, but it was neat to get to see the racers up close, both parading in and competing in the prologue.

I had no idea this year's tour would turn out to be so controversial. I watched a bit of it in Italy after I sprained my ankle and a few days later the guy who won that stage got kicked off the tour, with several others to follow.

M got to show off his iphone for the friday opening ceremonies - all the photos of riders walking in and riding away from trafalgar square are from the phone. They turned out pretty good and it looks like he even managed to get a picture of the winner.

The photos of the first two days in London, along with some other random photos from that weekend, are posted here.

More about me

I love these cheesy 'get to know you' emails. Thanks to my friend Shirley for forwarding this one.

Four Things you may not know about me....but probably do now:

Four places I have worked:
1. Winchell's Donuts, Carson City, NV
2. Women's International Bowling Congress Tournament, Reno, NV
3. Gold Hill Hotel, Gold Hill Nevada
4. Western Union, Reno NV

Four places I have lived:
1. Cambridge, MA
2. London, UK
3. East Lansing, MI
4. Portland, OR

Four TV shows I love to watch:
1. Frasier
2. Will and Grace
3. Saturday Kitchen (BBC)
4. Countryfile (BBC)

Four places I have been on vacation:
1. Lake Louise, Canada
2. Cancun, Mexico
3. Crete, Greece
4. Salerno, Italy

Four of my favorite foods:
1. sushi
2. ethiopian
3. a really nice cheeseburger
4. caprese salad

Four places I would rather be right now:
1. Italy
2. Portland, OR
3. Thailand
4. Fenway Park

Amalfi Coast Holiday

M and I just spent two lovely weeks on the Amalfi Coast in Italy. It was an amazing place with plenty to see and do, and more importantly for two workaholics, a great place to relax. There is so much to take in and it is a trip I would recommend to just about anyone, although perhaps not in the hottest part of the summer.

I have to admit at first I was a bit intimidated by the whole trip. M had suggested it after seeing a show on the Naples underground on the history channel. I love Italy so it is never hard to convince me to go there. However my only experience in Naples was as a stop on my first train trip through Europe, where we took a couchette car (6 beds in one car) with an Italian lady we affectionately called Madonna who kept getting up to smoke. I remember pulling in late/early on the trip and seeing Naples from the train and thinking, yuck, what a dump. But after talking to some friends and reading about the Amalfi coast I thought it sounded like a brilliant trip. I was really geeked to see Pompeii and the multitude of other archeological sites and the food in the area is billed as the best in Italy, if not the world.

At the recommendation of a very nice Italian woman from a store where I shop in London, we started our trip in Salerno. It was billed as pretty reasonable with very good transport links to the major attractions and my friend even recommended a hotel that was down the street from her aunt.

We flew into Naples late in the evening and took a train from Naples to Salerno. Naples was as I remembered and the whole train station experience was a bit stressful. But eventually we got on the train, which incidentally was the same type of sleeper train I had passed through Naples in before.
We shared a compartment with a guy who turned out to be going to Salerno too. He didn't speak much English but we communicated fairly well with a few struggled words and he let us know when to get off the train, and also let us know that our Hotel K was not pronounced 'K' but kappa. We would have felt like idiots asking the cab driver to take us there...but, as it happens, when we came out of the train station in salerno dazed well after midnight he flagged us over to his 'machine' and gave us a ride to our hotel. It was a very nice start to the trip.

Our first day in Salerno we took the ferry to Amalfi and explored for the day, then took a bus back to the city. The bus ride was an experience in itself, so many windy turns on the mountain road with the bus honking everytime it went around a corner. Many times rows of cars had to stop and/or back up to let us go by. It was treacherous to say the least, but fun to watch from our vantage point.

The next day I was all fired up to go to Pompeii and we got up a bit early to make our way down to the bus. M had bought the tickets and when the bus showed up, he rushed across the street and we both hopped on. But I didn't really hop properly I guess, because I stepped on a sewer grate, and very painfully turned on my ankle, spraining it instantly. I was howling on the bus and we immediately got off. Needless to say, this moment sort of changed the entire tone of our trip.

M helped me hobble back to the Hotel K and propped me up with ice while he went out to the Farmacia to see what was what. He came back with some steriod gel and the recommendation that we go to the hospital. By this time my ankle was huge and already bruising and looked pretty gross. It was really hard to tell if I had broken it because any type of movement was so painful. So we took a taxi to the hospital so I could make sure it wasn't broken.

The hospital was an experience in itself. Hardly anyone spoke English, which is to be expected, but by pointing and handing them my European Insurance Card (thank god I got one of those!), they put me in a wheelchair and checked me in. We spent probably three or so hours there, and had a great time watching the people and the other dramas going on around us. There was a grandmother in a wheelchair moaning and getting catered to by her entire family, a few teenagers who must have been in some kind of car/scooter accident with the boy strapped down to a board and in a neck brace, and a woman screeching and crying at the carabineri, who pulled up with their sirens and tall black boots. There was one nurse/orderly who spoke English so he took me to the X-Ray and told me what was going on...I have to admit when he left at the end of his shift I thought I was screwed. But I finally made it into see the doctor and though he couldn't speak much english, we figured out that my ankle was not broken and that we needed to get me an air cast. To amuse myself while I was there, I started counting t-shirts with English slogans on them. I got up to around 18. I find it interesting that people will wear shirts with something in a language they cannot speak.

So the next several days for us were pretty low key. It really hurt to walk so about all I would do was hobble a few blocks to eat. Luckily there was a great little restaurant on the corner by our hotel and we got to know them a bit, so by the end, they made meatballs especially for us. Ordering was an adventure though. The first day we were there M ordered a pepperoni pizza with artichokes - and got a pizza with pepperoccini and anchovies. It was good though. Pepperoni is definitely an American pizza topping...

Salerno itself was a nice little town, not touristy at all. It has some spectacular ocean views, though the beaches we saw were pretty scraggly. It would have been great for doing more sightseeing - the ferries and buses were amazingly cheap, especially compared to the rest of the area. It was very relaxing to be there without any crowds.

After Salerno we moved on to Sorrento, which was very much the opposite. Sorrento was brimming over with tourists, from when we arrived on the ferry we could tell we were in a different world. Luckily we stayed at a nice place, Mami Camillia's, a cooking school in Sant d'Agnello, a little town up on the hills looking over Sorrento proper. We stayed in a little bungalow and though we didn't learn to cook anything, in the evening we dined family style with all the other guests, eating whatever they had made that day. We had some really nice dishes and it was great because it was stuff I would never have ordered in a restaurant. One night we even had 'burgers and fries' - an amazing beef patty with rosemary potatoes - as our main course. Plus we met a lot of interesting people traveling through. Definitely a fun place to stay.

From Sorrento we finally did get to Pompeii. I sucked it up and dealt with the pain for the day. Though I have to say the pain of my ankle was nothing compared to the heat. I think it was almost 40 degrees centigrade that day and the sun was merciless. There was not much shade and since we got there around 11 am, we were there at the hottest part of the day. We sort of went from shady spot to shady spot and tried to follow what we were seeing with this cheapie guidebook - I should have known better than to buy it from one of the hawkers on the way in. After Pompeii we went into Naples to see the one thing M really wanted to see, the underground.

This was the only time we really spent in Naples and as I expected, it was not really nice. There were piles of trash everywhere and people selling random junk out on the street. We got very detailed phone directions to make it to the underground, which was probably about a 20 minute walk, which seemed like torture in the stifling heat with a sprained ankle. I have to think that under the filth there is probably a very interesting historic city, but i am not sure I have the patience to find out. The underground tour was great though - miles and miles of tunnels that had been used as greek and roman acqueducts, a theatre, trash pits, then finally as bomb shelters in WWII.

From Sorrento we moved on to Ischia for the last few days of our trip, where we stayed at a beautiful five star spa hotel, the Terme Manzi. Ischia was a great little island, big enough to take an hour to get around, but with lovely little pedestrian streets and beautiful harbor views all over. We spent a lot of time lounging at our hotel, where I think we had some of the best service ever. Everyone was so nice and friendly and constantly looking out for you - at breakfast they carried your buffet plates back to your table and whenever you finished something it disappeared before you even noticed. I would highly recommend it. The last night we were there we went to the festival of St. Anna, where basically the entire island turned out to watch a competition for the best 'float' - floating displays with music and skits about the island's history.

As I said earlier, people in the area consider Neapolitan style cooking to be the best in Italy, if not the world, and I have to agree. This is the land of my personal favorite salad, the Caprese, and I had at least a dozen during my time there. The ingredients were so amazingly fresh and I do not think I had a bad meal the entire time. The house wines (in Sorrento homemade wine) was better than most wine I drink in London. The best part was after two weeks of chowing down on pizza and pasta I don't think I gained any weight, in fact it seems like I lost some, which is pretty amazing.

Anyway, it was a fabulous trip and I can't wait to go back. It was absolutely stunning, and there are many more places to see which would be much more accessible with a healthy ankle! All the pictures are posted here.