Author: John Bassett

This morning  we took the Tube into London and went to the National Portrait Gallery. We’d just quickly walked through this museum a couple years ago, and we decided we wanted to do it more completely this time. It’s a wonderful but strange museum. It isn’t really an art museum because quite a few of the portraits there are not great art. And, in a modern sense, it isn’t a history museum, either. We no longer view history as the exploits of a group of heroic people, particularly when almost all of them are male, white, and affluent. But despite these failings, it is still a fascinating place to learn about some people you never knew existed, and to learn a little more about some other than you thought you knew a lot about. We did the audio tour, of course. We like audio tours.

After the museum, we met Vicki and Jerry at the Palace Theatre to see the matinee of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

This was a big hit in Sydney. It’s an adaptation of the movie of the same name about the exploits of three female impersonators traveling through the bush from Sydney to Alice Springs. I think there is some original music in it, but mostly it borrows freely from lots of earlier hit songs. That makes sense for people who specialize in lip synching, I suppose. The special effects are good, and the costumes are utterly amazing and absolutely hysterical. Vicki and Jerry had a great time. I did not expect to like it – being like Mikey, the kid in the old Life cereal commercials who hates everything – but I had a good time, too. Afterwards we had dinner at this neat place called Wagamama. It’s sort of like Noodle Planet in Westwood, but a little nicer and with an alcohol license.

 

It was still light when Jerry drove us home past some of the landmarks of London’s tonier neighborhoods.

We spent today with Vicki and had a lot of fun. We had a leisurely morning feeding the geese in the canals as we drank coffee on the balcony and enjoyed the sunshine.

One of Vicki’s cats was also fascinated by the birds, but he kept a safe distance.

The battery appears to have died on my video camera, so Vicki figured the best place to get a replacement was at a camera shop in the new Westfield’s mall in Shepherds Bush. We did not end up getting a new battery, but the shopping center was impressive for its size and the affluence of its shops. It is the size of South Coast Plaza or one of those huge Chicago suburban malls, but much of the shopping suggested Hong Kong or Dubai boutiques. There was an undulating ceiling with panes of glass in it to let in some natural light, but that was the only token nod to the environment.

Westfield’s London is built like a huge fortress mostly accessible from the massive parking structure below. Transport for London – the new name for the regional transportation agency – had made a new tube stop, but it was not inside the mall itself but at least 500 feet from the structure. We had lunch there was a Japanese place with the fastest conveyer belt of multicolored sushi dishes I’ve ever seen.

We spent the afternoon at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew in Richmond. It was a perfect, perfect day and the flowers were in full bloom. I was at Kew about 20 years ago on a rainy May day. I was not much into plants at the time, and I do not remember being all that impressed. Yesterday was completely different.  There is such an amazing variety of beautiful plants here.

Besides taking pictures of plants, we had a lot of fun taking pictures of ourselves and each other.

One picture I did not take was of the tree in a cage! It is an Australian tree thought to have been extinct for 200 million years or something. As a Millennium Seed Bank site Kew is helping to grow some samples to revive the species. There are lots of kid-friendly exhibits as well: this would be a fun place for a field trip, er, “school journey.”

Jerry, Vicki’s husband, came home this evening. He’s working in Leeds during the week where he stays at a small bed and breakfast which he says reminds him of an updated version of Fawlty Towers. Since he grew up in Belgium and northern France, he helped us plan out next week’s adventure in Normandy.

Day Two was devoted to walking around London, sometimes in decent weather. John was feeling better, and we drove the car to Boston Road Station to catch the Tube. He almost always stayed on the left side of the street!

We started our day in Leicester Square at TKTS, the half-price ticket booth. John was determined to see a play, but the tickets available were all for shows we had either seen or had no real desire to see. It started raining fairly heavily as we were waiting around figuring out what to do, and I began to think that this day was going to be a disaster.

We decided to do two audio walking tours we downloaded from Audible. The first was of “Royal London” which explored the old palace quarter around Saint James’s Palace. We started out at Saint James’s Church, a Christopher Wren building right in the heart of the area. Here is John standing outside of the outdoor pulpit there.

Apparently there was not always enough room inside the church so people stood outside and listened to a sermon there. It was another era, one with no TV….

There interior of the church has some beautiful touches such as the intricate woodwork of the reredos and the peculiar baptismal font with the near-naked figures of Adam and Eve. William Blake was baptized here.

Still, I could tell that millions of pounds were needed to restore the church to its seventeenth century grandeur, and I wondered if they would ever successfully raise it.

The audio guide next took us by a whole bunch of little shops with names like “Jopps”. All of these places had been making hats or boots or gloves ever since 1600 or so. They all had a sign saying something like “By Appointment to Her Majesty the Queen”. John thought this one had a particularly intriguing name.

We went into Fortnum and Mason, the store which traditionally provided the aristocracy with overpriced groceries. The interior was somewhat grand with a large circular stairway.

We found a statue of Beau Brummel, the dandy who scandalized polite society by wearing only black and white.

We passed by a number of former and current clubs for aristocrats. This one supposedly is the place where Ian Fleming apparently came up with the inspiration for James Bond.

Speaking of Bond, James Bond, John was absolutely certain he saw Daniel Craig, the latest actor to play that part in the movies, as we walked down a particularly high-priced street. Alas, we are not good paparazzi and did not get a picture of him.

We saw the old Saint James’s Palace and saw where Princess Diana’s body was laid in state before the funeral. It is a pretty unimpressive Tudor place. No wonder they built a few new ones. We passed by Buckingham Palace and Clarence House. Of course, we stopped to take a picture of the Coldstream Guards.

By this time, the weather had changed completely and it was actually warm and sunny. So we took a break on the lawn at Saint James’s Park. It had nice views of the tourist attractions.

After we had rested a bit, we walked back towards Leicester Square to start our second audio tour. On the way back, we passed The Banqueting House and we stopped in to look. Now with this name most of us probably think of some all-you-can-eat buffet, but The Banqueting House is actually the only remaining part of Whitehall Palace, the largest royal palace in the world before it burned down. This section was used for formal receptions, not for eating. It was commissioned by Charles I, and he had Peter Paul Rubens do the ceilings. They are magnificent.

The paintings strongly suggest the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, so it is probably no surprise that Cromwell chose this spot as the place for executing King Charles. The pictures were the last things he looked at before he was lead out to the street and his head was severed from his body.

We passed by Trafalgar Square when John caught this lovely picture.

Our second tour was of the Soho area. It was not as well done as the first one and was kind of hard to follow at points. But we did seem some interesting stuff. We started at Leicester Square and went through Chinatown. London’s Chinatown is not as extensive or as interesting as San Francisco’s, but it is picturesque in places.

We saw the Carnaby Street area, famous from the 60’s. The audio tour did take us to a couple places we otherwise would not have seen. We went inside a fairly uninteresting Catholic Church where a side chapel had been decorated by Jean Cocteau.

And we came across the Broad Street Pump, the source of the 1854 cholera outbreak which killed thousands in London. I read a book about this called The Ghost Map and told John about every detail of how cholera is spread and kills you. I did this while we were in rural Indonesia, just so every time his delicate tummy was upset he would be convinced he was about to die horribly.

When our tour was over, we took the Underground back to Brentford. We had fish and chips for dinner. We had to beg some malt vinegar for the chips from the neighbors. Vicki only had balsamic vinegar – hardly the same!

We arrived safe and mostly sound.

The plane ride was uneventful. It was the first time, I think, that I’ve been on a flight where the lead pilot was a woman. I was really surprised by the number of Middle East folk who were on the flight. Everybody was apparently going back to Beirut after this.  I guess this is not unusual for Virgin — the little screen on the back of the seat not only told you where the plane was over the Atlantic, but what direction to turn to for Mecca at any given moment. I did not, however, see anybody with a prayer mat in the aisles however.

We landed in Terminal 3 at Heathrow. It was a dump when I was last here, and it’s still a dump. We spent about 45 minutes in the line for Immigration. The line for UK/EU nationals was even worse. John’s stomach was deeply troubled – evidently taking an Ambien to help you sleep and eating every last thing the airline gives you is not a good combination – and he had vomited in the bathroom before we had left the plane. I was pretty certain that they were going to spot him as having Swine Flu and send us off to some Ellis Island type quarantine, but when we finally hit the immigration officer he was so busy stamping things that he never even looked up.

We picked up the car at Hertz. We are not really going to need a car all that much, but British Rail is not only so awful but so expensive that a 4 day pass cost more for the two of us than renting a car for three weeks. Driving into Brentford – Google Maps really does fantastic directions, so much better than Mapquest – John really started to get sick. Two times while we were stopped at a red light on the A4 he opened the car door and vomited. I wondered what folks in the car behind us were thinking, but Vicki says that binge drinking is so prevalent in England that people are puking all the time. After a couple hours more the tummy was quiet and he ate his dinner with the usual voracity.

Our second day in Ashland began with a trip to the dog park for Edie. Unfortunately, no other dogs were around yet so we looked about and strolled back to the Blue Moon Bed and Breakfast. Edie had her usual kibble while John and I enjoyed a really tasty little cheese souffle. We had some interesting company at the table. Most were members of one family who had gathered in Ashland from different parts of Oregon and California. There were two clergymen, one Episcopal and the other Methodist, and a several teachers. I think the priest was a professor at Oregon State. Anyhow, it was a group where you could be certain that nobody had ever voted for George Bush or supported the Iraq war for evening a nanosecond.

We had nothing planned until The Tempest that evening. John looked in our dog hikes in Oregon book and found one that seemed good to him. It was a hike around some lake a little south of Jacksonville. So we set off in the car. We stopped for a bit in Jacksonville. When I saw the town I remembered that Ellen and I had come here with Naida one day while John was taking classes. It seemed a little bigger than I remembered it, and more conservative, too. I saw a couple of those “This car will be unmanned in case of Rapture” and when we asked the lady at the visitor center if there was a bookstore in town we were directed to “Discount Christian Books.” Now there’s the Republicans for you: not just tacky religion, but tacky religion on the cheap.

The lake hike was a bit of a disappointment. First of all, we should have realized that in this area any large body of water is likely to be a reservoir, and these are just not as attractive as real lake. We strolled around for a bit, and John and Edie got wet. We got turned around at one point, and John, who really wasn’t wearing the best shoes for this kind of hiking, just announced that he’d had enough. We hadn’t done much of the trail, but frankly it did not seem all that wonderful so I did not protest that I wanted to stay and do all three hours of it.

We tried to look for the book John had lost at a bookstore in Ashland. Much of the main part of town had been shut down and cordoned off by the police, and this made traffic incredibly slow and parking a bit challenging. We learned later that it was because a phony bomb had been left by the statue of Abraham Lincoln. It had a note connected to it saying that it was a fake, but the police called in the bomb squad as usual. We didn’t find the book John wanted, but ended up buying a couple others instead.

John took Edie and me back to the room, and he went off to the grocery store to get stuff for an early dinner. All three of us ate and took naps, and we went off to see the play.

It was a traditional presentation of The Tempest, but quite well-done. The actor who did Prospero was particularly good. One of the problems with the play is that there’s so much exposition about the events which happened in Milan and Naples and then all the stuff with the shipwreck. I’ve seen this part handled a little more creatively than they did in Ashland, but once Act I is over it picks up a bit. They did a Cirque du Soleil style act with acrobats on ropes for the illusion that Prospero creates for Miranda and Ferdinand — that could have been cheesy but worked well.

John had left yesterday open, since we had only about forty miles to cover between Grants Pass and Ashland and no commitments in Ashland until 8:30 in the evening. He looked through the dog book, and noticed that there was a rafting company nearby which took dogs on its tours down the Rogue River. It seemed like a fun thing to do, so in the morning we gave them a call.

They did indeed still have space on that day’s excursion, and they gave us directions to finding the landing. They wanted payment by cash or check, so I went to Bank of America while John packed up the room. We did have a little difficulty getting on the 5 freeway and finding the place to meet out guides, but we were only a few minutes late.

Our guide was a tall young man named Wade who was accompanied by a Labrador Retriever named Junior. Our other passengers were a family from Simi Valley with two pleasant teenage daughters. As is typical, we exchanged lots of useless personal information. Our guide was an aspiring theater teacher who had gone to school in Eugene where he had studied linguistics. The two girls went to an all-girls Catholic high school in Simi. Despite the hat, dad did not go to USC. And so forth….

Edie tried playing with Junior, but he seemed a bit older and though friendly was not really playful. She did get in the boat without too much fuss, and when we pushed off she seemed calm and quite happy with all the attention she was getting. She did get a little nervous when we hit our first whitewater, but she seemed fine. After about an hour of drifting down the river we got off to explore a bit and well, relieve ourselves. This was when we had our only real problem with her. She got off the boat and ran around, but she did not want to get back on the boat. In fact, when we pushed off, she jumped out and ran back on shore!

After about three hours or so, we pulled in again and here the Simi Valley family left us. They had only signed up for the half day adventure. We thought about this, but it seemed kind of dumb since the full day was only twenty dollars more. We were joined here by another dog, Popeye, a big yellow dog who seemed to be some kind of wolfhound and shepherd mix. Edie was intimidated by him, as she often is by larger dogs, but there were no problems. So three people and three dogs continued on the down the river.

We stopped again about ten minutes later at a particularly picturesque bend in the river to have lunch. Here Edie and Popeye made friends quickly, and they chased each other around the lawn having the best time. Poor Junior looked a little jealous as if remembering his own youth. At one point while John was lying down on the grass the two dogs jumped over him while chasing each other! Ah the moments when the camera was somewhere else.

We continued on down the river. We had a small kayak attached to our float, and John decided to take some of the rapids by himself. He did pretty well for the most part, but landed in the water in the end. I had a good time with the camera, but decided not to save the least flattering pictures. The weather was strange. At times it was quite hot, and then for a while it was raining. John pulled a trash bag over him, and he sort of looked like a cross between Darth Vader and a nun.

We met the owners of the operation on our ride back. Ferron was an old hippy still wearing tie-died tee shirts and driving a VW van. His wife was a genial woman from Marblehead who had not lost one bit of her “no-ath show-uh” accent. We paid our bill and headed on into Ashland. Edie fell asleep right away.

We found our bed and breakfast without much problem. It’s not far from the dog park — a definite plus, and it’s a pretty spacious little cottage with a full kitchen attached to the rest of the house. It’s been put together cheaply but with some sense of style: maybe we can call it “Homo Depot.” We rested and cleaned up, and partially unpacked our stuff. John took a short nap. I discovered the fastest Internet connection of our trip so far.

We went to the local coop market and found stuff for dinner. The first time I went to this place it was still quite funky and had better politics than produce; now it seemed more like Whole Foods or another high-end organic market. We sat outside the theater to watch the free show on the green. It was the usual sort of thing: people singing madrigals while a small group of dancers incongruously pranced around in a sort of amateur homage to Martha Graham. I did not pay much attention to it.

The main offering of the night was On the Razzle, an adaptation by Tom Stoppard of some nineteenth century Austrian farce which was the inspiration for The Matchmaker and Hello, Dolly. Theater critics were pretty dismissive when it was first produced twenty-five odd years ago, and it is hardly Stoppard’s best work. I found myself drifting in and out during the first act. There’s some clever writing here, but it’s not quite as clever as it thinks itself to be. A really smart elementary school kid would love it.

Miss Edie was happy to see us when we came home, and I was asleep in no time, and according to the complaints received, evidently snoring quite loudly.

I felt much better this morning! I wonder what caused that feeling of weakness and fatigue yesterday. Was it just allergies? Taking too much Claritin? Whatever….

We had another pleasant breakfast in the dining room at the Inn with Edie by my side. Well, I suspect I enjoyed it more than Edie did who seemed to find it pretty boring. I had the same breakfast of Egg Benedict with mushrooms instead of bacon that I did yesterday, and once again it was pretty good. We returned to the room and packed up. I checked carefully for anything plugged into the wall since I did not want to leave something here. We paid the bill (gulp!) and headed up the road.

Since the day was pretty we decided to hug the coast as much as possible. We skipped through Fort Bragg, feeling like we had pretty much done it yesterday, and continued on. We stopped for a while at a beach about half an hour north of town so that Edie could get out and romp around a bit. She had a great time, and got completely wet a couple times running through unexpectedly deep water. She seemed to not mind getting wet, though. There was even another dog there for her to play with for a bit.

We continued on through some parts of Highway 1 that I don’t remember ever seeing before. Maybe it was the sunshine that made the scenery look so unfamiliar. After a while Highway 1 merged into the 101 as we went past the Lost Coast and through the redwood parks. We stopped in Crescent City for gas. We briefly checked out staying there for the evening, since the weather was so unusually lovely, but none of the hotels that appealed to us took dogs and the one or two that took dogs were pretty unappealing.

We continued up US 199 towards Grants Pass. It was for the most part a very pretty drive. There were some parts where I noticed quite a few dead trees. I wonder if this is more problem with the bark beetle? We considered staying the night somewhere along the way, but no place really appealed to us. So we continued on into Grants Pass to a place recommended in one of the dog books.

We found the Riverside Inn without too much difficulty. It’s not quite as nice as the book made it sound, but it does have a nice location right on the banks of the Rogue River. We unpacked and then took a walk down to the river. Along the way we saw some white wino (a classic bum) sprawled out unconscious on the path. We walked across a WPA-era bridge and explored a small city park on the other side of the river. We ate supper at a mediocre Mexican restaurant where we heard the most astonishing display of white trash family relationship outside of the Jerry Springer show. It was so hard not to laugh out loud at lines like “I’ve been taking the last two weeks off work.” “I know. It’s your community service the court ordered.” I only wished I could have seen the pictures of the new trailer (evidently at least a double-wide) or known just how huge the still fat girl had been before she lost all the weight.

We strolled through the “historic” quarter of Grants Pass before returning to the hotel room.