England

As summer winds down, I figured I should probably get around to blogging our Europe trip.  Well here it goes...

The plan was to fly into Heathrow then jump on a train south to close to Jess and Gerrard's, but when the airline was looking for someone to bump, we of course volunteered.  Instead of going straight to London from Chicago, we would go to Amsterdam then to London arriving only 40 mins later.  In return, we got to fly FIRST CLASS and got a $400 travel voucher with the airline!  Sweet... until the plane headed for Amsterdam spent an hour and a half on the tarmac.  We of course missed our connection and our train in London.  We've had some interesting luck with air travel lately!

We finally made it onto a train and here's where I admit my nerdiness.  All I could think about was Harry Potter.  Unfortunately the train looked nothing like in the movies, but to my great delight there was a food trolly that passed by.

But enough about the travel.

It was so nice to meet Julian's sister and her family.  They were so very welcoming and warm.  They live in this great cottage called Blue Haze Cottage.  I can't believe we didn't manage any pictures of it, but I did find it on Google Maps.  I don't know if this will work, but here's the link.

We had such a good time exploring the area.  We went down to a World Heritage Site on the coast.  Multiple layers of rock are visible in the cliffs along the English Channel, testament to the relentless progression of time through the millenia.  There were lots of school groups admiring this lovely geology while we were there.

What kind of trip to Europe would it have been without a trip to a castle?

My favorite outing was to the church fete (pronounced 'fate' for all us Americans).  Basically, a fete is a church fair that serves as a fundraiser.  Jess' family helps out each year at the fete coming up with different booths or stations or whatever you want to call them.  Jules and I got to help with this year's activities.  I helped touch up the paint on some plastic fish that were for a little kids' fishing game.  Jules got in on the big project.  In the course of one morning Gerrard, Jules, Nigel and Jeff (the two oldest boys) made this.

It was a huge hit at the fete.

The other huge hit at the fete was a type of raffle.  For a pound, you picked 5 raffle tickets out of a bingo tumbler.  If any of your numbers was a multiple of 5, then you were a winner.  You went over to a table and found the item which had the same number as yours.  Now, the great part of this raffle was that 95% of the prizes were alcohol!  I guess that's not normal, usually you have a variety of things like stuffed animals and other random things you think of as carnival prizes.  I think that the guys got a bit addicted to this game.  We ended up with oh... about... 10 bottles of alcohol ranging from wines to whiskey to cider.  Julian was the big winner of the day.  He won his very own bottle of ironing water!

Picnic on the beach!

 (the water was freaking cold - lucky we had some rubber dinghies along) 

All in all, our time in Shipton Gorge was much too short.  We had a fantastic time and would love to go visit again tomorrow if we could.