I have pre-prepared this entry. We have two sea days as we travel from Southampton to Norway, following this route:
Today was the start of the next cruise, to the Norwegian Fjords, with Lynn's relatives Tom and Jacqui. That meant we had to get four people from Herne Bay to Southampton with suitcases and the only practical way was by taxi, pre-booked for £300. This is an extraordinary amount of money, but the train would be awkward, very long, and considering the prices of long distance trains, not much cheaper. The trip was a fair way across the country and took about four hours.
It was a very boring trip, broken by a stop at the services. This seems a very English thing, a cluster of food shops and service stations arising from their reliance on motorways. The traffic is always awful, including on motorways, but every other road is narrow, having been developed before the modern population pressures, and so completely inadequate.
Anyway, we got to the Queen Elizabeth II terminal and we're embarked in an efficient, industrial process based on the system used for livestock carriers.
Our cabin is adequate, if a bit dreary.
We have watched the safety video on the cabin tv and been checked off at the muster station. So I'll stop now, as presumably I'll lose signal once we're some way off the coast.
We really didn't do much today. It was another one of those transition days, being taken up by washing, ironing and packing before our next trip tomorrow. So I have little to say. Labelling the post 'Swalecliffe'is a bit of a satretch. It's an area midway between Herne Bay and Whitstable, Tom dropped me off there late morning and I walked back along the seafront. This got me out of Lynn's way while she did much of the packing.
So I also don't have photos of anything new, these are familiar things I've walked past before, added here to brighten up the post.
Today's outing was to the Shepherd Neame brewery in Faversham, the oldest brewery in England. Faversham is a shortish drive towards London, and in the pleasant weather it seemed to be a lovely old market town - there's one of those old market buildings in the centre, open at the bottom with a closed building above it.
The brewery itself occupies about a block and the tour was pretty long. I suppose if you have to pay they feel obliged to give you your money's worth.
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| Safe in our high-vis vests. |
At the conclusion we staggered around the corner to one of the many local Shepherd Neame owned pubs for lunch.
Today we were back to visiting historic sites, with a trip to Scotney Castle, near Tunbridge Wells. Unfortunately it was grey and rained lightly all of the time we were out, but this seemed kind of appropriate for the setting.
There is a ruined 14th Century castle on a lake - the old castle. When the new castle (actually a stately home) was built in the 19th Century, the extensive and beautiful gardens were designed in the picturesque style which was based on landscape paintings and the old ruin because a deliberate beauty spot. We wandered around and also had lunch in the inevitable tea rooms.
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| The new castle |
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| Distant View of the Old Castle |
A very brief and unillustrated entry today. Late morning we drove up to Erith, in South East London and visited a couple of Lynn's old friends, then back again. It was cold and windy.
Another short post. The aftermath of the family function was that people hadn't planned to do much today. In the morning Lynn and I walked down to Reculver Towers - it was fine, but very windy. Then in the afternoon we sat around and watched the football.
I suppose it was inevitable that Lynn would catch up with the rest of her family eventually, and that happened today. A horde of people, of various relationships, descended in the afternoon and stayed for hours. Admittedly most of them were very pleasant people and the time passed.
Should I include here a series of photos showing various combinations of people, lined up in the kitchen with Lynn? Perhaps that's not necessary as their importance, at least to me, is really just a function of their relationship to her rather than in themselves. Instead I shall inclue a photo I took earlier; while others were preparing for the family gathering I walked from Hampton Pier along the seafront back to the house.
This can be brief because we're in a domesticated routine now. The difference today was that Lynn went grocery shopping with Jacqui this morning, so Tom and I went to Rochester Castle and Cathedral. The Castle, built in the 11th cewntury, is in a sizeable bailey. It looked like just a stone shell, but there was quite a lot to see because there are spiral staircases up in each corner. And from half way up the thick walls are hollow, with corridors running through them which formed galleries onto the central halls.
The adjacent cathedral was good too. Much less gold and appalling crucifictions than the catholic ones in Portugal.
The morning was spent in Herne Bay.
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| A Robin. They're Orange. |
Then our outing today was to Chartwell, near Sevenoaks, the home of Winston Churchill from the 20's until his death. There were the obligatory tea rooms, and then the house, which was large but homely and comfortable, and extensive gardens, a mix of formal and wild with several lakes.
Lynn's Birthday.
Her favourite pastime is, of course, laundry, and this worked out well because we had a fair bit to do after our weeks in Portugal. I escaped out the back door and went for a walk.
But it can't all be fun, so in the middle of the day we drove the hour to the wharf at Folkestone. The tide was right out, which left the boats stranded on the mud until the water came back in mid-afternoon. The is a decomissioned railway line all the way to the wharf that has been turned into a garden.
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| White Cliffs of Dover |
We had an extremely good seafood lunch at Rocksalt, a restaurant cantilevered out over the harbour, then drove back through the winding country lanes.
The last day of our Douro cruise. This went with the usual routine, cruising further west in the morning, back through a couple of locks. However we had to use this time to sort and re-pack our clothes, which was a drag.
The good thing about the timing is that I think we've reached the end of our patience with organised tours. Well, I have, Lynn never had any patience for it. The guides talk incesantly in the bus when I want to listen to my podcasts and Lynn is reading. Then they talk in detail about every picture and piece of furniture, things we'll never remember, just to give the impression they've earned their money.
Anyway, we went to Guimaraes, another pleasant town, this one with a castle/palace on top of the hill (again, not much different there).
We walked down the sloping paved streets and through a few squares into the centre of town and then wandered for some of the afternoon, stopping for a coffee.
Today fitted the common rhythm of sailing along in the morning and going out in the afternoon. We reached Peso da Regua about the middle of the day after a couple more locks, and immediately were put on buses to go to another quinta.
This one specialises in muscatel, which doesn't have a bad name here and is drunk frequently as an aperitif. It was a large winery and an impressive set-up. There are about a hundred passengers on our boat, and they already had two different restaurants with coach groups going. So tourism, and probably these river cruises, are big business. The food was meant to be authentically Portugese, and based on our limited experience this was probably right: it included bacalhau (fried cod-and-potato cakes), pork, and the main dish was mostly meat and potato. We haven't found the food particularly interesting overall, but Lynn said the wine today was better than in most other places.
It is now the evening and we have escaped from a fado performance. The music is okay, but they're very earnest in a folk/beat-generation kind of way and I can hear it still going on now.
Today ended up being fairly slow-paced. We expected to get back to Pinhao by mid-morning but there was a hold-up getting through a lock because water levels are unusually high and this led to concerns by the lock authority (I don't understand what about). So we had a restful morning watching the scenery. On getting to Pinhao we went for a walk and saw the tiled murals at the little railway station. Pleasant ratehr than impressive.
After lunch we had an excursion to Lamego, a medieval town a short distance away. Unfortunately the guide talked the entire way, which was irritating, and we stopped listening to him as soon as we were able. One of the things the town is famous for is the Our Lady of Remedies church and the baroque steps leading down to the town. After a look at the church we walked down the steps and along the main plaze through town. We stopped at the cathedral and then at the museum, but I will spare you pictures from the inside of any more churches because they are both impressive and indistinguishable.
A long day today (after a few quite lazy days). We were on the bus at 7am for the two hour trip to Salamanca - first winding up, out of the valley, then across fairly flat green plains marked by scattered stork nests on constructed poles.
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| Stork Nest on a Church Tower |
Salamanca turned out to be a beautiful university city full of medieval yellow sandstone buildings and an immense gothic cathedral. We got a fairly painless guided tour then wandered the streets for a couple of hours.
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| Plaza Mayor |
We spent most of the day continuing up the river. The river seems to be flowing quite quickly, but the ship makes good speed. We climbed three dams with each lock nearly as high as the one yesterday, so the process has become almost commonplace. We spent much of our time just watching the valley go by, with vineyards gradually coming to predominate over the forest. The river is quite narrow so the scenery is always close.
All of those factors mean the river must have been steep and pretty wild before the hydroelectric dams were built. I believe it's still like that upstream which is why the river isn't navigated much further by the cruise boats. At times the marked channel is so narrow that we have to wait for a boat coming the other way to pass.
Mid-afternoon we were bussed up to Castelo Rodrigo, a small castle ruin and hilltop village on the border with Spain. I wasn't expecting much of this (I'd hoped to see cave paintings but there weren't the numbers for that tour to proceed) but it turned out to be a very pretty little medieval village with wonderful views.
My the time we got back to the boat it had moved onto Vega Terron. This is as far as it goes and at this point the river forms the border with Spain, which is technically the country where we are moored for the night.
Our cabin is very comfortable and I'm really hoping nobody notices the hole I put in the wardrobe door when I hefted our metal suitcase.
After breakfast we were treated to a bus tour of Porto. So we traipsed across the pier into the set of big buses - most people on this tour are pretty old and slow. From the accents so far I think they're largely English. Probably because it's a slow moving crowd we were just dropped at the cathedral and then the group walked the short distance to the train station and back. Well, most people did, Lynn and I wandered off because we've seen most of that.
The standard system for tour now is that you have a little radio receiver with an earpiece charging in your cabin and when you're on an excursion you wear it round your neck, while your guide has a transmitter. Lynn refuses to ever use one. It's pretty crackly and when the guide got further away I found I was listening to some other tour group entirely. Anyway, it was all fairly painless and we were back on board before the ship unmoored at midday.
Because we were moored right at the mouth of the river we had to pass through the town, which was pleasant.
In the afternoon the scenery was all steep valley walls and wild forest. After afternoon tea we passed through Carrapatelo Lock, which seems to legitimately be the tallest lock in Europe with a rise of about 35 metres. It looks like there will be a few more big locks to come. At the top there was very little room below the bridge that tops the lock. The bridge cabin at the bow, and a lounge at the back, both collapsed down to half height like a poptop caravan.
It was only late in the day that vines started to replace the forest. In the evening we stopped and were bussed to a winery, Quinta da Pacheco, for dinner. For the (unlikely) alert reader, this is indeed the quinta where we had lunch four days ago. The conversation and tendency to sing along to the music confirmed the passengers are mostly English.
A quirk of the Douro is that ships aren't allowed to travel at night, so we remain moored at Peso da Regua. This is why we get some time underway during the day and why during some excursions the ship will continue on while we're ashore.
Today marked the end of our land tour and the start of our river cruise. So this is the plan for the next week:
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| Can you find Lynn? |
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| There she is! |
Traveling again. But our flight wasn't until nearly 6pm, do hurry up and wait. We mostly sat around all morning. Well, I did, while Lynn...
