Stratford, Oxford and Bath
The train trip from Abergaveny in Wales to Stratford in England took three trains, while waiting for a connection in Hereford I went to withdraw some cash but the machine rejected my card. I assumed I typed in the wrong pin so tried again but with the same result. My thoughts of ‘ah bugger’ turned to ´Oh Shit!’ when I worked out my card had expired and had the nightmare realisation that I had no back up plan for getting cash. Looking through my wallet for ideas I decided to try my credit card, and hey presto – cash! (at a small fee or course). Later I wrote to the people staying in our house in Melbourne who looked through the mail and found the new card the bank had automatically sent out and they posted it to London where I picked it up a few weeks later.
Stratford was a nice town, with several ‘Birthplace of Shakespeare’ tourist attractions, none of which seemed worth paying to enter. The many timber frame houses though did provide a fitting atmosphere for the town’s heritage. I stayed with Servas hosts who owned one of the town’s many B+Bs and thus had two nights free B+B style accommodation, including two cooked breakfasts, one full English and one vegetarian. Better yet their son Steve and his mate Ed (a quintessential English bloke) took me out to celebrate Guy Fawkes night in style – down at the park with the dangerous combination of a few beers, some magic mushrooms and a box of fireworks. It was a great atmosphere, people letting of fireworks all over the city, at any moment there could be a bang and some pretty lights. This brought back childhood memories of Guy Fawkes celebrations in New Zealand. I hadn’t set of fireworks for over ten years thanks to them being illegal in Fascist Australia.
Next stop was Oxford featuring some beautiful old buildings, but not the same feeling as I felt in Cambridge. The unusual highlight was some Chinese art in the Ashmolean museum. In traditional Chinese art the notion of empty space, where the canvas is left blank/white is very important. This represents qi (chi), life-force and a lot of meaning is conveyed by the juxtaposition of objects with empty space or by whether the qi is allowed flow through the picture in large or small quantities. This was just something totally new to me and quite different from other notions of art I´ve experienced.
From Oxford I rode through the Cotswolds (can’t see what everyone raves about there) to Bath and then along the Avon bike path to a servas host at Saltford. This last 6kms was in pitch black, another of my great cycling adventures. The days by now were getting shorter and shorter and I’d been caught in the dark a couple of times but mostly in built up areas with street lights. This path though had no lights at all and while I had a rear light and head lamp I could see the ground immediately in front but not where the path ahead took a turn or what sort of surface/puddles I was approaching. The path ran right beside the river and the danger was brought home to me when the path turned right following a bend in the river and I only avoided the two metre drop into the freezing cold river by about half a metre. From then I on adrenalin pumped fast through my veins as I concentrated on reacting quickly to the little could see, but I rode much slower. Shortly after, another cyclist, obviously quite familiar with the path, came flying past me. I tried to speed up in order to follow behind where he/she would show the way but was now going so slow that by the time I got my speed up she was way ahead and I couldn’t catch up. Luckily though I could still see his flashing light way in the distance which showed the path was straight for some distance. A while further on and a bright light appeared ahead, and I wondered weather a car was approaching. I heard no engine but kept well to the left as I had no idea how wide the path was. When it was only the brightest bike light I’ve ever seen that temporarily blinded me, I called out ‘you need a dimmer on that thing’ but gotno response. In the end I got there safely without any problems and when I rode back the same way the next day I saw one of the best bike paths in England – a disused railway line, very straight, nice surface and about 3m wide!
It turned out to be one of my best servas stays, one of those ones where you just click with the person, so Gill and I had some great conversations. The other highlight of Bath was the old Roman Baths, still largely in working order and just amazing in terms of the level of construction for 2000 years ago. Certainly the most sophisticated ancient construction I´ve ever seen and one of the few places well worth the £10 entry fee. Gill also recommended that I check out Glastonbury (which I´d decided to skip) and on the way ride through Cheddar Gorge (which I´d never heard of). Glastonbury was okay, a nice little alternative town, but the highlight was searching the bookshops for Steiner´s ´Philosophy of Freedom´, they all knew it but didn´t have it. Cheddar Gorge though was a great discovery. I rode towards it from the north and had been riding for a couple of hours through some fairly ordinary country and seen no signs to it when as I began my decent down a river valley it suddenly turned into these magnificent cliffs - known as Cheddar Gorge. It was incredible! Again partly due to the means of discovery, a tip from a friend and then just finding myself in it. However it is also spectacular in its own right and it just kept going and going as I descended around corner after corner and the cliffs just kept getting higher and higher. To my mind the best gorge in all of the UK and Ireland. Then suddenly it finished and I came out into the little tourist town of Cheddar, milking the gorge and its status as the home of cheddar cheese for all its worth. As I passed the huge bus parking areas I appreciated even more the direction I had approached from. Not to mention that I had ridden down the steep hill that with all its twists and turns would be a great ride at full pace even without the cliffs.
Stratford was a nice town, with several ‘Birthplace of Shakespeare’ tourist attractions, none of which seemed worth paying to enter. The many timber frame houses though did provide a fitting atmosphere for the town’s heritage. I stayed with Servas hosts who owned one of the town’s many B+Bs and thus had two nights free B+B style accommodation, including two cooked breakfasts, one full English and one vegetarian. Better yet their son Steve and his mate Ed (a quintessential English bloke) took me out to celebrate Guy Fawkes night in style – down at the park with the dangerous combination of a few beers, some magic mushrooms and a box of fireworks. It was a great atmosphere, people letting of fireworks all over the city, at any moment there could be a bang and some pretty lights. This brought back childhood memories of Guy Fawkes celebrations in New Zealand. I hadn’t set of fireworks for over ten years thanks to them being illegal in Fascist Australia.
Next stop was Oxford featuring some beautiful old buildings, but not the same feeling as I felt in Cambridge. The unusual highlight was some Chinese art in the Ashmolean museum. In traditional Chinese art the notion of empty space, where the canvas is left blank/white is very important. This represents qi (chi), life-force and a lot of meaning is conveyed by the juxtaposition of objects with empty space or by whether the qi is allowed flow through the picture in large or small quantities. This was just something totally new to me and quite different from other notions of art I´ve experienced.
From Oxford I rode through the Cotswolds (can’t see what everyone raves about there) to Bath and then along the Avon bike path to a servas host at Saltford. This last 6kms was in pitch black, another of my great cycling adventures. The days by now were getting shorter and shorter and I’d been caught in the dark a couple of times but mostly in built up areas with street lights. This path though had no lights at all and while I had a rear light and head lamp I could see the ground immediately in front but not where the path ahead took a turn or what sort of surface/puddles I was approaching. The path ran right beside the river and the danger was brought home to me when the path turned right following a bend in the river and I only avoided the two metre drop into the freezing cold river by about half a metre. From then I on adrenalin pumped fast through my veins as I concentrated on reacting quickly to the little could see, but I rode much slower. Shortly after, another cyclist, obviously quite familiar with the path, came flying past me. I tried to speed up in order to follow behind where he/she would show the way but was now going so slow that by the time I got my speed up she was way ahead and I couldn’t catch up. Luckily though I could still see his flashing light way in the distance which showed the path was straight for some distance. A while further on and a bright light appeared ahead, and I wondered weather a car was approaching. I heard no engine but kept well to the left as I had no idea how wide the path was. When it was only the brightest bike light I’ve ever seen that temporarily blinded me, I called out ‘you need a dimmer on that thing’ but gotno response. In the end I got there safely without any problems and when I rode back the same way the next day I saw one of the best bike paths in England – a disused railway line, very straight, nice surface and about 3m wide!
It turned out to be one of my best servas stays, one of those ones where you just click with the person, so Gill and I had some great conversations. The other highlight of Bath was the old Roman Baths, still largely in working order and just amazing in terms of the level of construction for 2000 years ago. Certainly the most sophisticated ancient construction I´ve ever seen and one of the few places well worth the £10 entry fee. Gill also recommended that I check out Glastonbury (which I´d decided to skip) and on the way ride through Cheddar Gorge (which I´d never heard of). Glastonbury was okay, a nice little alternative town, but the highlight was searching the bookshops for Steiner´s ´Philosophy of Freedom´, they all knew it but didn´t have it. Cheddar Gorge though was a great discovery. I rode towards it from the north and had been riding for a couple of hours through some fairly ordinary country and seen no signs to it when as I began my decent down a river valley it suddenly turned into these magnificent cliffs - known as Cheddar Gorge. It was incredible! Again partly due to the means of discovery, a tip from a friend and then just finding myself in it. However it is also spectacular in its own right and it just kept going and going as I descended around corner after corner and the cliffs just kept getting higher and higher. To my mind the best gorge in all of the UK and Ireland. Then suddenly it finished and I came out into the little tourist town of Cheddar, milking the gorge and its status as the home of cheddar cheese for all its worth. As I passed the huge bus parking areas I appreciated even more the direction I had approached from. Not to mention that I had ridden down the steep hill that with all its twists and turns would be a great ride at full pace even without the cliffs.
posted by James Tonson | 2:57 am
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