Category Archives: Culture shock

Monk-ey Business

This is the fourth post in a series about a road trip to New Orleans that starts here.

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Finally! I will get to our day in Chicago now. But I have to say, it’s the little sights and interactions and quirky people you meet while traveling that make it interesting. You can read about the Art Institute of Chicago in any guidebook or on hundreds of commercial websites, but you would probably not learn that a high street and a downtown are the same thing, and you would never get to know David the Innkeeper.

The temperature had plunged overnight, from the mid 70sF to almost freezing. The wind sliced through the thin clothes I had packed in anticipation of the New Orleans’ heat. No matter how much I travel, I always pack optimistically, and sometimes I end up shivering as a result. Home in chilly Minnesota, I can’t imagine anywhere else could be as cold.

I had checked the map and was focused on finding the Architecture Foundation of Chicago. I had been on their river boat tours several times and they were great. It was too cold for a boat tour, but they had lots of other indoor tours, according to their brochures.

Lynn and I wandered up and down Michigan Avenue for an hour and never found the AFC. I hadn’t realized there was a north and south Michigan, there was construction hiding the building numbers, and finally we just gave up because it was too cold and windy. Besides, we kept being approached by guys dressed as monks asking for money. I say “dressed as” monks because we eventually concluded this was a scam. The first guy approached us and thrust some sort of bracelet into Lynn’s hand. He started speaking badly broken English and pointing to a booklet he had with pictures and symbols that made no sense.

I tried to hand him some quarters, nickels, and dimes leftover from the tollway—win win! “No coins!” he barked.

I was inclined to walk away but Lynn is nicer than me. She’s also been to Bhutan, Nepal, Thailand, and everywhere else there are actual monks.

“You’re trying to build a temple, are you?” she asked, as the fake monk showed her a page of writing. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“Hong Kong,” he replied.

That did it. She said “No thanks,” and walked away. “Hong Kong just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “If he really was from Hong Kong he would very likely speak English.”

“Yeah, I bet as soon as we walked away he muttered ‘bitches’ under his breath!” I replied.

—

Finally, our site seeing got underway with a walk through Millennium Park:

We couldn’t stand the cold anymore so headed over to Starbucks for a hot drink while we waited for the Art Institute to open. Of course the people in line with us were from Scotland. That seems to happen all the time.

When the Institute opened we wobbled around for 15 minutes trying to figure out which line to join. I couldn’t believe it cost $25 to get in. That seemed outrageous. I was used to the free admission we have at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which is a great museum thanks to all the corporate headquarters we have here—like General Mills, United Health, Cargill, 3M, and Target—plus our tradition of individual philanthropy. Was Chicago really so different? Was the city in economic straits? I don’t know, but after I dithered and protested and probably embarrassed Lynn by asking a security guard “do we really have to pay $25 to just to see the permanent collection?” she coughed up the admission fee plus an extra $5 to see a special Van Gogh exhibit.

Meanwhile, I was snapping a picture of the back lighted wallpaper in the ticketing hall:

I’m kind of a wallpaper freak. I take photos of beautiful wallpapers when I travel, certain that I’ll somehow recreate them in my tiny condo. How hard could that be?

New Orleans or Bust

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This is the second post in a series about a road trip to New Orleans that starts here.

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As Lynn and I were about to leave Madison for Chicago, the car’s engine light came on. I drove to my cousin’s house, pulled Bluebell into the driveway, and popped her hood.

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for,” I told Lynn.

“I know—I always bring mine to a garage—I don’t even know how to open the bonnet,” she replied.

I pulled out the dipstick, already knowing it would be impossible to tell if the oil was full or empty due to one of Mini Cooper’s many design quirks.

“Maybe the engine is hot?” I suggested hopefully. The coolant container was clearly marked: “DO NOT REMOVE CAP WHEN ENGINE IS HOT.” I unscrewed it anyway and quickly jerked my hand away as steam exploded out of it and coolant ran out onto the driveway. I screwed the top back on and waited for it to cool down so I could see how low it would be now—now that I had made sure it was low on coolant.

I didn’t think my cousin knew much about cars, but I still wished he was back from the pow wow. Car problems are the one situation in which I revert to my primitive, dependent woman self. I wanted a man to deal with it. A man would know what to do, right? Never mind the many times I had asked some male relative or coworker about a car issue and they got a panicky look on their face because they knew, as men, they should know about cars but didn’t know jack.

I also fell back on an old coping mechanism—denial. “I think it’ll be okay to drive to Chicago. I’ll deal with it in Chicago.” Thus commenced several days of flipping back and forth from outright heart-thumping panic to the blissful Zen of denial.

—

When you Google “Chicago tollway” here are just a few of the images that come up:

The engine started chuddering along the way and the drive was every bit as stressful as I’d remembered, with the added feature of an endless road construction project which had us all swerving into new lanes every few miles, amidst massive piles of concrete rubble that looked like a moonscape.

Every time we approached a tollbooth I had to talk Lynn through how much money to pull together. “Those little ones are called dimes; they’re 10 cents, get 15 of them. And 10 of the big ones, those are quarters. They’re 25 cents” This is one of those micro culture shock things: the UK has 20 pence pieces, while we have 25 cent pieces.

Each time we slowed, the car shook harder and I feared it would kill and not start again. I made a conscious effort to keep my back and shoulder muscles relaxed. The previous day, it had seemed like a good idea to take a new pilates class. You know, get some exercise in before sitting all day in the car. My torso felt as tight and tense as a loaded steel trap.

I didn’t trust what Marge, my GPS, was telling me, so I exited the tollway early and drove stop-and-go slow for miles through the city streets. The streets were swarming with crowds of people out enjoying the 75F spring weather. Marge got her revenge by beeping loudly at every intersection to tell us there was a speed camera. Fat chance of triggering one of those during rush hour.

Lynn had found a great little place called the Old Chicago Inn just south of Wrigleyville. Lynn and the Innkeeper carried in the luggage while I searched for a parking space. The inn came with free parking—a permit to park wherever you could find a spot in the vicinity. I found a spot two blocks away and killed the motor. I checked the trip odometer—we’d driven 450 miles that day. I sagged over the wheel and exhaled. I thought about calling AAA but then what? They would tow my car to some garage in Chicago, one of the most corrupt cities in America. I was determined to get to New Orleans.

Innformed

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This is the third post in a series about a road trip to New Orleans that starts here.

—

Enough about the car for now! We had 48 hours in Chicago and I put Bluebell out of my mind for the time being. Here’s a photo of the Old Chicago Inn at Christmastime.

It’s an Art Deco-era inn and I was very grateful that Lynn had booked two rooms instead of one. The small rooms were…small, but they were en suite. For you Americans, that means they included a bathroom. The larger rooms shared a bathroom in the hallway.

Our innkeeper was David, and he informed us he was from Kentucky—or “Kaintucky” as he pronounced it. David turned out to be one of the best things about our brief time in Chicago.

He gave us a couple $10 off vouchers for the restaurant next door, which turned out to be a Key West-themed karaoke bar. We ordered a couple sandwiches and beers and sat back to watch the show. We must have raised the average age in there by 20 years; duos and trios of inebriated 20-somethings were sang while others danced. They sang and danced badly, but with a lot of heart. It was good for a few laughs. I’m sure Lynn could have stayed out later but I just wanted to lie down. I know I’m drained when I pass up a second beer on vacation.

—

The population of the Chicago metropolitan area is almost 10 million. It’s a bustling, busy place full of skyscrapers, art, industry, tourists, and music. They love their deep dish pizzas and baseball. It’s known as the Windy City, and for good reason. Chicago is perched on Lake Michigan, one of the Great Lakes, and the wind is ferocious. I think of Chicago as like a merger of New York and Minneapolis. A big city with a Midwestern vibe.

Lynn and I had breakfast in the basement of the inn, which had originally been a speakeasy. A speakeasy was a secret, illegal bar during prohibition, when alcohol was illegal in the U.S. from 1920 to 1933. It’s hard to believe, today, that we ever attempted to ban booze. Of course prohibition was a huge fail. My great grandfather went to federal prison for two years because he tried to steal liquor out of a government warehouse where they stored confiscated alcohol. He owned a restaurant and his business had tanked when he could no longer serve drinks. This was in Kentucky, and I mentioned it to David, our innkeeper.

“My grandmother was from Covington, Kentucky,” I said. “She always referred to it as ‘down home.’” I didn’t mention that she also called black people “coloreds.”

David was one of those people who knows a lot about a lot of things and appreciates a captive audience. He didn’t acknowledge my comment but launched into a story about his “mama” and Miss Rose, a neighbor of theirs in Kentucky. David was probably approaching 60. He was gaunt, missing a tooth, and wore Malcom X glasses.

I’m conscious as I write this that you’ll know David was white without me having to write it. I’ve probably done this a hundred times in this blog, but this road trip was packed with interactions around race, so maybe it’s good I’ve caught myself.

David stood between us and the door and talked about his mama and Miss Rose and the antebellum (pre-Civil War) house he’d grown up in. He described the closets which were designed to store hoop skirts and fancy ladies hats, and how they went to the Kentucky Derby every year. Normally I can’t stand this kind of person who talks on and on and never asks you a question about yourself. But David was just a lovable guy.

We finally broke away and walked over to the Belmont station to take the train downtown. Lynn asked me what “downtown” and “uptown” meant.

“Downtown is what you would call the High Street,” I explained. I wasn’t sure about the term uptown.

We arrived downtown and the first thing we saw was Trump Tower. We instinctively turned to each other and exclaimed, “Blech!!”

Spring Surprises

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The road trip is now in my rear view mirror, ha ha. I drove about 2,660 miles.

—

As you may recall if you’ve been reading along for a while, I planned obsessively for this trip and felt anxious about what might go wrong. For instance I feared my car would break down in the middle of nowhere so I had all sorts of maintenance work done on it and I joined AAA (the American Automobile Association) a few days before I left.

None of the things I’d imagined would go wrong, went wrong. What happened was more ambiguous and thus, more stressful.

—

Lynn arrived as planned and spent the night at my place. She showed me the guide books and maps she had brought and I said I wouldn’t bring most of mine since hers looked better. Vince had moved out that morning, so we went to visit him briefly in his new pad before we rolled out of town. Lynn and Vince had been hearing about each other for years. It’s great when the important people in your life meet each other.

We left St. Paul around 8am. We had a lot of catching up to do, and the miles peeled away quickly as we cut across southeast Wisconsin. I needed to gas up near Warrens, which is home of the Cranberry Discovery Center and Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park—two sites I’d visited in the past and knew would be strange and wonderful to British eyes.

Lynn had never seen cranberry fields; here is what they look like:

We drove around Jellystone, a massive campground for families with kids with a water park, rides, and cabins.

The area was deserted, since it was only early April, and I was glad the gas station was even open. I filled up as Lynn perused the offerings inside—gun magazines, cranberry wine, bowie knives, cranberry beer, coon skin caps, and a hundred kinds of beef jerky.

Back on the road, we were quickly in Madison, where my cousin Bob lives with his wife Paula. We were joined by my niece Emily, who attends the University of Wisconsin Madison. Bob had promised “light refreshments,” which turned out to be a huge spread including many Wisconsin cheeses. They brought out the inevitable cheese head, an accoutrement of Wisconsin Badgers football fans, which Lynn refused to wear but which I was happy to model:

We talked about politics. Lynn, probably like most foreigners, is appalled and bewildered by the rise of Donald Trump. Bob is a radio news reporter, so he’s steeped in politics. Paula has been apolitical until this year, but the rise of Trump has got her reconsidering whether to jump into the fray. Emily, being a college student on one of the most liberal campuses in America, has no shortage of opinions.

Paul is Native, and we lucked out that the spring pow wow was taking place that day at the Madison civic arena. A pow wow is basically a big social gathering of a tribe—in this case, the Ojibway tribe which is spread across the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and central Canada—to dance and drum. It was unclear to me if there is any spiritual significance to it all. There were lots of colorful costumes—they prefer the term regalia. There were cute kids running around and stalls selling jewelry and fry bread and pop. No alcohol was allowed on the premises.

Since I’m not Native I didn’t take photos because it would have felt like I was photographing animals in a zoo. But plenty of other people do take photos at pow wows and post them online:

After a couple hours it was time to leave so we could get to Chicago by dark. If you’ve never driven the expressway into Chicago, flanked by giant semi trucks going 85 miles per hour while fumbling for coins for the toll booths, you haven’t lived. I’ve done this drive half a dozen times and it is nerve wracking.

As I started the car Lynn exclaimed, “Damn! I must have left my maps and books on your dining room table!” That’s when I heard the “DING DING! DING!” and my engine light came on.

Minis, Everywhere

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This is the ninth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Day Two of the Mini United festival in Silverstone, England. Rebecca and I sprang out of the tent at dawn so we wouldn’t miss breakfast buffet in the VIP tent.

Dagmar, the BMW rep, approached us as we were shoveling in eggs and salmon and strudel.

“We have a special treat for you,” she announced. Then I ate a poopie. I like to eat poopie.

A special treat, I wondered? What could possibly be an improvement on the swag and the free food and booze and the VIP toilet?

“We know how much you must miss having your Mini with you,” she went on.

Not really. Did I mention the 8,000 Minis all over the festival grounds? I didn’t have some kind of unnatural connection to my car. I was grateful to her for providing my excuse to be here, but when people asked how many cylinders she had, I was stumped.

I was all ears.

“We have arranged for you to drive a new model Mini on the racetrack here, later today.”

“All of us at one time, or separately?” I asked. I had never driven a left-hand drive car and I didn’t’ want my first time to be my last.

“Vun at a time!” she said through closed lips, then whirled and walked away. We must have been very trying for her. I wondered if she would lose her job over the budget mishap.

—

But before the track, there were more exhibitions to see.

First stop, celebrity Minis. David Bowie’s was my favorite.

Madonna’s was my least favorite. Why, Madonna, why? What’s with the cammo? Aren’t we American’s already viewed as war mongers as it is?

George Harrison’s Mini was the most beautiful.

Then it was on to the novelty and classic Minis. Everything from cowhide to the Simpsons.

We visited the information booths and picked up all the free pens and pencils and key rings we could find. There was the Mini Club of Northern Ireland, the wheel makers, the specialty body works people, the custom floor mat booth, and on and on.

At the appointed time, we meandered over to the track. Silverstone is an international, professional race track, whatever that means, if I haven’t already mentioned it. All the North Americans were already there; apparently they’d been lined up for hours. Rebecca and I joined them and the doors opened. It was a pleasant sunny day, not at all a bad one to spend hanging around a race track—Minis, when viewed in multiples, remind me of hummingbirds.

It was our turn, and I urged Rebecca to go first since I was nervous. They pulled the car up and she glowed (Rebecca that is, not the car).

Rebecca is from Oxfordshire and I think she thought this was some sort of sign. I didn’t remind her until after, that Oxford is where BMW makes Minis in the UK.

A few minutes later it was my turn. I got in, grabbed the gear shift with my left hand, and thought, “Don’t think.” In certain life endeavors, like learning a language, falling in love, or driving the opposite of how you’ve done it all your life, thinking can be detrimental.

Suddenly, the car careening out of control, smashed head on into the side wall, then burst into flames!

Just kidding.

I drove around the track a couple times. I think I got ‘er up to 50mph. It was uneventful.

We all knew it was a promotional gimmick to get us to buy this new model, whatever it was, but we appreciated that BMW had thrown in even more fun, for free.

We retired to the tent, where one of my fellow Americans, and Indian guy from LA (India Indian, not Native American), was saying he had just ordered the new model to add to his collection. Nice for some people.

I was done with Minis for now. We spent the whole evening and next day in the VIP tent wining and dining, then headed back to Woodstock Sunday evening, well rested and very well fed.

Mr. Whooooo

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This is the eighth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I spent our first day wandering the Mini United festival grounds. As I wrote in the last post, Mini owners like to have fun. Cramming is some people’s idea of fun.

I did not participate in the cramming. The most people I have ever had in my car is five. Two of them were men well over six feet tall. I remember the elbows and knees everywhere, and only being able to get up to fourth gear because someone’s foot was blocking the gear stick.

I did happily subject myself to a fake pat down by a fake generic police officer. There are all sorts of things I could write about this, involving naughty British and German stereotypes, but I’ll just say, “Anything for a photo opp with a classic Mini,” and leave it at that.

There was a double-decker bus full of overpriced Mini T-shirts, hats, sunglasses, drink glasses, key chains, and lavishly illustrated souvenir books. I didn’t need to buy anything; I was more than content with my swag bag, which had turned out to contain a bunch of similar Mini trinkets in addition to the bottle opener.

There was lots of racing by professional drivers which I found boring. I’ve never understood the attraction of watching someone drive around and around and around a track.

But then, there were the trick drivers, a la the Italian Job, accompanied by a DJ.

We went back to the VIP tent for our evening feeding, then headed out for the headline concert by Paul Weller. I had never heard of him, or The Jam, his first band. I had never heard The Jam’s number one 1980 hit, Going Underground. There are probably Americans who would be shocked at that, but I was busy changing diapers and going to school full time back then, so I had other priorities.

But also, back in the day, it was probably more possible and quite common for music not to make it over the pond. Not every group was the new Beatles or Rolling Stones, but lots of groups, like The Jam, were huge in their home country.

So Rebecca and I jammed, and I never actually saw Paul Weller because, at 5’3”, I never see anything from the main floor but other people’s heads. There were clearly a lot of drugs in use. A guy near us was hopping on one foot the whole concert, yelling “Whooo!” over and over and over. He was as entertaining as the concert itself.

—

It had been a long day and we were barely started on all there was to see and do.

We trudged back to the tent, feeling like First Class passengers forced to return to Coach Economy. We should have slept soundly but we were so excited about going back the next day that we stayed up talking in the dark. Besides, Mr. Whooo was camping somewhere nearby, so there was a round of mostly good-natured “Shut up!” from us and our neighbors every 10 minutes until he finally ran out of steam around 3am.

Good on Ya, Gdynia

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This is the seventh post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

Rebecca and I were sitting in the VIP tent at the Mini festival, pinching ourselves, when a bunch of loudmouths barged in. Oops, turns out they were my fellow North Americans.

Rebecca and I were waved over to join them by a tall woman dressed in black and wearing extreme eyewear.

“I am Dagmar,” she said in a clipped German accent, “head of BMW’s Mini Cooper North American Customer Relations Division,” or some such. “I would like to give you a warm welcome to Silverstone and Mini United.” She never cracked a smile; she was about as warm as an ice cube. Dagmar gave us an orientation to the VIP amenities.

“The VIP toilets are over there … these coolers are available to you 24/7 … your feedings will be at oh-eight hundred hours, 1200 hours, and 1900 hours.”

Our feedings? VIP toilets? And those coolers … for years I had a repeated dream in which I entered a house brimming with priceless antiques and treasure chests full of gold coins and precious jewels. Suddenly I would realize that all this was mine. I have no idea what that dream meant but I felt it had come true now as I stood before a tall glass-front cooler stocked with good German beer and bottles of wine including my favorite, prosecco.

“Anne … Anne!” Rebecca was standing next to me, trying to snap me out of my trance. “Your compatriots have the inside scoop on why we’re really here,” she said as we rejoined them at a table.

A tall guy wearing a tall fuzzy hat with a Maple leaf said, “I got the low down from another employee last night. BMW budgeted for 500 North Americans coming to the festival. Only a select few, like the auto journalists and the big collectors, were gonna get the VIP treatment. But then the recession hit and only 15 of us showed up!” We all laughed. There was one rich guy among us, but most of us were regular middle class people for whom our cars and trips like this were a budgetary stretch.

People often assume that Minis are super expensive cars. How much things cost is all relative, so I’ll just say that they cost about the same as a Subaru Crosstek or Legacy, a Mazda 3, or a Toyota Camry. So you could spend a lot more on a car, or a lot less.

—

We waited for our first feeding, aka lunch, and shortly before noon the pit crews from the rack track poured in. BMW must have reckoned it might as well feed them the good grub, too.

I wonder which bunch Dagmar found more distasteful—us rag-tag North Americans in our jeans and T-shirts and fuzzy hats, or the tatted-up mechanics? Not exactly the high-class clientele she’d had in mind, perhaps.

We enjoyed a light lunch of fresh salmon and salads and desserts.

Then it was off to explore the festival! Rebecca and I slipped a few beers in our swag bags. Tacky, I know, but since the swag had included a Mini bottle opener, we figured we were obligated to field test it.

—

BMW has done its brand research. Mini owners love to “motor,” we love good design, and we love adventure and fun. Not all of us are all of these things, but you get the picture. There are all sorts of Mini events going on around the world all the time, like group road trips, music festivals, and art and design extravaganzas. They’re all organized by Mini owners; Mini United is the only one sponsored, every three years, by BMW.

To give you an idea of how passionate Mini owners can be, here are some Minis with the equivalent of car tattoos showing where their owners drove from—in order—Budapest, Kiev, Moscow, and Gdynia, Poland.

These are just the Eastern Europeans; there were hundreds more from Western Europe, North Africa, Turkey, and Asia.

“This puts things in perspective,” I said as we clinked a couple of beers. “Yes,” said Rebecca drily, “I guess our epic 200-mile drive was worth it, if you like this kind of thing.”

Accidental VIPs

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This is the sixth post in a series about a UK road trip that starts here.

We had arrived in Silverstone, England for the Mini United festival tired, hungry, crabby, and on a budget. “You can sleep when you’re dead,” is one of my mottos. Hungry could be fixed with overpriced, tasteless vendor food, but a budget was a budget, and incompatible with a long weekend of overpriced vendor food. I was doing okay financially—obviously—since I could afford the airfare to get there. But Rebecca worked as a carer, which is someone who cares for elderly and handicapped people in their homes. It’s a super important and supremely underpaid job.

We crawled out of the tent and surveyed our surroundings.

Yes, teepees—they’re big over there. I subtly strolled by one that was open to get a look at the interior but didn’t have the guts to take a picture. There’s a permanent platform, so you’re never going to get wet unless it’s flood-mageddon. You rent the teepee with all the gear, which can include cots and coolers and all the bulky heavy stuff that’s a drag to store and pack if you own it.

Is this cultural appropriation? I don’t know. Maybe they’re just triangle-shaped tents. It’s not like these campers were dressing in rawhide and eating dried strips of deer meat and doing war dances. At least, not that I saw.

—

We used the porta loos, which weren’t bad as far as giant storage containers of feces and urine go. There were sinks with warm water but no showers.

I was having a hard time getting excited. But hey, it was just three days. How bad could it be? I didn’t want to ask Rebecca what she was thinking because it had been my fool idea to come here.

We slogged for what seemed like a mile, following the other ratty-looking campers, to get to the registration point. “Okay I’ll just say it,” I said. “We can walk back to the tent and cook over the stove every meal, which will take forever but save us money. Or we can buy the overpriced food at the concessions.” I was wondering how much a beer would be.

“Yep,” Rebecca replied, stonily. Then she turned to me with a forced but radiant smile, “Let’s just see how it goes!”

“Hmm … what a novel but healthy idea!” I was on board.

“We can always bitch and moan later.”

“Yes, it’s a beautiful day!” I replied, and it was. We were tromping through a farm field on a sunny, warm spring day.

We arrived at the registration point and there was a line a hundred people deep. An employee came by and scanned our confirmations. “Oh,” he said meaningfully, “You’re North Americans.” I didn’t correct him, that Rebecca was not a North American, in case that was a bad thing which would cause her to be ejected.

He waved us over to a different line where no one was waiting. This was good. I showed the confirmation. “Welcome!” our staff greeter said enthusiastically. “Here’s your swag bag.” He handed us each some nice-looking messenger-type bags emblazoned with the festival logo and stuffed with … stuff, to be revealed. “And these are your VIP badges.”

Rebecca and I exchanged glances that said, “do we keep our mouths shut, or not?”

“Thanks for thinking we are VIPs,” I said regretfully, “But we just paid the regular admission like everyone else.” I waved my arm toward the hoi polloi waiting in the very long line.

This guy had the best job in the world, because he got to say this to people: “You are VIPs, because you–you North Americans–are our best customers.” I didn’t feel like an uber customer, but I just smiled and nodded in order not to break the magic.

—

We made our way straight to the VIP lounge, where we sat speechless, smiling dumbly at one another, emitting the occasional giggle. “What if it’s a mistake?” I kept asking.

“Let’s just stay in here the whole time so we don’t have to risk not being re-admitted!” was Rebecca’s idea. And that’s pretty close to what we did.

On the Road Again

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This is the fifth post in a series about a UK road trip that begins here.

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Rebecca and I whiled away a week in Wales. We hiked along the cliffs; this was my favorite sign:

We spent a day at St. David’s Cathedral, which is a functioning place of worship. St. David is the patron saint of Wales. He punished himself for his sins by standing neck deep in the sea. The ice cold sea.

The cathedral was erected on top of a monastery circa 500 AD. The interior was fantastic, though cramped, with signs like this throughout:

It was impossible to get good photos inside because it was so dark and I couldn’t back up enough to get perspective. That’s okay; sometimes it’s good to just be and really see, and not be preoccupied with getting the best shot.

The little gem below is from the exterior. It’s important, in the UK, to look up or you’ll miss the gargoyles, murals, and curlicues.

—

We wandered about the countryside. You know the expression, “take the high road?” Well there really is such a thing as a high road. They’re useful during floods, apparently:

Back in town, we stopped at the butchers—a real butcher shop—to buy lamb. This is Wales, after all, which has more sheep than people.

Rebecca is a great cook, and she managed to make lamb stew with spring potatoes and peas on a camp stove. Here she is doing her impression of a posh Oxfordshire camper, complete with pinky aloft.

There was one rainy day, so naturally we attempted to cook inside the tent. This is a Very Bad practice. As experienced campers, we should have known better. The stove toppled over, the meths ran along the floor, flame followed, and we screamed and scrambled to put them out. We succeeded, but there was a burn hole in the floor of Rebecca’s newish tent.

We often recall this story. She remembers it being her fault, and I remember it being mine. At least it’s not the other way around! All that matters is that neither of us got burned and we still had a tent over our heads, if it did have a hole in the floor.

We returned to the pub a couple times and learned a great deal about McGiver, Mr. T., Luke, Bo, and Daisy. The farmers just couldn’t get over that I, and American, was so ignorant about my own culture.

If our road trip had only been this much—this sojourn in Wales—it would have been enough. But we had only begun! We packed everything back into the Micra and bade farewell to our beautiful, peaceful, seaside outpost. Off we went to our next destination, Silverstone, England, for the Mini Cooper Festival.

The “Welcome to England” sign made me laugh. The drive was like going from Minnesota to Wisconsin, and yet here we were crossing country borders, sort of.

Rebecca wasn’t laughing. She was driving 200 miles on a week of sleep deprivation and encountering Bank Holiday weekend traffic jams and spring road construction projects every two miles. As we slowly progressed I watched her shoulders rise up to the level of her ears. This was my introduction to certain charming British terms such as “buttock clenching,” and “fuckwit.”

The drive took most of a day. By the time we neared Silverstone, Rebecca was laughing in a way that made me nervous. Once again, as we neared our destination, the skies darkened and the winds rose. We pulled into the campground adjacent to the racetrack and festival grounds at dusk and this time did a little better at pitching the tent. We looked around. We were surrounded by a sea of tents and teepees populated by rag-tag Mini owners from all over the world. We were famished, so we walked and walked and walked until we found the food stalls and bought some extremely overpriced and under spiced curry in a paper cup.

We trudged back to the campsite to use the porta loos before it started raining. Neither of us said anything, but we were both thinking we should have stayed in Wales.

Springtime of the Daleks

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Have you ever tried to pitch a tent in the dark in a gale force wind? That’s what Rebecca and I did on the second night of our UK road trip.

“Park the car between the cliff and the tent site to block the wind,” I yelled helpfully.

“But the tent is bigger than the car!” Rebbeca pointed out. There was a lot of flapping and flopping and “f—ing!” and hysterical laughing before it was done.

Here is Rebecca blowing up her “lilo,” which is what Brits call an air mattress. She is purposely not looking at me, or she would burst out laughing and end up sleeping on the hard ground.

We got things pretty well organized, then settled down to sleep. Our bodies were the only thing weighing the tent down. We lay there in the dimness watching the top billowing wildly.

In the morning, we crawled bleary eyed out of the tent to scenes like this:

That’s the wonderful thing about seaside weather; it can change within hours. Rebecca made some coffee and porridge on the cook stove with the meths. I still couldn’t get over that that’s what they called camping fuel.

Then it was off on a hike:

If you live in a place with four distinct seasons, like Minnesota with its harsh grey winters, you appreciate the pure bliss of a spring hike. I do believe that our bodies are attuned to the seasons and nature in general, although that connection is blunted by indoor lighting, artificial schedules, and screens, screens, screens. But if you get outside on a spring day and start paying attention to the colors of the sea and the tiny blossoms and the sounds of larks that you can’t even see because they fly so high, very quickly you feel alive—alive, and free, and joyous.

We hiked for hours and said barely a word to one another; it wasn’t necessary. Then we headed into St. David’s via narrow, hedgerow-bordered roads and farm fields.

We learned we would have to return the next day to tour the cathedral, so we wandered around and ended up in the pub, which fortuitously had a pub quiz that evening. We were enjoying our fish and chips with mushy peas and a pint of ale when a crusty farmer sidled up to us and began making marriage proposals. “I’m a millionaire farmer,” he declared. “Ye could do worse.” We laughed at first, until we started wondering if he was serious because he was so persistent. Thankfully the quiz started and he went back to join his crusty friends.

Now, Rebecca and I had been to many pub quizzes in Oxford, where the typical question was, “In which scene of Hamlet does Polonius offer Laertes a string of aphoristic clichés enumerating the shoulds and shouldn’ts of a young man’s life?”

This wasn’t Oxford. The first question was, “What common household items did McGiver use to escape from a drug lord in Season 3? Was it: a fork and spoon, a pen and paper, or chopsticks and a cigarette lighter?” The rest of the questions were based on other great American TV series like the Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team.

Rebecca and I looked at each other and tee-heed. We weren’t going to win this quiz, but this was much more entertaining than playing cards in the tent. We had had a few pints when Rebecca raised her hand. I can’t recall what cheeky question she asked of the quiz master, because as soon as she opened her mouth the whole pub turned and stared.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Ahx-fohrd-shaw,” she replied (Oxfordshire), intentionally overdoing the posh Oxford accent. They all laughed, we laughed, and the questions about McGiver went on for hours.

—

If you ever go for a walk in the country, be sure to bring a flashlight in case you end up walking back to your tent much, much later, in the dark, on unlit country roads after having maybe one too many pints.

Fortunately, Rebecca and I had packed our headlamps, so we had loads of fun impersonating the daleks from Dr. Who:

“You shall be exterminated!”

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Springtime of the Daleks