A Pilgrimage Across the Salisbury Plain

“…Before the dawn of ‘istry, there lived a strange race of people – the Druids. No one knows ‘oo they wuh, or, wha’ they wuh doin’, but their legacy remains, hewn, into the living rock … of Stone’enge.”

– Spinal Tap

The kids and I finished up work Wednesday morning and jumped onto a bus to the surprisingly close by attraction of Waterworld. I know, it sounds cold – and for Kevin Costner aficionados, horrifying -- until you realize that this indoor, heated water park is the perfect place for winter fun! The mercury has plummeted over here, to the tune of the snowiest November in two decades, and last year was their snowiest winter in half a century, so the drama is building steadily. We needed a warm-up and you can see for yourself how perfectly Waterworld fit the bill.

Thursday saw the ASU students join us for a Thanksgiving feast (I know there are some of you out there jealous of them for getting my turkey this year), in fact I just had leftover sandwich number four before I sat down to write this. It brought a little taste of home to the proceedings over here, and it seems pretty obvious that most everyone is going to be ready to get back to Boone in just a few weeks now.

Friday we rose and grabbed an early bus to the train station for a three hour plus ride to the middle of the fat bottom of England and the ancient town of Salisbury. We walked past the tallest cathedral in the country (maybe Europe?) and went into the county museum. They had some great primers on Stonehenge to help us get ready for the morning, plus a keen section on rock music in Salisbury. Check the photos for more on this. After dinner, we took a cab through the snow to our hotel far out of town, but more in the neighborhood of Stonehenge, a Holiday Inn at a place called Solstice Park near Amesbury.

Our room and breakfast were nice, and we were out the door and into the blustery cold by 11. We had a couple of maps and a couple of potential destinations. We also had about a quarter inch of snow on the ground. We started the pilgrimage to the west, but after reaching Amesbury had to go underground to avoid a giant traffic roundabout, and when we emerged and walked a mile or so, I wasn’t seeing any of the landmarks on my map. Then I saw the sign for Woodhenge. We had toyed with the idea of going by Woodhenge to whet our appetite, but in the weather, I wasn’t so much going there on purpose. Anyway, we were there and we checked it out, and then took to the paths that crossed directly across the plain and away from the car traffic… but very much through the snow.

It was cold, and we were alone on the paths with nothing but sheep for company. The paths were easy enough to follow, and it was easy to feel the millions of pilgrims that had been making this same journey for the last several thousand years all around us. We finally got a view of the monument across the plain, but our feet were wet and our toes were getting more numb by the minute. The last push across an open field took us to The Avenue and we made our way to the stones. (Okay, first we made our way to the WC and the hand dryers were we defrosted our socks, shoes and toes, and then we got hot chocolate.)

I didn’t know what to expect tourist-trap wise, but I’m pretty impressed with how they handle the historic majesty of Stonehenge. The stuff is underground and out of sight if you are looking across at it, and most of the drama is intact. There is no doubt that it is thoroughly impressive, but I have to admit that it was colder than we wanted it to be. The wind was howling on the hilltop, and we gave them rocks a good look and then headed for the warmth of the wind-free subterranean gift shop.

We were soon back in a taxi to Salisbury, and later on a 5:45 train north to home, secure in the knowledge that we had completed a trying pilgrimage to one of the greatest wonders of creation. All in all though, the kids would probably tell you that they would have rather gone back to Waterworld.

We’re off to Italy Wednesday morning. We fly into Milan, spend the night and then take the train to Venice. We have two nights back in Milan after that and fly home Monday. You probably won’t hear from us until next Tuesday, so have a good start of your December. We’ll be home soon…

Papa Glenn out.

CLICK HERE FOR THE STONEHENGE AND SALISBURY PICTURES

The Prodigal's Return to Oxford

It’s been 20 years and 20 weeks since I stepped off a bus in Oxford for the first time. My fellow history students from the University of Georgia would be spending six weeks at Jesus College, right in the center of one of the most beautiful cities on earth. Those weeks changed me dramatically, I returned to the states not only more versed in the goings on of the English Civil War and the Restoration of the monarchy, but much more aware of the kind of person I wanted to be. Not only that, but there was one night there that I reached out and grasped something that stays with me to this day, however that is another story for another time.

Against this backdrop, we grabbed a taxi from the train station and dropped off our ridiculously heavy suitcase on the top floor of an old school guesthouse on the south side of town. It was much closer than it looked on the map (the town really was as small as I remembered), so we set out for Christ Church Meadows and the accompanying college.

You may not know that Oxford University is actually a collection of somewhat independent colleges in the same area. As I said, when I was there, I attended Jesus College, but you will also find Trinity, Hertford, and about 20 others, each with a list of acclaimed alumni. It was a close run for most famous until a few years ago, but now Christ Church is easily the biggest draw to outsiders. The fame that once rested squarely on the shoulders of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, author of a couple of books about a little girl named Alice), is now overshadowed by the backdrop of their Great Hall. Yes, eleven prime ministers took their meals there in their college days, but none of them are as famous as the Gryffindors and Slytherins who ate there in the first two movies of the Harry Potter series.

It costs 12 pounds for a family to walk through this college to see Harry’s dining room (which is only barely recognizable among the numerous paintings of Christ Church alumni that returned to the walls after filming). The supplemental draw of the hall is the stained-glass window containing tiny characters from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that is just about too high to even see, much less get a good picture of (it’s in the gallery, have a look for yourself). Adjoining the college is the cathedral, a very impressive structure in its own right, but when you add the two pianists that were preparing for the night’s concert, it is rather overwhelming.

CLICK HERE FOR THE PICTURES AND VIDEOS FROM OXFORD

We continued on from Christ Church to Jesus College to rouse some dormant memories for Papa Glenn. It felt good to walk the paths and to see our own Great Hall again. I realized that I couldn’t quite remember how to get to the classroom where we studied, but my dorm and the college looked exactly as I remembered. We tromped around past the Bodleian Library and some of the other areas in my old neighborhood, and then made our way to Carfax Centre where the best fish and chips in the world were no longer being sold from a little hole in the wall. Carfax is all chain stores and generic now, too bad. We grabbed some Italian at the English version of Olive Garden and headed back to the guesthouse.

I wasn’t done however. I let the family hit the sack while I trudged back to town. I had a mission. If you read the Golden Compass books by Philip Pullman, you might be aware that a central theme of the book was that there was a portal in Oxford to other worlds. I’m not completely crazy, but I thought it was worth a look if I was here. At the very least, Pullman lives in Oxford, and I wanted to run into him and tell him the story about what had happened to me here in 1990. Long story short, no portal, no Pullman, but I did run into a couple of Canadian rescue pilots that were over for simulator training. We had a great conversation about the area, and they told me about a meteor crater in northern Quebec that I had never heard of. Portal? I’ll keep you posted.

I awoke slowly, and we had the inclusive full English breakfast at the guesthouse. In case you are not familiar with the English Breakfast, it is always as follows: bacon (which we would call ham), a sausage link (which is mushier inside than ours), an egg (usually poached-ish), toast (which is often fried in batter to make it less good for you), and, believe it or not, regular old baked beans that run all over everything. To this you can often add a cooked to-mah-to and mushrooms, if you’re insane.

After breakfast, we had to get out of the guesthouse by 10, but our train didn’t leave until 2:30 -- the perfect window to finish up the Harry Potter theme in Oxford. The new movie was released the night before, and there was an 11:15 showing. It was great. We got to the train on time, and were home around six on Saturday evening. This gave us a nice day off Sunday so that I could start writing these two books you have been subjected to over the last couple days.

We’re having Thanksgiving for the ASU students Thursday, but we will not be able to watch any football. This will be the first time this has happened to me in ever. On Friday, we get up and head south again, this time to see “the living rock of Stone ‘enge” (cue the dancing dwarf Spinal Tap fans!).

Soccer, Towers and the World's Biggest Toy Store

WARNING! The first part of this story contains significant rambling about professional and international soccer. Some of you (read girly-girls) might find it technically boring. If you’d like, feel free to skip down to where we go to the Tower of London and I ramble on about my issues with Colonialism and Greed instead of talking about how purty the Tower is.

You folks that have been paying attention to (non-American) football, at least over the past year or so, should know that England has a pretty strong reputation for their skills in the international pastime. That is to say, they did going into the World Cup competition last summer. We Yanks were scared to death to have to open the tournament against them, if you recall. But then, England’s keeper let Clint Dempsey’s shot slip through his fingers and we snuck out of the match with a tie, and honestly, things have been downhill for these boys ever since. In our second week over here, the national squad had a match with Montenegro (I’ll pause while you find it on Google maps…), yes, that Montenegro, with most of the English stars from the Premier League healthy and available. Most everyone was wondering just how many goals the home team would win by. I watched the game on the telly, along with the rest of the nation, and was just as unimpressed as said nation. Were it not for a Montenegrin shot that slammed into the crossbar rather than the net just below, England would have lost, as it was it ended in soccer’s standard 0-0 tie.

So, maybe that was part of the reason it was possible, and indeed rather easy, to get Sawyer and I tickets to the England/France match at Wembley Stadium in London last Wednesday. To test your World Cup memory yet again, do you recall France’s overwhelming humiliation in the competition? They were annihilated in the first round and sent home to an appalled nation that met their plane with bonfires and misery. This was unacceptable after they had reached the finals in the previous completion in 2006. Their program has not recovered from the summer, and they looked to be an easy target for the rebounding Englishmen.

But no one seemed to account for the dark clouds that the Grizzard boys can bring to a sporting event on this island. (Ref: Ryder Cup entry below)

We took the Wednesday afternoon fast train from Stoke to London Euston station and tubed over to our hotel near Paddington in Sussex Gardens. Every building on that street is a hotel if you ever come to visit, there are numerous reasonable choices and it’s a very convenient location. We left the girls to an Italian dinner in that area while Sawyer and I headed northeast toward Wembley. The rain was falling, of course, but the walk was relatively short, so we grabbed some dinner and headed in. If you’ve never seen Wembley, it is nearly covered but with a hole in the roof over the field, so the rain wasn’t a problem for spectators. It would prove to be a problem for the best English player and his club team though.

We stopped by for some refreshment, but, and take this as another travel tip for your visit, there are no grown-up beverages allowed in the seating area. So, if you buy two 20-ounce cups of anything grown-uppish, fifteen minutes before kickoff, keep in mind that you are not 22 years old anymore. And, if you set the last eight or so ounces in a very specific place you hope to find during your loo visit, remember that the clean up staff at Wembley is ridiculously efficient. I’m just sayin’, you know, hypothetically, for your benefit.

Anyhoo, it started slow, both teams getting their feet and England seemed to be keeping the action near the French goal, and then, as football matches tend to do, it all switched up and before anybody knew what hit ‘em, France was up 1-0. This was bad. We went into halftime that way. Then, before a third of the crowd was back from the loo after the half, France scored again. Unbelievable. The 18^th ranked team in the world against the (underachieving) sixth, and they were up 2-0 in the 50^th minute, how’s that for some numbers. The Frenchies continued to hold the lead with just minutes left, when England’s single best player, Gerrard, who is also Liverpool’s best player for his day job, went down with a hamstring injury on the wet turf. The bright side of this was: A) It drew more attention to Liverpool getting beat by my home team of Stoke last week, and B) It brought in Peter Crouch off the bench, who scored a goal less than 30 seconds after running onto the pitch. This gave us a bit of what turned out to be false hope, as France closed things out, sending us home in the rain. At any rate, it was a fantastic experience, and it has us fired up for our match that we will be attending in Stoke on Dec. 11. Our boys will be facing Blackpool, and there is a possibility that those boys might have to win that game to keep their hopes of remaining in the Premier League alive for next season.

To the Tower and the Toys!!

We got up Thursday morning and rode the rails to the Tower of London. If you recall, we had tried to go on our previous visit to London, but had run out of time and ended up just walking around the walls and the Tower Bridge. In continuing my advice about your pending visit to the UK, I suggest you try to visit the Tower of London before you go to Edinburgh Castle. Because, you see, it’s pretty much the same thing, but not up on top of a mountain overlooking a perfect medieval city. It’s beautiful, and worth doing, but, visit it before Edinburgh is all.

The main attraction at the Tower is the Crown Jewels of England. These are the huge scepters and orbs and, of course, crowns, and piles of gold and jewelry. (Remember, I warned you up top) This stirred up my emotions in a way that I wasn’t honestly prepared for. The Scottish jewels at Edinburgh took up a room. One crown, one scepter, one other royal stick of some kind. They had been hidden buried for a hundred years so that the English wouldn’t take them a few centuries back. Compared to this pile of extravagance it was nothing. This started to weigh more and more on my sensibilities.

I suppose the farthest you can get from being a monarchist is being an anarchist. I’m not an anarchist, but I do believe I could not possibly despise monarchy -- and particularly the imperialist brand that England was so instrumental in inventing -- much more thoroughly. I could not separate the sparkle and splash before me from the families, hearts and lives that were broken all over the world to allow them to all be assembled here before this moving sidewalk. There was no mention of the elephant that I seemed to be the only one seeing in the room, no expression of remorse, no “our bad, we probably didn’t need 12,000 diamonds in this particular crown.” Having to feel this in the context of the week’s top news story: “Royal Engagement – Prince William Finally Asks Kate,” it was just a little too much to take. The Royal Family is a sticky subject over here, but it never has been for me (as some folks who have heard me sing inappropriate songs late at night can attest). If they ever have the bad sense to elect me dictator of this particular island nation, every one of the Windsors better start packing that night. I simply find it incredible that this country can sit in the midst of the worst recession since WWII, with gold fetching over $1,300 an ounce, and decide that they can’t load up this room and head to the pawn shop and pay off the debt of the whole Commonwealth. And I’m sure if you turned Buckingham Palace into condos, they would probably bring in a tidy little monthly income for years to come. The ridiculousness is absolutely baffling. So, that was the visit to the Crown Jewels for me. Sawyer thought the swords were cool, and Savannah really liked the moving sidewalk. I don’t think they followed my rant completely, but they’ll get to hear it again someday.

We went on around to see where crazy old Henry VIII had the heads whacked off, and we saw where our state’s big daddy Sir Walter Raleigh got himself thrown in jail THREE times. I’m going to have to learn more about that dude. We saw the ravens that can’t leave the Tower or else the empire will fall (no I didn’t try to sneak one out, but you might note in the pictures that their wings are clipped to keep them from getting away to freedom). There was also some cute little video things the kids played with, such as where you get to pretend to be a ghost, or just under surveillance. There was also a couple of other jail rooms with some interesting graffiti from ancient prisoners, and they even had a gift shop. (That was sarcasm by the way, if the guv’ment were to lay an extra tax on gift shop c-r-a-p in this country, it would probably eat the deficit up too.)

We still had a little time after the Tower and another round of fish and chips, so we headed downtown to Hamley’s, which claims to be the world’s biggest toy store. The reason they claim this is because is has six floors in a city-block sized building, so, I’m guessing it’s the world’s biggest toy store. Check out the videos, but I’ll say it was worth a visit, and Sawyer and Savannah will probably tell you it’s the coolest place in England. I was still a little sour on the whole rampant capitalism thing, so I probably could have been biased in my assessment, but they did have puppet shows and radio control car areas that were free, so go Hamley’s!

I see that this entry has reached the 1,666-word level, so I think we’ll put off the jaunt up to my old stomping grounds in Oxford until tomorrow. As you may know, 1666 was the year that the Great Fire took down London, and they way I’ve been talking about the Queen, I may be burned at the stake myself. Hopefully, you'll hear from me tomorrow, if not, check the Tower.

CLICK HERE FOR THE ENGLAND-FRANCE, TOWER AND TOYSTORE PICS

Grab Ye’ Kilt, We’h Gon’ to Scotland

It wasn’t the smoothest trip north last Thursday. There’s not a direct train from Stoke on Trent to Edinburgh, and we bounced through Manchester and finally had to change trains completely at Carlisle near the northern border of England (a freight train was blocking the one and only track), but we finally reached our destination in a misty rain in the early afternoon. Before we had even stopped completely, you could tell we were in what was, though not officially another country, most definitely another world.

A giant castle looms high over the city on a cliff of volcanic rock. Almost every building looks as though it had stood rooted to its spot since 1473. Though it has the bustle of a modern city, Edinburgh has the charm and feel of a medieval outpost and centre of trade. It is truly breathtaking around every corner.

Now, before we go any further, let’s work on your pronunciation. It’s E-din-burr(a)h. It’s not that you want the ‘g’ to be lessened, you have to get rid of it altogether, but fill its space with that little ‘a’ in parentheses up there. And, honestly, that still doesn’t even get it. Scottish enunciation practically makes English a foreign language, especially to Suthun boys like myself.

I had taken a pair of khaki pants in the hope that I might be able to get in some golf in its ancestral home, but it became evident early on that we just had too much to do to experience Edinburgh’s treasures. We took off Friday morning and skirted past Holyrood Palace, where the Queen stays when she is in Scotland, and took in the Discovery Centre and its multi-dimensional take on the history of the earth. It is well done, and it almost makes up for the fact that its rugby ball-shaped building is a complete eyesore amongst the gothic backdrop of the city’s skyline. We saw the Scottish Parliament building, where their representatives meet and pretend that they are an independent country from Great Britain, and we got some great views of the geological wonders that hang over the city at the end opposite the castle. The cliffs and the extinct volcano known as Arthur’s Seat come into our story shortly.

CLICK HERE FOR ALL THE EDINBURGH PICTURES

We hiked the length of the Royal Mile, which really amounts to a much more pleasing version of the main street in Gatlinburg. There are no less than 30 shops where you can buy your own kilt, or man purse to go with your kilt, or Scotch shot glass, or various other sundries to commemorate your stay in the North. We even bought some fudge…and it was good.

We got to the castle and it turned out that we weren’t going to get to see much of it before closing time, so we decided to save it for tomorrow. We still took some pictures under the rising half-moon though.

Saturday turned out to be a whirlwind. We were up and scaling the heights of Arthur’s Seat by 10. The kids did great and just kept plugging along, and it was a genuine hike. The peak you can see in the photos is the highest point for many miles around, and we stood on the very tippy top. Even the castle looked small from up there. We could see across the Firth of Forth (the arm of the North Sea that provides Edinburgh’s access to the world), and probably halfway to Glasgow on the other side. When we got down and grabbed some second-rate Mexican food on the Royal Mile, we headed back to Edinburgh Castle.

The highlights included the Crown Jewels of Scotland that were worn back in the occasional days of independence that the country experienced, and we got to see the prison rooms where prisoners of war from the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were held. It is a castle like no other I have ever seen.

I diverted from the family plan on our way home and took a bus out to the stadium on the off chance that I might be able to scalp a single to the international rugby showdown between the Scottish national team and the visiting squad from New Zealand. I had watched a little rugby here and there on the telly, but we hadn’t really gotten a firm grasp of the rules, or of the hierarchy of national skills, though I did see that England had stayed pretty close to New Zealand the week before but finally the ‘All Blacks’ had triumphed. It turns out that New Zealand was having an off day against England, and have actually been the best rugby team in the world since, well, since pretty much as long as there has been international rugby. I was able to get a ticket close to game time, and by the time I got to my front row seat at the equivalent of the fifty yard line (25 pounds! Singles are the way to go at scalping time), Scotland had kicked a penalty shot and taken a 3-0 lead on the All Blacks. This could be exciting! And it was, but for a different reason. It was exciting because I got to see the best rugby team in the world up close. New Zealand proceeded to decimate the hapless Scotsmen. It was 28-3 midway through the first half. It was 49-3 by the end. However, there was not enough room on the bench, so many of the New Zealand players were forced to sit at the far end of the row my scalped ticket was in. I’d bet there are people who feel the same way about rugby that I do about football that would be pretty darn pumped to be as close to the New Zealand stars as I was that Saturday night.

Wow, that’s a lot of Edinburgh information. I’ll spare you any further details except to say that on the train ride home on Sunday we saw fields of snow in the Lake Country and it was beautiful. We are on our way back to London Wednesday for more memories as Sawyer and I have tickets for England vs. France in football (soccer) at Wembley Stadium. We’ll be in the upper deck if you get it on the satellite. I think we’ll be under the cover of the roof, so don’t worry about the rain. Ta!

A Tale of One City Two Times (Part Two)

Return to Birmingham

As I said, we made plans to hop back on the train on Monday morning to return to Buhmingum for a Shakespeare for Kids production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. We had read a storybook version of it (along with Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet), but we didn’t really know if we would be able to follow the real thing on stage. Luckily, it strayed heartily from the original language, but did a great job of retaining the essence of the story and the more famous quotes and nuances of Billy’s original.

I’m going to let Savannah tell us about the play while I play the ‘scwibe’…

Puck is the main character. He’s a troublemaker, and a sprite. In the play he had green facepaint all over him with a bit of black to look like leaves. Then it started with Theseus and Hippolyta, Theseus is the Duke of Athens and Hippolyta is his Amazon bride-to-be. Hermia’s father came out and told the Duke that Hermia has to marry Demetrius, because Demetrius approves the wedding and so does he. Hermia doesn’t approve because she loves Lysander, who loves her. Helena, Hermia’s lifelong friend, loves Demetrius, but there’s no hope for that because Demetrius is going to marry Hermia, like I just said. On Midsummer Night Eve, Lysander and Hermia run away into the woods. But before they ran away, Hermia told Helena that they were going. Helena told Demetrius that they had run away, so maybe he would change his mind and wish to marry her. But when she told Demetrius, with his sword, he ran finto the woods cursing revenge on Lysander. Helena followed, she pretended to be a dog so she could serve him. Lysander and Hermia, still in the woods, decided to rest a bit. Lysander wanted to sleep next to Hermia, but she said that since they weren’t married they shouldn’t sleep next to each other just yet.

Oberon, King of the Fairies and Titania, his queen, right then were in a quarrel, they didn’t care that it was pouring down rain or not. They were fighting over who should get a little Indian boy as a page. Then, after Titania and the boy left, Oberon had heard about an herb that in sleeping eyes of anyone it would make them fall in love with the first thing they see when they wake up. He told Puck to go and get this herb so he could get revenge on Titania to get the Indian boy. After Puck left for his errand, Oberon’s peace was shattered by seeing Demetrius and Helena tramping through the woods. Helena was still reminding Demetrius how much she loved and adored him. After they were out of Oberon’s sight, Puck returned from his errand. Titania was already asleep so Oberon squeezed the juice into Titania’s eyes. He said a tiny speech and told Puck to put the juice into a boy with Athenian clothing’s eyes, so he’d love that girl who followed behind him.

Puck didn’t know there were two Athenian boys in the woods and accidentally squeezed the juice into Lysander’s eyes. When Lysander woke, Helena was beside him after Demetrius had left her behind, and she was trying to make sure Lysander hadn’t been killed by Demetrius. When he saw Helena with the love juice in his eyes, he wanted to worship Helena and love her. Helena didn’t like the sound of this and she ran off to find Demetrius with Lysander running behind.

Anyway, the highlights are that these men were putting on a play for the Duke’s wedding, and one of the actors, Bottom, was hiding behind a bush during their rehearsal, and Puck gave him the head of a donkey. When he came out, the other actors fled. That’s when Titania awoke and saw Bottom. Through the love juice she wanted to love him, and she called her fairies to do stuff for him.

Oberon saw Helena with Lysander chasing after her, and he told Puck that he had squeezed the juice into the wrong eyes. Oberon told Puck to fix it all. After Puck fixed it, it was time for the Duke’s wedding, and they all woke up, and thought it was all a dream. The Duke saw Helena and Demetrius and Hermia and Lysander together and said that they should all get married when he got married too.

After the wedding, they had the play. The play was funny because they made a boy play the girl in the play and the boy put balloons under his dress that he wore. When she was trying to kill herself because her boyfriend had killed himself because he thought a lion had killed her, she killed herself by popping the balloons. After the play, everyone went to sleep again, and it stopped raining, and then the play ended.

Thanks Savannah.

As I mentioned, there was another bit of excitement on the train ride home. We were sitting next to a couple of guys that were twisting around their Rubik’s Cubes very quickly. We kept watching them and noticed that one of them was wearing a Rubik’s Cube competition shirt. We asked if we could make a video of them doing the Cube. He wasn’t happy with his 20 second time, his average is 12, but he has done it in NINE seconds before. They were on their way back to Manchester from a competition in Bristol, and pretty tired, so we accepted his apology…

We’re on our way to Edinburgh this weekend, we’ll keep you posted.

A Tale of One City Two Times (Part One)

BIRMINGHAM – (Oh please, it’s pronounced Buh-mean-gumm) The Grizzard family arrived in England’s second largest city on Thursday expecting an industrialized gray mass of buildings and depression. In fact, Birmingham has a beautiful downtown area, great walkways along their canals, and THE chocolate factory that inspired the creation of Mr. Willy Wonka himself!

We caught the train into Birmingham and spent the afternoon at the science museum learning more about recycling than we already knew, and we worked on our deductive reasoning in their exhibit where you catch the jewel thief. We played a bit in their miniature town set-up, and we made our own aliens suitable to live on the planets that we were given. Outside of the rain, it was tons o’ fun. We also grabbed the best Indian food we have had from the restaurant at our hotel (not the hotel restaurant, the Indian restaurant at our hotel, just to be clear). Finally, before bedtime, we flipped past a channel on the telly -- and this is especially for Sawyer’s teacher Miss Kristy and her ‘Disco Friday’ friends – watched a bit of the band that you can see on the video in the picture file.

CLICK HERE FOR OUR FIRST ROUND OF BIRMINGHAM PICS

We woke up Friday in great anticipation of a chocolate lunch at Cadbury World. This museum/factory tour is the biggest draw in Birmingham, and there were the tons of people there to prove it. They started handing us chocolate before we even walked in the door, and we proceeded to chocolate coma our way through the whole place. We learned the story of chocolate from its beginnings among the Mayans and Aztecs, and of how Cortes brought it back to Europe along with all the Aztec treasure in the 1500s. The mixture found its way to England and the shop of Mr. Cadbury right there in Birmingham, and then he added some milk to it, and before you know it, you got the best chocolate in the world. They also did an amazing job of treating their workers well and giving them nice places to live around the factory, this was all part of the Cadbury family’s Quaker tradition. Then they gave us more candy. There is a video and picture of the kids writing their names in chocolate, and then Sawyer in front of a crazy shadow machine that you have to check out. We closed the visit with – you guessed it – more chocolate…this time liquid chocolate mixed with your choice of other ingredients, but we took the safe route with marshmallows and rice krispies instead of things like sour gummy bears, yuck!

We had some more Indian food at the hotel as the rain continued, but we awoke to a sunny day for our ride home on Saturday. We got a few more pictures around the city centre and came home to rest up, because we would be heading back to Birmingham again on Monday for another taste of Mr. William Shakespeare at a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but that’s enough for now, check tomorrow for that story, including the train ride home next to the Rubik’s Cube professionals.

(That says Chester Zoo -- The Kids are in Charge Again)

CHESTER ZOO

By Sawyer and Savannah Grizzard

First we got on the bus to the train station, where we got a direct train to Chester. After we got off the train, we saw a free bus outside the train station that goes to the Chester bus station, which is exactly where we were going to go anyway. After we got to the bus station, we got on the bus to the Chester Zoo, which is, obviously, where we were going.

When we got to the zoo, we got our tickets to allow us in without breaking the law. When we got in (legally), we went to the Elephant thing. After that, we went to the monorail to get us to the important stuff. On the way, we saw cheetahs, lions, cranes, bats, ostriches, many different species of deer, monkeys, and other things with such weird names that no one I know knows how to pronounce them, such as sitatunga (even the computer doesn’t know that it exists!).

When we got off the monorail, we saw some more animals that we never knew existed(and some we did know existed that we didn’t expect would be there). We saw things like Giant otter, which make the most horrible, high-pitched noise, Chimpanzees, Orangutans, Gibbon monkeys, a Burmese Python -- the longest snake in the WORLD, iguanas, huge turtles, big fish, penguins, mongoose, lemurs, tropical birds, flamingos, camels, onagers, snakes, tigers, warthog, and even Komodo Dragons! And near the end, we went in this place that shows you how zoo vets take care of the animals. At the vet place we scanned stuffed monkeys’ wrists that have microchips to show who they are when scanned, listened to heart beats, and saw how the vets check the animals’ blood temperature. After that we went back to the entrance. We had a really Great time!

Daddy’s Halloween note: We forgot to take our camera to the zoo, but we do have some pictures from Halloween the night before. They do trick or treating here, but it is actually seen as more of an American tradition. Probably half the houses in our neighborhood gave out candy, but I think we managed to hit all of them. In case you can’t tell, Savannah went as a cat, and Sawyer went as a disgusting zombie killer (not killer of zombies, mind you, we’re very proud).

CLICK HERE FOR THE HALLOWEEN PICTURES