Bath and Wells Cathedral

We drove to Bath for a 2-day stay in what turned out to be a spectacular Airbnb coach house run by Libby and Ken, the most welcoming and helpful couple one could imagine.  In Bath we visited the Roman Baths of course, and other well-known sights. But the real find there was at Bath Abbey, where we stumbled upon an extraordinary exhibit of 35 diptychs (paired panels) created by a woman named Sue Symons.  As a “retirement indulgence", she set out to create a visual interpretation of stages in the life of Christ as taken from the Gospels. Each in the series of 35 diptychs consists of one panel of text on the left that she developed in decorative calligraphy (paper, watercolor, paints, colored ink) paired with another panel on the right that she created as an abstract interpretation of that text in needlework (fabric, beads, buttons, thread and odds and ends).  Her vision of a 5-year project in reality took over 3,000 hours and was completed in a year.  Bath Abbey became the owner of all 35 diptychs, now known as The Bath Abbey Diptychs: One Man’s Journey to Heaven”.   I am an agnostic and am always amazed by the power of religious belief to inspire human beings (for good or evil). This is a stunning example of such inspiration for creativity. Here are a few examples of Sue Symons work – my little IPhone photos do not do them justice.
The Journey to Bethlehem

 The Three Magi

 The Sermon on the Mount

 Loaves and Fishes Are Multiplied

And here are a few more photos from Bath. The exterior of Bath Abbey:

The East Window was shattered in WWII in 1942 and then painstakingly restored in 1954, using 60% of the original stained glass, which had been just crudely swept up into dusty piles after the Bath blitz.

 The interior of the abbey. In its early history, Benedictine monks controlled the abbey and the town for 500 years.

A street in Bath decorated fittingly with colored umbrellas

The Roman Baths - this was absolutely packed with tourists and not so much fun to visit.

There are audio tour guides of the Roman Baths for both kids and adults. This little girl took the tour very seriously!

After Bath, we drove to Wells on the recommendation of Ken and Libby to see Wells Cathedral. We arrived just in time to join a 1-hour tour by an excellent docent.  Wells is an English Gothic Cathedral with some very unusual features, among them its 14th century scissor arches which were built to shore up its sinking original arches. You can see the "scissors" in the center of this photo.

It also has a very rare clock that dates from 1390. The face shows the universe as imagined before Copernicus, with the earth at the center. On the quarter hour jousting knights emerge and circle round the clock as it chimes, and one falls over at the end of the chiming. I put a video of this ancient clock chiming 11am on my Instagram account if you want to see it there.

Above is the Vicars's Close - the oldest street in England. Below is a closeup view of one of the hundreds of columns in the Cathedral that is decorated with sometimes comical or scary details of humans and creatures, real or imagined. This is a portrayal of "apple scrumpers" or apple thieves!

From Wells we made our way to our next Airbnb studio in Devon, just north of Plymouth. It’s a very rural location with no wifi signal at all, but it’s beautiful and there are horses, a chicken named Ruby, ducks, a dog named Grace, and a cat. In the kitchen were milk, a basket of fresh eggs, bread and jam (homemade by Mandy and her 5-year old granddaughter Lilly). I’ll include some photos here to show how nice these lodgings are.      
This is Ruby, who wanted to get inside as soon as she saw us through the glass doors.

 Here are the 2 horses and a view of the countryside around the farm

The studio is the building on the left with a patio and French doors to the livingroom. Very spacious and elegant inside. Our Airbnb accommodations in England have been really varied and interesting and almost all our hosts have been terrific.

We drove to Plymouth on a rainy day and were not very impressed with the city. It's a naval city that was bombed heavily during the war and its postwar architecture unfortunately leaves a lot to be desired. So we took a little ferry over to Mount Edgecumbe across the harbor (in Cornwall!), had lunch in a pub and took a walk. Plymouth was one of the harbors that served as a departure point for D-Day in 1944, and there are commemoration plaques there thanking the Allies for their partnership. This is a sailboat entering the harbor from the Channel. As a newbie to cruising in 1984, I sailed from here to Tregiers, France in a 35' sailboat  i'd just bought with my ex-husband - learning to cruise, stand watches alone and and do overnight passages while dodging fast ferries, fishing fleets, cargo ships and other pleasure boats! No radar, barely any instruments. Crazy, in retrospect.

The place I really wanted Jim to see was Dartmouth, so we braved bad driving weather and skiiiiiinny little roads with lots of curves and mad English drivers to get there and back. Here it is, raining with blue sky, luckily on a motorway with 2 lanes...

And lots of this. When you meet an oncoming vehicle, someone has to back up or pull 'way over into the hedge to get by.

Dartmouth deserves its own post, so that's coming up next.