Ridgeway Trip I: The Voyage Out!

Okay, I'm back from my amazing Ridgeway trip!  And I brought the gift of Covid back with me, so for the past two days I've just been lying around.  Now I feel pretty able to start working on blog posts, which I mostly wrote up every evening...or at least I tried to.  This one, for example, consisted of a messy paragraph I wrote while falling asleep over the keyboard, which explains the extremely bad typing and the inexplicable comment "just like Archer's Goon really" that I have no idea what I meant by that, though this trip did yield many a happy Diana Wynne Jones moment!  Anyway, I'm going to get started with our flight out....

My mom and I drove my car down to my brother's place in Livermore a couple of days before our flight out, because my niece graduated from high school and we missed all the festivities, so we wanted to at least hang out a bit.  At just about the last moment, we all decided to spend a day in Berkeley.  Mom also messaged her sister to see if she wanted to come have lunch with us, so it turned into quite a reunion.  We all drove up to Berkeley and wandered around campus a little bit; the Campanile was open, and the kids had never been, so we went up and took pictures.  Then as we waited for my aunt, we were a little bit early, so I dragged everyone over to Anthony Hall to look at the pelicans.  Having met my aunt, we walked down Telegraph to find some lunch, and I really wanted to eat at Mezzo, the new incarnation of Intermezzo, my favorite lunch place ever.  The line was incredibly slow, but at least we could chat while we waited, and we took our food to the back courtyard and squeezed into what shade we could find.

Two sisters, Berkeley women for 50 years!

Very hot rose garden

After lunch and saying goodbye to my aunt, we wandered over to the Bancroft Library in hopes of seeing the gold nugget that kicked off the Gold Rush, which we didn't manage last time.  This time, success!  Then we hiked back up to the car and drove north to the Berkeley Rose Garden, which was a few weeks past its best but still looking fantastic.  By then we were all so hot that we mostly admired all the roses from under the pergola at the top.  After that, everyone wanted to hit Yogurt Park for frozen yogurt and we drove back home.  My niece was flying out to Chicago that night to visit her friend, and we had an early flight in the morning.

We left at 7am to catch the BART to SFO, which is much, much better than driving there, at least in daylight.  (When we came back, our flight landed at midnight, so no BART that time.)  We were flying to Montreal and then London on Air Canada, so we found our gate, and pretty soon our friend Teresa joined us, which was great.  We had a pleasantly boring trip to Montreal, where everything is done in French first, and our flight to London was quite soon afterwards -- hardly any layover at all, so we only had time for a quick bite.  Good thing we did too, because there was almost no food on the overnight flight, which was fine and boring, just like you want an overseas flight to be.

Airport selfie

Once we landed at Heathrow, we wanted to take the Tube, or a train, out to the city of Reading, which was a convenient place to sleep before getting to Avebury the next day.  This trip used the new Elizabeth line, and we were pretty confused as to whether this is a Tube line or a train.  We used our Oyster cards, which turned out to be a mistake; Oyster cards are no good outside of greater London and it became a hassle as I tried to get refunds on our cards.  Anyway, we got to Reading just fine, found some food at a Pret a Manger next to the station (I was so tired and out of it that I left my suitcase by the cash register and didn't notice until it was nearly time to go) and walked half a mile to the hotel, deposited our luggage, and decided to explore a little bit; I'd found a few interesting things to look at in the town center.

Reading's town center is, all by itself, quite pleasant and full of interesting buildings.  We walked by a church built in an unusual checkerboard pattern (closed), through pedestrian-only streets and alleys, over to the late-Victorian town hall.  It's built in an eye-arresting style, in orange and dark grey brick, like a mini-St. Pancras.  These days it holds the city museum, and I wanted a peek at the top floor, which hosts...a 19th century small-scale reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, made by the ladies of Leek, who figured England deserved one too.  I'll probably never get to see the real one, but this one is pretty nice.  Each lady signed her section at the bottom, and being a Victorian version, it's slightly expurgated.  And while, as we know, the final section of the real tapestry is lost, the well-known embroideress Jan Messent came up with her own version of what it might have looked like, and they have that too, in a vestibule.  I really like Jan Messent so I was happy about that, and tickled by how it ends with "Omnes gaudent."  

Interestingly checkered church

Wow, that is some town hall

Victorian Bayeux tapestry!

With explanation!

Jan Messent's final panel

The massive church next door to the town hall was also closed, and we went down an alley, into the churchyard, through a park, by a gigantic lion statue commemorating the Afghan War, past a Regency-era hill park with trees, by more war memorials...where are those abbey ruins anyway??  We finally found them, and they are massive.  That abbey was enormous, and very powerful in its day -- Henry I was buried under the altar and everything.  

It was getting difficult to appreciate the ruins, though, because we were so very tired -- and it was starting to rain as well.  We dragged back to our hotel -- once out of the city center, this was a very unpoetic walk through and under a massive parking garage and traffic circle -- and Mom and I ventured out for some curry at a Wanamaka on the next street.  Our final friend was due to arrive around midnight but I couldn't stay awake for that and just left her key at the desk.