Trans-Atlantic Travelogue #14
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Stumble It!We Cross the Channel!, Lose our Passports, and Come to a Rest Near a Plethora of Lily Pads!
East Horsley, England
August 5, 2001
Scoreboard: 12,835 miles; 7 Countries, 20 states; 2 automobiles and a like number of blown engines, 3 ferries, 1 cruise ship, 4 trains, 1 hired van, 1 rented car, 9 taxicabs, 1 bus and 10 blistered feet (Myles gets carried after awhile).
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Myles considers flying to London, via magic cape
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Welcome back, my friends, to the journey that shall never end. Contrary to speculation that I received over the email we have not tucked tails and taken a plane "home," and we have no intention of doing so.
We are pressing ever onward, though events may dictate that we stop for the winter a bit earlier than planned, with an eye towards preparing for yet a stronger assault on the highways of Europe to commence late next March.
Pressing onward, but limping (staggering, if you prefer). Sweet Pea remains in France, without a new engine for reasons involving finance, but in good hands. We have come to rest in East Horsley, but I'm getting ahead of the tale...
First I should clarify something:
I know that I customarily bid adieu on the note of "tune in next week for [any silly reason that comes to mind]," and it has now been quite nearly four times that long since my last communiqué. Please recall that we were pinned to the Loiret for 8 weeks, and that the last installment degenerated into a critique of James Joyce about halfway through. Enough said.
Despite it all we loved France, made some incredible friends, had a lot of great times...but cash was the issue, and I wasn't able to convince any of my American travel markets that Orleans was worth a look (it is!).
As our financial hole got bigger and deeper we realized that we had to make a run for London, where I'm told they appreciate written wit, and occasionally even publish it on real paper. So we did.
Norbert (the President of the Orleans Volkswagen club, who was helpful in ways too innumerable to mention; he was so helpful that I initially distrusted him; too many years in L.A.) drove us to the Paris bus station, which is competitive with any depot in America for filth and grime considerations.
We arrived only half an hour after our bus was scheduled to leave, so we had a bit of a wait before the bus actually left. It was an all night affair powering through the slumbering French countryside, stopping only for gas at a rest area that didn't serve beer because the restaurant was closed.
We took the Calais to Dover ferry, bringing back many memories of my youth...I must have taken this ferry 30 times in the 1960s and '70s...the ferry line is British, so around 3 a.m. I emerged from the bathroom to announce, "Soft toilet paper, hot water that stays on 'til you turn it off...welcome to civilization!"
The kids were wide awake and there's a great playroom, so they were off and running. Theresa and I went outside on the upper deck for a few beers and smokes (her only for that) in the inky, fish brine smelling night. Ah, the glory! A large sign on the wall noted that we might be bombarded with soot from a smokestack at any moment. We ignored it. We weren't.
I don't think any of us slept more than 20 minutes before pulling into Victoria Station, London, a little after 6 a.m. Of course it turns out that contrary to my thoughts on the subject, Victoria (bus) Station isn't in the same spot at Victoria (train & tube) station...they're about four blocks apart.
For sensible people this wouldn't be a problem. For us, two adults, four children, 18 bags, it posed something of a dilemma. It took an hour or so of relays to relocate to the train station.
I'd never been to East Horsley, I only knew that we needed to go there. A gentleman that I write tennis for lives out this way, and only ten minutes from the camp site. So tickets to East Horsley it was.
Problem: have to change trains in Clapham Station.
So no one has slept in 27 hours or so, we're very burned out, carrying a lot of luggage, tired of carrying it, working things in relays.
We got off the train at Clapham Station. I looked around. OK, got my computer bag, got the food bag; 1, 2, 3, 4 kids....I nod to the conductor that we're through pulling things off the train, the train starts chugging and rolling SUDDENLY A GUY IS DESPERATELY WAVING AT US AND TRYING TO HAND SOMETHING THROUGH THE WINDOW!! and Theresa is jumping at the side of the train and Kasmira is too, so I'm yelling at them to get the hell away from the moving train, and then a porter does too, so they stop jumping at the train...
And that's how we lost our passports.
Theresa's purse (Guatemalan bag, actually), Kasmira's clarinet, and two duffel bags full of clothes rolled out of Clapham Station without us. A series of quick phone calls by the porters failed to illuminate their whereabouts. We're assured that such things always eventually return to Waterloo Station, not to worry, but after three days we're not entirely relaxed about it.
So we got on the train to East Horsley, London suburbs including Wimbledon rolling past, very pretty, very crowded... I'm following our progress on the map on the wall...seems like a morning where there's a good chance that we'll miss our stop.
We didn't. The train turned the wrong way.
No one told us that we had to change trains twice. We got all our stuff off that train, to put it on a train going the other direction. Turns out the same train now goes the other direction. We put all our stuff back on the same train.
We took all our stuff off the train at the station. Theresa went to the bathroom. Our train rolled through, no other one for half an hour. I opened up a can of Grolsch in the weak and gentle British morning sun...incidentally, make sure to buy beer and tobacco on the ferry, much cheaper than in England.
My two earliest recollections of this life are my farmer shirt, and my mother taking me to the ponds in Mildenhall, England, where I was born. I loved to feed the ducks, and swans, and was fascinated by the mystique of the myriad lily pads.
Got off the train in East Horsley (Horsley Station), a couple quick calls failed to locate our lost bags, called a cab from the traditional red pay phone, the cabbie jumped out of the door beside me by the time I hung up the phone...and we're off again! (uh-GAIN as they say here)
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England weather as according to legend, replete with stoic lily pads
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Been awake nearly 30 hours without sleep now...I get out of the cab, and the camp site is built around this beautiful lake/pond with ducks and...huge, enormous, beautiful lily pads. It was a wonderful moment in my very stretched brain.
So that's how we came to be in East Horsley. (pronunciation guide: East HORZ-lee is correct, I raised many eyebrows early on with East HORSE-ley, wrong)
It is, to say the least, an affluent bit of Britain. Walking to town (one mile) is like attending an auto show. Brand new Lotus' (beautiful, but not as spectacular as the old Elite's), Jaguars (still good, but they look a bit more like Buicks every year), MGs (now look almost exactly like the Ford Taurus, but I bet they're still built with that legendary craftsmanship that allowed mine to run for about 800 miles in between ten trips to the shop)....BMWs, Mercedes...
I had a wonderful meeting with the guys I write tennis for, they work on either end of the gambling industry and no small amount of great British ale met its end on that night I can tell you. I'll be seeing what else I can do to further encourage our shy economy next week.
Tune in next week, we may be in East Horsley....we may be headed to Wales or the southern coast of England....I may be the new correspondent for the Daily Mirror (the British newspapers are very good, the writing is a tremendous balance of substance and humour, even the conservative ones) in Malta, maybe we'll have our passports again...it's possible even that I'll be Olivet picking up Sweet Pea...how long until the Oktoberfest?
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Main Street, downtown metropolitan Horsley
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I can only promise you this: We won't have wrapped it up and returned to America. There is too much yet to explore...in Spain...and southern France...Greek Islands...Denmark...the Scottish highlands...the Guinness spouts of Dublin...the Cathedrals everywhere...the ruins at Montsegur...there's bound to be a tennis tournament somewhere that I can manage to attend!
Tune in next week, when more stuff will have happened and we'll be someplace.
