Style overlooking Chesil Beach from St. Catherine's Chapel in Abbotsbury

My home in Northridge is in the San Fernando Valley, a suburb of LA. At one time it was known as "the bedroom of Los Angeles" since most of the people living here worked over the hills in the LA. area. After World War II thousands of new homes were built, in this wide valley of orange groves and walnut trees, that were easily affordable for Veterans on the GI Bill. My husband and I and our ten month old son moved here in 1953. We didn't even have a telephone for the first year because the lines didn't run this far out. We felt like real pioneers. Today the Valley is heavily populated and has much industry of its own. We have seven major shopping malls, a large university, two junior colleges, countless movie theaters and dozens of supermarkets. It's a nice place to live, but oh how I miss Dorset.

In order to survive until next June when I will be in Dorset again I've had to devise several methods to keep in touch with England's prettiest county. Thank goodness for the Internet! The first thing I do each morning, after rushing through a minimum of housework, is to log on and exchange e-mails with my friends who are lucky enough to live in Dorset. My friend Joyce who lives in Corfe Mullen has been very good about sending me a negative thought about Dorset each day during my usual visiting period. It's usually about the weather: "You wouldn't like it here today, it's pouring rain and freezing. I wish I were in LA." My friends the Hunts in Wyke Regis will say: "We're sitting in the conservatory having tea and thinking of you. The red valerian is out and it's beautiful this year."

Weymouth harbor

After the e-mails I click on to the BBC and listen to Radio 4 and The Women's Hour while I read the Dorset Echo newspaper. I read the local news from in and around Weymouth and Dorchester and sometimes click over to the main site in Bournemouth. I know all about the woman who tried to poison her husband and then tried to kill him by putting a plastic bag over his head. I marveled at the way an unemployed man from Portland was able to win £l,254 using his own intricate system of placing 3 penny bets. I read about the disgraced Dorchester doctor jailed for swindling the NHS out of £799,087 over a period of seven years, and I was amazed to learn that Cecil Beaton's former home near Tollard Royal is up for sale with a price tag of £9 million. The Dorset Echo site is very user friendly. I can browse around and read what's going on all over Dorset. It even has a device that gives me a 3D tour of Weymouth.

After the Dorset Echo I go to the Dorset Life magazine website to see if it has a new lead story. The monthly changeover here usually happens a few weeks before I get my copy by snail mail. The site doesn't have the complete magazine, just a few of the main topics, so there's still plenty to read when the magazine finally comes in the mail. It takes between six and ten weeks to arrive.

Fortunately, I brought the Dorset Art Weeks guide home with me last year. Many of the listed artists and craftspeople have websites I can visit. I can send e-mails and order from the more than two-hundred artists listed. I'm very tempted to order another ceramic sculpture from Furze and Rosemary Swan. I love the one I have of a little piglet setting on top of an apple tree and I'm sure I could use another of Sheila Sanford's lovely watercolor prints. I like her address at: Sheepwash Cottage, Matravers, Upholders, Bridport. I'm glad Dorset Art Weeks only happens every two years. At least I'm not missing it this year. The nicest thing about it is that it provides links that can be followed to dozens of other intriguing Dorset websites.

Red Valerian

My favorite is John Allen's Images of Dorset. He provides over 1200 digital photographs illustrating life in the County of Dorset. "They are grouped by date, location and event to provide a virtual tour through places and seasons that together give Dorset its distinctive character and make it one of the most attractive counties in England." I would have said the most attractive county in England. There are many different ways to dip into and enjoy the collection. I can spend hours on this one site. Maybe after all of these years I can at last learn the names of a few of Dorset's wild flowers. Until John's site with his lovely wild flower images I could only recognize cow parsley and red valerian. Now, thanks to John, I even know about the very cunning way the Early Spider Orchid uses to attract a certain bee species so that pollination can take place. I didn't know flowers could be so sneaky.

I spend a lot of time on the Internet enjoying many websites hosted by professional photographers and I'm sure that John Allen's is among the very best. He's learned the rather tricky craft of using digital technology to record his images and produces remarkably sharp photos that never have any of the blur that so many otherwise beautiful pictures on the Internet have. He provides complete information about the cameras he uses and instructions about how to achieve the near perfection he does. All of his images can be viewed full size by clicking on the thumbnail. Because John makes monthly additions to his collection it's always exciting to see what new part of Dorset he has captured for me to see here in the San Fernando Valley. He has promised to take some shots of my favorite spot: the little valley on the way to Old Girt Farm near Evershot.

By clicking on a link from Dorset Images I found: Nigel J. Clarke Publications where I can order books, maps, and guides to Dorset and South West UK. The publications cover local walks, paleontology, Dorset's smugglers, and they tell all about the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685. I can order Smugglers Tails of Dorset and Devon, Lyme Bay Fossils, or a book about that Rude Man of Cern Abbas. The list seems endless. It even offers a book called Adolph Hitler's Holiday Snaps, two volumes which cover most of the south of England containing Luftwaffe reconnaissance photography from 1939 to 1942. There's another called The Battle of Britain Over Dorset - The Story of the Spitfire Base at Warmwell During World War II. I think I'll get that one for my husband.

Evershot Cottage

This ordering of books published only in England over the Internet can be very dangerous. Every year when I'm in Dorset I pack up and mail home one or two large post office boxes with between fifteen and twenty paperback books in each. Postage is a bit pricey but well worth it because I like these authors so much. Authors like Margaret Forster, Libby Purves, Angela Huth, Lilian Harry, Ruth Hamilton, Clare Francis, Elizabeth Jane Howard and sometimes Mary Wesley. If they are published over here I can't find them. The dangerous part is that now I can find new books by these same authors on the Internet, books that I would normally find in Dorchester at Ottakars' or WHSmith. I can order them on line direct from the bookseller! The catch is that the postage from the UK to LA is even more expensive than when I mailed them myself. I have twenty hovering right now in my amazon.co.uk shopping cart in that no man's land of 'saved to buy later.' All it would take to send them on their way is one simple click. The temptation is great. I don't know how long I can hold out.

I don't remember where I was clicking from when I suddenly found myself at David Strange's Worth Hill Observatory. It's situated on the South Dorset Heritage Coast. He's an arable farmer by profession but has been an amateur astronomer for thirty years. The web pages on his site show digital images and photographs taken with a Starlite Express CCD camera mounted on the site's main telescope - a 50 cm f/4 Newtonian. (I'm sure it's very good even if I don't know exactly what it means). The important thing is that it's a wonderful site for astronomers, amateur and professional, with links to many other astronomy websites.

Sooner or later I was bound to type 'THOMAS HARDY' in a search box just to see what I would come up with. Amazing! After a few clicks through a biography and lists of his work I came to pictures of a meeting of The Thomas Hardy Society. One page was filled with pictures of members enjoying refreshments after a meeting. I thought I recognized two faces in the crowd. I clicked on the thumbnail and there, large enough to fill my whole screen, were my friends Hazel and John Hunt from Wyke Regis! Hazel was just about to take a bite of a tempting looking cake.

Mapperton House and Gardens

Britainexpress.com is a brilliant UK Travel and Heritage Guide. If you find this you really don't kneed anything else. It covers all of England, Wales and Scotland. David Ross is the webmaster and has put together a collection about Ancient and Roman Britain as well as Anglo Saxon England, Medieval England, The Tudor Age, The Stuarts, Georgian England and the Victorian Period. He explores thousands of current attractions all over Britain and provides information about cost of entry, opening times, instructions and maps showing how to find the attraction plus how to find the best nearby accommodation. But of course it's his section on Dorset that I always head to first. When I type 'DORSET' in David's search box the website comes up with 166 choices about Dorset. A few of these are my own stories that have appeared in Dorset Life magazine but most of the others have intriguing titles that invite investigation.

It was on a link from David's site that I discovered The Country Bus: - "a historic and nostalgic look at country buses - mainly in the county of Dorset." Since I consider myself an expert on Dorset's country buses I was fascinated. It's Peter Roberts' site. When he was a child Peter dreamed of running his own bus company. He's spent most of his adult life working in the bus industry. He invites the audience to "click on a link and take a pleasant ride with him down and along the winding lanes of nostalgic memory..."

I was particularly interested in his story about the Blandford Bus Company that was started in 1985 by John Cummings with just one bus, but was forced out of business just five years later by a much larger bus company. One of my nicest bus rides was on that bus with John in 1986. He picked me up in Iwerne Courtney in front of the Cricketer's Arms while on his way to Salisbury. His was the cleanest bus I've ever been on. The windows sparkled and the floors and seats were spotless. John was very pleasant with all of his ladies on their way for a morning of shopping. He made sure every one of them was back aboard when it was time to return. He helped to load and unload all of their shopping bags and made sure when it was time for each to alight that they made it back safely to their front doors. I'm so sorry he couldn't keep running his little company. It was a pleasure to ride with him.

Comfy Lux bus

Through the years I've had many rides on the A. Pearce & Co. buses of Cattistock so I sent Peter a snap I took in 1986 of a Pearce Comfy Lux Bedford as it pulled into Evershot. I am delighted to see that he has put it on his Country Bus website. I'm glad I'm not alone in appreciating these humble little country buses. They are national treasures that most tourists don't even know about.

These are just a few of the Dorset wonders I've found on the Internet. There's bound to be dozens, maybe even hundreds more. It's going to be a long, hot summer. If I can't spend part of it in Dorset, I can at least go exploring on the Net to see how many I can find. I'll have plenty of time but I can't spend all of it at the computer. I think I'll go through all of my photos from nearly twenty years of visits and pick six or seven to have enlarged and framed. If I hurry I can do it before Wimbledon is over. If I can't see Dorset out of my window I'll hang my photos near by. There's more than one way to skin a cat.

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