You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April 2011.
Browse any bookstore and you’ll see many books about English gardens and countrysides. I’m here to tell you that the photographs in those books are very real and not staged or photoshopped. Although the timing of our trip wasn’t the best for seeing the gardens at their finest, we were still able to see a glimpse of what was yet to come……..
For some reason, I’m having issues with WordPress tonight and getting captions to post under the pictures. Since it is now after midnight and this is the third time I’ve tried to caption the pictures, I’m just going to summarize them here: The first picture is a vine of some sort growing on the side of a building in Oxford (wish we could see this once it “greened” up). The second picture is a red bud type tree; the third picture is a window box in front of a dorm room window at Oxford (many of these around the university). The fourth photo is a flower from a garden at Shakespeare’s birthplace, and the fifth picture was taken in Bath, England, of a street vendor’s booth. You could smell the fragrance from these flowers from a block away – unbelievable!
In every town we toured in the UK there were awesome architectural elements and stone faces on many buildings…from over a thousand years ago to the 20th century. I could probably post a hundred pictures of all the neat gargoyles and grotesques we saw, but I’ll just upload a few of our favorites:
It seemed like every town we went through during our travels in England, there were street performers. Folk singers, guitar players, unicycle riders, opera singers, you name it. Foot traffic moved rather quickly so there wasn’t much time to just sit and listen, but there were really some talented people. One guy even had a sign that said something along the lines of “I don’t need money but if you like my music, feel free to donate.”
An opera singer at the Roman Baths
Juggling flamethrower unicyclist
A guitar player
Band of boys in the gazebo
Another guitar player
(I’m thinking I mighta had a new friend in this guy – I’m in the red coat ;-)
Coody's Bluff 