A whimsical journey

[Useless rambling about the title.  Skip ahead for info about my weekend trip.]
In my graduating class, in the Stanford band, there was a guy named Tom Hennessey.  For years, he proposed a field show that would tell the story of the black plague from the point of view of the rat, ending with him arriving in England and having tea with the Queen.  This show never got voted in because, well, no one thought it was that funny.  What was funny was Tom's persistence in presenting this show, inevitably with the loud proclamation, "IT'S A WHIMSICAL JOURNEY!"  It seems appropriate for the random-ass trip I took with my sister-ish-in-law...

I won't bore you with the details of all the transportation connections we messed up, but we always got where we were going, even if it meant sampling the local cider in a pub while waiting for a taxi (how rough).  Here's the short version.

STOP #1: Tintern Abbey (just inside Wales)
William Wordsworth wrote a famous poem "written a few miles above Tintern Abbey" after a visit in 1789.  It's one of my favorites -- go Google it and read.  The actual Abbey is remarkably well preserved considering it was founded in the 12th century.  And for an extra bonus, they were having morris dancers perform that day -- as far as I could tell, this means hopping around with bells on your legs and waving handkerchiefs.  We had a lovely couple hours in the sun between rain showers.

STOP #2: Clevedon (Somerset)

This little coastal town used to be a modest Victorian resort.  There's a restored pier from that period, and we even saw a day-cruise ship dock as we ate dinner on a pub balcony:

It was a gorgeous evening, as you can see.  That night, and all the next day, it rained without ceasing.  Nonetheless, we walked down to a little church for the real reason we'd come: the grave of Arthur Hallam.  Hallam was Tennyson's bosom friend from the time they met at Cambridge and was engaged to Tennyson's sister.  He died very suddenly of a stroke at age 22, which devastated the poet.  During the ensuing years, Tennyson wrote a bunch of poems and pieced them together into his masterpiece, In Memoriam A.H.H.  The plaque to Hallam is inside the big window on the right of this picture.  His actual grave is somewhere nearby, possibly under the floor.

The Danube to the Severn gave
   The darken'd heart that beat no more;
   They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.

There twice a day the Severn fills;
   The salt sea-water passes by,
   And hushes half the babbling Wye,
And makes a silence in the hills.

The Wye is hush'd nor moved along,
   And hush'd my deepest grief of all,
   When fill'd with tears that cannot fall,
I brim with sorrow drowning song.

The tide flows down, the wave again
   Is vocal in its wooded walls;
   My deeper anguish also falls,
And I can speak a little then.

STOP #3: Chew Magna 

Never heard of Chew Magna?  You're not alone.  It's a one-horse town, but it holds something special for my sister-in-law's family, the Miners.  Their ancestor Thomas left Chew Magna in the 1600s to make his way to America.  When some Miners from America wanted to put up a plaque in the church in the 1970s, they discovered that the herald they'd been told they had by a shady genealogist in the 1700s was complete BS.  We wanted to see whether the plaque ever went up.  It did!  But without the heraldry.  I'll spare you that picture and leave you with me on the main street:

In short, it was a very quirky tour -- a whimsical journey, if you will.  It appeared that we were the only tourists in Clevedon and Chew Magna, and on one memorable occasion, we entered a pub and everyone turned and looked at us, perplexed.  That's how you know you've gotten off the beaten track!  But as long as there's cider in the pub, it's a good place to be.