Maryanne has popped over a few times, but I haven't been to Mike and Annie's house for over a decade, it turns out. Most surprising to me was their three adorable kids. They all have Master's Degrees now and were coming for a visit from their own homes, just like us.
They have such a nice family. From our guest room upstairs we could often tell when the family was up in the mornings by the sounds of raucous laughter making its way through the house. Other times, we would think they were gone and arrive to find them all sitting quietly around the table, clutching cups of tea and putting a jigsaw puzzle together.
Celebrating Christmas in the warm hug of Maryanne's friend of old: Annie, and her wonderful family
We didn't do a lot during our stay in Marple that would make for great travel writing (with Maryanne still suffering from her bad ankle). Mostly, we all just hung out together, catching up on the goings on of the last few years, while playing games together or helping with a seemingly endless supply of puzzles.
The weather was generally dreary, but I did manage to start the routine of suiting up in rain gear and going out for a daily squishy walk through the woods and along the canals nearby. When I got back, somebody would always offer me a hot cup of tea within seconds of my entering the house.
After a week or so, it was time for us to gather our stuff, pack it up, and then see what's going on with the British rail system that everyone has been whinging on about.
We were not disappointed. It seems a good proportion of the staff had decided to call in sick. Trains were cancelled, delayed or shortened, making reserved-seat tickets useful only as confetti. Our second, standing-room-only train, which was supposed to be our last, abruptly terminated six stops from where we were trying to go. As a concession, we were told to wait an hour for a non-cancelled train to resume our journey. In all, we only arrived an hour and a half late to our last stop in Grimsby. How's that for a British place name?
We spent our New Year's Eve in Lincolnshire with Maryanne's sister Sarah (and friends and family, horses, dogs, and cats)
Maryanne's sister, Sarah, met us there and drove us to her property in the nethers of northeast Lincolnshire. She and her husband Lee have horses, so the place is a proper country getaway with stables, paddocks for the horses and even a small pond.
After meeting their many animals, we then embarked on a re-enactment of the plot of the 1998 movie "Madhouse", where a young couple's in-laws arrive as houseguests and then promptly begin to destroy their home through a series of bungling misadventures and general incompetence at performing normal daily tasks. It turns out that living on a farm is almost nothing like living on a sailboat. After the first few mishaps, I started to get self-conscious, which just made the pace of the mayhem accelerate. It was fortunate for them that we left before erasing their hard drives, burning down the house, or teaching the horses how to pick a lock.
To keep the damage in the house down, we did manage a couple of side trips to nearby cities. Cities around here are mostly made of stone, so they are harder to break.
Our first trip was to York. York is a beautiful old city. The Shambles, the area surrounding the impressive cathedral, York Minster, is particularly picturesque, with its steep streets and old Tudor buildings where the centuries have assured that nothing is square or plumb anymore. It's like walking around in a surrealist painting of a medieval village. In the end, we were really glad they didn't tear down York when they built the new one.
Sightseeing day trip to the city of York (with Viking history and more) We went to the Jorvik center, the castle, The Shambles Tavern (for lunch), and the Medieval 'Barley Hall', and generally ambled around the streets. We hope to spend more time in York before we leave the UK again.
We also spent a day in Lincoln, which I assume was named after the American President Abraham Lincoln in 1170, a mere 639 years before his birth in a log cabin that he built himself. Lincoln has a lot of the same feel as York, only on a smaller scale and with fewer people milling about. The Cathedral is particularly impressive. So much so, in fact, that we ended up spending the better part of five hours crawling all over the place. The highlight was definitely the two-hour roof tour. We didn't actually spend too much time on the roof itself because it was a cold, miserable day, but the route up took us through two bell towers and the attic above the nave, along with all of the intervening chambers in between. All of these were wonderful hidden gems. We felt so privileged to have access to these "secret" areas.
We returned to the nearby Grimsby, to see the Fishing Heritage Center (In the 1950's Grimsby was largest and busiest fishing port in the WORLD!!)
And a few other outings too, and Sarah treated Maryanne to a fine pampering at the hairdressers.
After leaving Sarah and Lee's place more or less intact, we drove to the southern end of Lincolnshire, the side ever so slightly closer to the tropics, for a visit to Maryanne's dad, Peter's.
Along the way, we stopped off at the Stump, Boston's Norman church, technically named St. Botolph's, but it has been known as The Stump since construction began in 1309. It is grand and impressive in the manner of a lot of Anglican architecture.
Between families, we had to drive through Boston where the main attraction is The Boston 'Stump' is an early Norman church that can bee seen for miles, we even got to climb most of the way up for the views around.
There are a few interesting tidbits about the place. The first is that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that it was built on the site of a monastery founded by St. Botolph in the year 654, hence the name. That last bit is probably not true, but the name of the location of St. Botolph's stone was shortened and simplified to Boston, as the town is known today.
The other famous Boston, the one in Massachusetts in the United States, was named after this one by John Cotton, who was a vicar here (in the UK Boston) in the 17th Century. He became a Puritan, whose militant followers trashed the church in 1612 for being too ostentatious. Later, be became a Pilgrim and left for the Massachusetts Colony in 1633, so that he would be able to practice religious freedom by accusing anybody he didn't like of being a witch.
It wouldn't be too surprising if I had a few ancestors traveling along with him. Maryanne and others in the family have done a lot of genealogy research and it seems that almost my entire family tree goes back in North America until the early 1600s to either the Jamestown or Massachusetts colonies. Then both branches jump to the British Isles. Her family, on the other hand, has been from right around here for centuries. She hasn't found one yet, but it seems likely that we both have a common ancestor who was a farmhand around these parts in the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Centuries. That would make us eighteenth cousins or some such thing. That sounds like an amazing coincidence, but it is said that if most Britons went back twenty generations or so, they would already be related to practically everybody else in Britain.
I had a strange experience a couple days later when Maryanne and I visited the Cathedral in Peterborough with her dad for a tour. Like many tour guides do, ours asked where we were all from (there were only five of us in total).
When Maryanne and her dad answered that we came from Bourne, instead of saying, "How close is that to London?" Our guide said, "Oh, I know Bourne! I drove through it on the way here this morning!"
I think that's the first time I have ever been on a tour with Maryanne where she wasn't the one 'from' halfway around the world. Peterborough, Bourne and nearby Stamford is where she grew up. Most of her school years were in Stamford and it was fun to walk through that beautiful old city with her as she pointed out both it's historic places and her old hangouts. As children went by in their school uniforms, I could picture her as one of them, not too many years ago, wondering if she had any clue what her future had in store. I'll say this from seeing a lot of the photos: She has a much better haircut now. Some of the ones she had back then bordered on child abuse.
Then there were the accents. Maryanne's voice is by far the one I hear the most - so much so that I hardly even notice her accent anymore. I'm much more likely to pick American accents, including my own, out of a crowd as sounding unusual, with our soft Ts and our sharp Rs. I figured, with her history and all, that if any town were to sound like a bunch of Maryannes, minus the American idioms, it would be Stamford. Instead, it sounded to me like most of the people milling around us had a distinct northern twinge to their conversations, as if we were on the side of the county closer to Yorkshire than to Cambridgeshire. Despite now sounding like she was from somewhere else as well, Maryanne knew all of the side streets and which alleys to use as shortcuts, so I think I had the best local guide of all.
Peterborough Cathedral - you can see a theme here! The big globe you can see is a temporary art exhibit of the planet Mars (part of the War and Peace works by Luke Jerram) and what a beautiful setting.
