Last Cruise Port: Dover, England

Our last cruise stop was Dover, England. The first thing we did was take a very long walk from the ship/cruise port along a highway to a nearby pier to … go geocaching. Kind of anti-climactic. 

Then we hopped on a tour bus driven by Adam the driver to go to the once-seaside town of Rye. Yes, it used to be by the ocean but isn’t anymore, and that’s not because the town moved. It was a cute, quintessentially English town with many cobblestones (and, it being the first day of school vacation, many tourists). 

We first visited the Mermaid Inn along Mermaid Street. Very short doors, though not quite as short as the ones in Lerwick at the previous stop. Fortunately I was able to “mind my head” so I didn’t find any of the doors, shall we say, accidentally. The “function room” was very formal as they were expecting the Archbishop of Canterbury (ie, the head of the Church of England) to attend an event for a society that was holding its concluding meeting. A very nice 50-something woman who presumably was in charge of the space was rather flustered by all of the pomp and circumstance and was slightly nervous because there was an air bubble between the fondant and the cake on one of the two cakes though if she hadn’t pointed it out I wouldn’t have known. 

We had lunch at Simon the Pieman where I had a “jacket potato” which the Americans in the crowd would recognize as a baked potato. Across the street from Simon’s was City Hall where a Town Crier was announcing weddings. I was amused by this door that’s nowhere near the ground as the rounded thing it’s sitting on is a roof. 

After a short visit to Rye we went to a place where we tool a short walk to be able to see the White Cliffs of Dover. The rocks are sedimentary and the white is chalk. As in, don’t touch them with your clothes or you will need to wash them. Hence the pose where only the bottom of my foot is touching the chalk. 

Finally, three perhaps random pictures. The first shows some of the traffic queuing up to get to France either by ferry or through the Chunnel — there were many lorries (trucks) lined up blocking a lane of the highway for several miles. The second is one of my favorite pictures of the trip, it’s a moth, specifically a six-spot Burnet (according to both the app Seek and my sister) on a flower which Seek declares is part of the honeysuckle family. And the third is a final view of the white cliffs taken from the ship. 

A month ago I would have been awestruck by the white cliffs. But I’ve seen so many spectacular sights that the white cliffs, by comparison, feel rather mundane. Clearly I need a dose of reality. 

And now I segue to part two of the trip: spending a month in Europe before meeting with my geocaching reviewer “cousins” in Germany at the end of August. The plan is to spend about a week in England, about a week in Switzerland, a few days in Austria, a bit more than a week in Poland, a weekend in Berlin and end up where the reviewers are gathering. 

I’m actually typing this from Bath, England. After disembarking yesterday I walked to the tram which I took (with friends) Rotterdam Centraal (train station). Then took a train to Brussels, waited for a few hours (because previous trains were full, thankfully I had a reservation), took the EuroStar through the Chunnel to London, took the underground to a different station (yes, I remembered to “mind the gap”), a train to Bath (it was supposed to take 80 minutes but it took double that because of some “police issue”), and walked a few hundred meters to my lodging. 

I only finished one book on the various trains.