Did I mention that we walked?

My birthday was Sunday the 16th. I woke up to the sound of seagulls in Dover, England. I went downstairs with the Divine Mrs. L and my boys and ate a traditional English breakfast... one gently fried egg (very runny), toast, tomatoe, potato, coffee, juice, bacon and sausage. If you're ever offered an English breakfast sausage, politely refuse. If you're ever offered bacon, make sure you ask for crispy bacon. Trust me.

We had all day in Dover and we planned to see the white cliffs, the Channel and Dover Castle. First, we walked up the hill to the castle. Dover Castle is astounding first for it's sheer size. It dominates the town. There are very few places in this town where the castle or it's walls cannot be seen. The castle itself stands in the center of an enormous compound surrounded by an outer wall. This outer wall starts at a chalky cliff face, travels for several miles across the hills of Dovershire and returns at last to another white cliff. The wall is 100 feet tall in places and must be 30 or 40 feet thick at the bottom. The castle, the building inhabited at times by Henry the 2nd and Henry the 8th is about seven stories tall. It sits on the highest point inside the castle grounds and provides a view from the towers all the way to France, 12 miles or so across the channel. The walls of the castle withstood a siege by the French in 1216. The kings and queens of England have relied on this castle and it's command of the harbor below for centuries.

We walked through the secret wartime tunnels under the castle grounds. The British military has dug an elaborate series of secret tunnels into the soft chalk. During World War II as many as 2000 soldiers bunked below the ground. Churchill visited several times. Admiral Ramsey is said to have saved the British Army by organizing a retreat from the advancing German army in the earliest days of the second world war. He moved 338,000 soldiers from France across to Dover in nine days by employing every boat and every able body in the port of Dover. The tunnels also housed the most powerful, state of the art radio equipment available at the time. The system in the tunnels could amplify a radio signal and send it all the way to the United States, at a time when most amplifiers had a range of 10 miles. It was crucial that Hitler not know that Britain had this capability and the tunnels provided the necessary hiding place.

After lunch on the grounds of the castle we walked down the hill into the town to let the boys enjoy a bit of time on the beach. The sun was hot, we'd sweated our way through about 47,000 steps up and down the hill and we were pretty excited about the opportunity to walk down the beach and be refreshed by the cool waters of the north Atlantic. If you've ever, at any point in your life, been to a beach... you've been to a better beach than Dover's. Dover beach was stocked with smooth gravel, heated to a low bake by the sun, bordered inland by a concrete seawall and descending rapidly into a frigid ocean. Not exactly what I'm looking for when I think beach... but that thin slice of fatty ham wasn't what I was looking for when I ordered bacon, either... it's a British thing, I guess. What surprised me most were the flocks of people gathered on the beach and swimming in the water. I have a new respect for the strength of the British populace.

After a brief dip in the chilly water we put our shoes back on and walked another mile or two down the cliffs. Susan has taken up a project of photographing the very fuzzy, very gentle British bumble bees. It's a worthy undertaking as they hustle and bustle and seldom pause for more than a fraction of a second on any given bloom. She likes a challenge though and since she's put the doctoral journey behind her, I suppose she's seeking a new outlet for her energies. So, as we walked up the path she tried in vain to capture the digital image of one of these energetic little bees. We got some pictures of her standing in front of the white cliffs, though, and that's what she really wanted. She has now stood on the very cliffs that have been the unofficial symbol for the English homeland for centuries.

Finally, we walked back to the room, gathered our backpacks, and walked back through town to the train. We rode the train back to London, grabbed a bite of bread and cheese at a grocery store and walked to our bus stop... or a bus stop near our bus stop, where it turns out we were able to see our bus loading up half a block away. Then we ran to our actual bus stop and boarded where another hour and a half ride got us back to Oxford and our house on Canterbury Road.