Hello, England!

Our route from Paris to Oxford led first to Sacrament Meeting in Paris, then through the beautiful and rainy French countryside to Calais. We passed the towns of Saint-Denis and Amiens, and I was sad we didn't have time to visit their famous and influential gothic cathedrals. We arrived in Calais a little ahead of time for our Channel Tunnel train, and had some lunch at the rest area, then drove down to the train area. The Chunnel trip felt much shorter than we expected (only about thirty minutes of traveling time), and the only hint that you were deep underground was the ear-popping at the beginning and end of the train ride.

Here are some photos of the Chunnel experience, in case you were wondering what it's like:

The toll-booth style entrance.

Driving onto the train.

Inside the train.

The departure is simply the reverse of the arrival. All the instructions on the intercom are in both French and English, and you go through passport control just like an airport, only in your car. It was quick, easy and painless, and definitely more efficient than the four-hour ferry ride.

We learned the hard way, that our French car's GPS system was not very effective in England, and we ended up driving through the center of London to get to Oxford, which is located northwest of London about an hour. Our phones stopped working when we crossed the border, so we had to stop and buy an actual road map (remember those?) to get out of London and to Oxford. We arrived a couple hours late, but Allen, our airbnb host was kindly waiting for us and took us directly to our boat, supplying the kids with milk and cookies.

Yes, I did actually mean to say "boat." Since we were only going to be in Oxford for four days, we thought it would be a grand adventure to stay on a canal boat. It was a grand adventure, but it is one that probably should have only lasted two days. By day three, we were cramped and tired of crawling on top of each other, especially since it also rained a lot. It would have been a lovely and romantic getaway, had it only been Ed and I. It would have even been nice with only a couple kids, but there were just too many of us for the space.

Our host, Allen, was originally from New Zealand, so he named his boat after his favorite New Zealand beach, Anapai.

The view out the red window. 

Joe was feeling urgent, but someone was using the bathroom, so Ed told Joe to pee out the window. Of course he did, and loved it. The other kids thought it was hilarious. I try to teach them decorum, but Ed undermines me at every turn.

Here are just a few of our feathered friends. At various times we had four swans, thirteen geese and a dozen ducks begging us for food (which the kids gave willingly, even when it was their own breakfast or lunch.)

Here the kids are feeding the birds from the top of the boat. Usually they fed them out the window, and the swans were particularly brazen. The would stretch their necks right inside the boat and nip at your fingers, even when you didn't have food to give them.

The first full day (Monday) I tried to take them on a walking tour of Oxford's historic campus, but by the time I got my phone working the kids were already hungry for lunch, and then Joe was a royal mess and everyone had to go to the bathroom. We stopped at a bookshop and got something for everyone to read, then hightailed it (whining and crying all the way) home so Joe could nap. Joe slept, I slept, and the others read through the afternoon. Ed and I went out in the evening, but unless we wanted to go clubbing (which we didn't), we couldn't find much to do. And English food isn't much to get excited about--even their Italian is blasé, and it's tough to make Italian boring.

The university buildings are lit up and quite lovely at night.

Tuesday we tried the Natural History and Anthropological Museums. We actually lasted a few hours, and despite Joe and Abby each getting lost and being returned to me at separate times by museum security, we all survived. The Natural History museum was quite fun for the kids, and they enjoyed the extensive entomology section. I particularly liked the architecture of the building, and around the exhibition hall were two notable elements: the first was statues of famous scientists and Oxfordians (all white males, of course), and the second was the Doric columns: each was a different kind of limestone taken from various locations around Great Britain. I had no idea there were so many beautiful kinds of limestone. 

Sir Isaac Newton is pondering the dinosaur skull below him.

One of the first public discussions of Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man took place in this very exhibition hall in 1860. What a debate that would have been!

The limestone columns.

A view of the exhibition hall from the mezzanine. The interior barrel arches are made of steel girders to simulate the gothic arches of the older stone buildings around Oxford. Very cool.

I've never heard of ocean jasper. It was stunning.

Of course, one of the best parts of the museum was making human geometry on the grass outside after lunch.

 Our host, despite his past occupations as a chemist and then an international buyer for Aston-Martin automobiles, he now makes a living renting out his boat and running a breakfast food truck (with ice cream on warm afternoons). Each morning we walked to the train station and picked up bacon and egg breakfast sandwiches, which were very unhealthy and very delicious. Because there were so many of us on the boat, Allen needed to refill the water tank for us after a couple of days, so he took us on a little trip up the canal. The kids (and Ed and I) were very excited, despite some rain. It was definitely the highlight of our stay in Oxford.

Joe loves his "cumbrella."

Boating through Oxford in the rain. 

Just for fun, Allen took us through the locks, and Joe and Isaac loved opening and shutting the gates. 

Allen let Abby drive the boat.

After going through the locks, Allen took us up the canal on the same route that Lewis Carroll wrote about in Alice in Wonderland. As the book opens, Alice rows up the river toward the churchyard, where there is actually a hole in the ground near the base of a tree, which Carroll used as his inspiration for the rabbit hole that leads to Wonderland. I don't have a photo of it, but I do have a picture of the oldest piece of public land in all of Britain.

It was deeded to the citizens of the local village by William the Conqueror in the 11th century, and is still used as public grazing lands today.

While our time in Oxford certainly wasn't on par with our time in France, it did have one of the things I love most about England --beautiful stone churches surrounded by dilapidated and lushly green churchyards and cemeteries.

Our last evening in Oxford was spent actually in Reading trying to get Ed's laptop fixed. Ed had a heap of trouble with his x-ray scanner back in August, and now his laptop goes dead at random moments. It's a warranty problem, so it shouldn't be a big deal to fix it, but Apple can't do it within seven days. And we are never in one place for more than seven days. So he'll just have to live with random shutdowns for a few weeks more until we get to Prague at the end of October. However, the kids enjoyed the hour we spent in the Apple store, waiting for Dad to finish visiting with the tech guy.

I can't think of anything to say about this picture, except to concede that, no, it is not staged.