Sorry it took so long to get another England post out. No excuse other than laziness. The next morning we drove to Lake Windermere and took a few pictures before the long day of driving which would land us in Hertfordshire. We stopped first at the house where John Taylor grew up, in the little town of Milnethorpe. There is a plaque outside his house and a cooler filled with eggs. I guess the people who live there now have chickens. You can take a dozen eggs and leave your money in the mailbox, apparently. As much as we wanted to eat raw eggs and get our protein like Gaston, we passed on the eggs.
Our next stop was Liverpool, home of the Beatles and Albert Dock, the port where most of our ancestors (including those from Scandanavia) left Europe for the promise of the American dream. I must admit, Liverpool was a bit of a hole and I'm sure it was an well-planned place for an emigration port because it didn't make you want to stay very long. We ate some crapes and toured the emigration museum. We were able to lay down on a replica 3rd class bunk. You'd really get to know people better if you were traveling 3rd class from Liverpool to New York, that's for sure.
We left Liverpool in the rain for a nearby town which was established in medieval times: Chester. It was still raining pretty hard so we made a quick trip of Chester. We toured a cathedral which was built in the 1400s and walked along the main street of the town.
Then, it was off to drive through Wales. Wow, we loved Wales. When we go back to the UK, I'm going to spend more time in Wales. The mountains are breathtaking and the street signs are in Welsh (which, by the way, does not look much like English). We stopped in Llangollen for dinner and did not find the first pub to be too inviting, so we moved on and tried another, called The Bridge End Hotel. This was the food find of the whole trip. We had lamb in mint sauce, steak and Guinness pie, Three Cheese Pasta (the favorite), jacket potatoes, and some lovely chocolate cake and a toffee pudding which was to die for. If you are ever in Wales, go find that restaurant. Delicious. Well, we stayed there way too long and wished we didn't have reservations to still get to, because we had to drive on windy roads in the dark to get to our hotel in Hertford. But, it was well worth it for the food.
The next morning we left for some church history sites. Hertfordshire is where Wilford Woodruff served the bulk of his England mission and was one of the most fruitful areas for converts. We visited John Benbow's farm where most of the United Brethren were baptized (including one of MaryAnne's great-great-etc. grandfathers was baptized, a United Brethren lay preacher named John Gailey, on March 24, 1840). It was so great to be there and see the pond where it happened. Too bad I look ridiculous in the one picture of the most significant spot for our family (sorry Annie, daddy looks like an idiot, but mom looks beautiful).
Next we went to Ledbury, a town where Brigham Young spent some time preaching. We saw the Market Place and a small chapel where he preached. The chapel itself had been condemned, but the ladies in the church let us go in (at our own risk). When I walked in and asked to see the chapel, she said "you must be Mormons." She was correct. It was in the chapel that the battery on the camera died, and so we don't have pictures from the rest of this day, which was spent at a few more church history sites (Malvern Hill, where Wilford Woodruff went to pray and meditate, and it's a big hill, and Gadfield Elm, the oldest chapel still in use in the church today), and driving through the Cotswolds, where we stopped at Stow-on-the-Wold for lunch. Other people found good food, but MaryAnne and I struck out on the place that we went to. After our late lunch, we drove to Oxford, where we were to spend our last full day in England.
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