I HAVE NEVER DRUNK SO MUCH TEA IN MY LIFE

As I mentioned, we had great weather and Iris and Jos were the bestest of hosts. It sounds corny, but it really warms my heart to know there are people in the world like them. Despite only having met us twice before, they welcomed us into their family with open arms and took care of two very weary travelers! In no time, we were feeling pretty much at home.

After sleeping most of Thursday afternoon, we took advantage of the fine weather on Friday to first drop in on the horse farm behind Iris and Jos’ place, where it was wonderful to be snuffed by critters and also to meet some more English folk. This seems to be an appropriate place to bring up the tea – tea, tea, glorious tea – which I think I drank more of in my first four days in England than I would in several months at home. Tea with every meal instead of water, at snack times, and any time we dropped in to visit anyone (or anyone came to visit us!). Don’t get me wrong, I love a good cup of tea, but I think the stuff was coming out of my pores. I just didn’t know a person could drink so much and still remain upright (or at least off the loo). In any case, we had tea with the kind horse folks, after having tea for lunch and before having some at dinner and again before bed. Tetley must make a fortune in this country.

After checking out the horses, we drove to the county town of Shrewsbury which is medieval in origin and is known for a lot of architecture by Thomas Townsend, who was a major player at the start of the industrial revolution (perhaps his most famous structure is the iron bridge in, funnily enough, the village of Iron Bridge – Google this chap for a good history lesson), and being the birthplace and schooling place of none other than Charles Darwin. His old school is now a posh private school library, which looked pretty nice from afar. Shrewsbury appears to be a fairly typical English town, with lots of narrow, cobbled streets and several impressive, spired churches. We checked out a particularly impressive structure (another of Townsend’s buildings) whose graveyard just happened to contain the (fake) grave of Ebenezer Scrooge, of Dickens’ “Christmas Carol” fame. Check out this photo of use unabashedly posing in the graveyard (eh, these people from the colonies!) and other pictures from our day on the town.

Aside from checking out a bunch of different places, we were very lucky to meet a bunch of my second and third cousins, who are just a tremendous bunch of people. They all made us feel very much at home and I am really looking forward to getting to know them a lot better during our stay. Hopefully Ray and I have not scared them off their Canadian connections!