SFG Photo Album: European Vacation

An SFG in Paris:
My European Vacation

A Great Tour of British Authors

John is a big fan of CS Lewis and I'm a big fan of JRR Tolkien, so a stop at Oxford seemed inevitable.
Here John walks the "Tombs", the ground floor corridors that our heroes and their students walked.
Tolkien and Lewis and their cronies were an informal group called The Inklings. They frequented a pub called The Eagle & Child, jokingly referred to as The Bird & Baby.
The front room of The Eagle & Child (where I ordered a chicken pot pie from the bar).
The back room of The Eagle & Child, where The Inklings would gather. Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of the memorial plaque which would be to the left.
Back at one of the colleges, we were directed to a man who runs a CS Lewis appreciation society. We bothered him at his room. He was grading papers, but he graciously put that aside to spend time with us, showing us points of interest such as The Lamb & Flag, where The Inklings might also gather.
Magdalen College, where CS Lewis taught. I believe his rooms are on the first floor (which would be the floor above the ground floor), the two windows just to the right of the middle.
The paths behind Magdalen COllege. It was perhaps right here, walking with Tolkien, that Lewis experienced his conversion to Christianity. Things weren't quite so bucolic though. It was end of term, so a lot of students were about, raucous and drunken.
Merton College, where Tolkien lectured.
John got directions to CS Lewis's house, which is named The Kilns. We spent the next day hiking to it. I didn't get a very good picture, but John not only took plenty of photos but even tried knocking on doors.
We splurged on a taxi on the way back. I did not have directions to Tolkien's house, but having read Letters of JRR Tolkien recently I told the cab driver to try "76 Sandfield Road". And I was proved correct.
I was too shy to bother the current occupants, so I just stepped out of the cab and took two quick pictures. The plaque above the garage says "JRR Tolkien lived here 1953-1965".
Next morning, John and I went to Stratford. We shared a cab with a couple from Texas. It was remarkable how many people from Texas we met during these two weeks.
Shakespeare's house. We were not allowed to take photos inside, of the empty rooms with their uneven, warped, and wavy floors.
Ann Hathaway's Cottage, from the back.
The River Avon, upon which Stratford is.
A statue of Shakespeare, near the River.
The Abbey, where are Shakespeare's remains.
We hitchhiked back, picked up by an American mother and son in a hired car. It turned out we were going the same way, to Warwick Castle.
My first castle.
The view from one of the towers.
Warwick Castle, as we leave.
We passed through Bath on our way northwest. We were tempted to go to Liverpool, but we were warned it was rough there at night. Instead, we stayed at Chester, where we pretty much had a two-storey bed & breakfast all to ourselves. (It was quite bizarre watching late-night television there, alone in a huge room as ornate as a ballroom. The movie Ghost Story was on. It was bizarre, for an American TV viewer, to watch full-frontal nudity followed by commercials for McDonald's and Kellogg's!)	The next morning, John and I took a train, crossing Hadrian's Wall, to the dark and steep hills of Scotland, where we stayed in Edinburgh for a couple days. We returned to London for some sightseeing in the City before we finally went home to America (and a further series of flights for me, from California back to Michigan). Sadly, my last two rolls of film were lost, quite possibly in our bed & breakfast in Chelsea in a mad dash to make it to the airport. So this must be the end of this Photo Album.