Long Weekend: Easter in Swindon (also Avebury and Bowood Estates)

The Easter weekend was right in the middle of a two-week break from school for Elise and Charis.  I had Good Friday through the Tuesday after Easter off work.  It was a good chance to get out of town.  Enter an invitation from John, Carol, and Marti Oldfield to come visit them in Swindon.  Carol is my grandmother's brother's daughter.  Our families have crossed paths going back to my childhood in Kenya, a visit to Bath with Kristine in 1999 shortly before getting engaged in Paris, and a trip to the UK shortly before Elise was born in 2005.  They graciously opened their home to us for the Easter weekend.

We made the trip to Swindon from Melbourne early on the afternoon of Good Friday.  The GPS kept us off the motorways, which we thought was a good thing.  That was until we were on a two-lane country road and behind a slow-moving tractor for several miles.  Begin choice words at our GPS.  Then we hit traffic going into Moreton-in-Marsh, which is a popular holiday town in the Cotswolds (of course having one road going into it that is also two-lane).  Increase choice words at our GPS.  Then we hit traffic going into Stow-on-the-Wold.  Increase (again) the choice words at our GPS.  Naturally we did not fault ourselves for not doing any research beforehand on the route to take.  And naturally we did not defend our GPS on the grounds that other routes would also be busy on a holiday weekend.  We just told Miranda (our GPS) that after her poor performance on the Center Parcs trip followed by poor performance on this trip, she doesn't get our blind faith anymore.  Perhaps she never should have.  Truthfully, the delays didn't add a ton of time.  It was supposed to be a 2.5 hour drive, and we made it in ~3.25 hours.  All things considered, that's not bad.  Clare didn't sympathize.  She fell apart shortly after we got through the Cotswolds, with about 30 min to go.  Note to self: 3 yr old's car trip tolerance is not much over 2.5 hrs.  If driving longer than that, strongly consider making a stop.

The area around Swindon is famous for the limestone shapes carved into the landscape.  The farm near the Oldfields' has a horse carved into the hill.  It's evidently around 200 years old.  This is pretty impressive considering the limestone has to be cleaned up every year.  We took a walk up to the farm Friday afternoon.  It was a good way for all of us to unwind after the drive.  Unfortunately we couldn't get a good photo of the horse with the camera.  Maybe next time.  

Notice Elise's uncharacteristic absence from the walk?  It has to do with the lovely back garden at the Oldfields' house.  As we enjoyed tea and biscuits on the back porch, John gave me a warning.  The flagstones lining the pond are unstable.  Don't walk on them, because they could give way and plunge you into the pond.  Elise, being an independent 8 yr old, gave me a reproachful look when I passed on John's warning and proceeded to go down to the garden with her sisters.  Some time later we looked down to see a tottering Elise on one of the previously mentioned unstable flagstones.  She tottered forward and made a mighty leap.  The mighty leap didn't clear the pond.  No permanent harm was done, but she did get a banged up knee.  So she stayed home with Carol while we took our walk.

John and Marti took us to Avebury on Saturday.  Kristine and I went there with them during our visit in 2005.  The item of interest on that trip was the standing stones, which is evidently the largest collection in the UK.  This time the stones got a photo to prove that we walked past them.  They didn't get any further attention.  

The item of interest this time Avebury Manor, for two reasons.  The manor has been set up so that each room is decorated to show what it would have looked like at different periods in the history of the house.  This means there is interesting information to learn as you tour the house.  The rooms are also set up with furnishings that can be touched, handled, and in any other way manipulated.  This means that it provides great tactile engagement for young children (who might or might not have tried to avoid having their picture taken in front of the house).

We spent most of our time in the kitchen, which was decorated to the time the Titanic sailed (they had a commemorative newspaper, which I didn't photograph).

The woman in the kitchen was a very good sport with the girls.  She let Clare spend quite a bit of time stirring the flour bowl.  To Clare's credit, she did leave the flour in the bowl when she was done.  Most of it anyway.

At one point the woman looked at me after hearing us talking, and said "Do I detect a touch of Transatlantic in your accents?"

Me (smiling): Just a touch, but not if you listen to my oldest daughter (pointing to Elise).

I had a friend who tried to teach me Transatlantic.  I learned two words.

<<pause for a deep breath>>

Glitter

<<pause for another deep breath>>

Mascara

How did I do?

Me (smiling): your Transatlantic is better than my English.

That whole thing about tactile learning?  Elaborately decorated dining room with hand-painted wallpaper wasn't of much interest.

The bedroom that Queen Anne stayed in, including a poster bed? Now that was fun. 

As was the adjacent room where Queen Anne would have received guests and otherwise spent her time.  There was an embroidery stand where present-day guests could embroider names or other designs on a cloth that stayed there for others to add to.  Kristine embroidered our initials (SKECC) while the older two girls watched.  Clared busied herself among the other needles and spools of thread.  Fortunately, they (the needles and thread) survived her curiosity, and her fingers didn't receive any pricks.

We did spend some time on the manor grounds.  The girls turned this into an opportunity to play hide-and-seek from the camera.  Which was great for the adults.  We stood in one place and talked.  The girls ran around while I occasionally pointed the camera at them to make sure they kept running.

Much of our time in the Oldfields' house involved games of different types.  John introduced Elise and Charis to Monopoly with British property cards.

We also played Dutch Blitz and Phase 10.  Somewhere along the line Elise and Charis decided that Phase 10 is more fun when they team up and play against Daddy.  Kristine denies all responsibility for the gloating and trash-talking that they're learning when they finish a hand ahead of me.  She claims that behavior was learned from watching their father.  I claim innocence.

Somewhere between getting our piano in Melbourne tuned and playable, and visiting the Oldfields in Swindon, Elise (and Charis under her tutelage) decided it would be fun to work on memorizing the piano songs she is learning.  I'm excited to watch this part of their musical development.

Marti's brother Alex and his wife drove down from London for Easter dinner.  We all (barely) fit around the Oldfields' table.  Elise put the time she was not hiking with us Friday to good use by making name tags for everyone.

On Monday John and Marti took the girls and I to Bowood House and Gardens.  The house has been the stately home of the Lansdowne family for several centuries.  One of the Landsowne ancestors, the 2nd Earl, was Prime Minister from 1782 to 1783.  He also negotiated peace with the United States after the War of Independence.  Joseph Priestly discovered oxygen there on 1 August 1774.  With such an impressive history, naturally we visited the important areas in the estate.

Like the Tractor Ted area.

And the adventure playground.  Clare, because she is Clare, paid no attention to the fact that everyone else on the rope ladder was a couple years older than her.  She climbed on and clambered up after her sisters.

The platform in the background?  That's the toddler slide that Clare turned up her nose at. 

The girls really enjoyed being up so high.  I mostly enjoyed watching them have so much fun being up that high.  Mostly.

Clare, again because she is Clare, insisted on going down the tallest slide in the playground.  She had an excited cheering section watching her. 

We did eventually leave the playground and spend some time exploring the grounds of the estate.  This picture of the running girls is becoming a familiar one. 

We found a couple swans who hopefully approached the girls, looking for bread.  They were disappointed. 

 I think the girls' favorite area of the grounds was right around this little stream.

There was a little cave they climbed into.

And came out of relatively soon when they discovered there was just barely enough room for the three of them. 

Clare, who had been playing hard for a couple hours by now, got tired and needed some encouragement to keep walking.  She picked a beautiful place to do it. 

This is the closest we got to the Bowood house.  If you look closely, you can see it in the background.

The last stop at Bowood was a paddock on the edge of the parking lot, where we greeted the Shetland ponies.  Clare and Charis were a little apprehensive at first.  Marti did a good job helping them make friends with the ponies.  Like the swans, the ponies were disappointed at the humans who didn't give them any treats.

We finished our weekend with a birthday tea ring to celebrate Charis turning 6.

Family Walk: Black Rocks

It's been a busy stretch for us here in Melbourne.  Kristine's parents were in town for a couple weekends.  We did the Center Parcs trip last weekend.  We might or might not have Kristine's brother in town this coming weekend at the start of the Easter holiday break for the girls.  Easter weekend we go south to visit some of my Dad's family.  Squeezed into all of that was a single Saturday with no plans.  Clare has been doing much better with the transition out of diapers, but she's still not entirely trustworthy.  Kristine graciously offered to watch her for the afternoon while I took the older girls for a hike.  I decided to do the Black Rocks hike in Derbyshire Walks with Children.  It's supposed to be 2 miles long, which I figured would be about Charis's threshold.  It's also only a modest drive (~45 min) from Melbourne. 

Part of the hike goes along the High Peaks Trail, which is a trackbed from one of the earliest railways built in England.  It starts at the ruins of the Cromford Moor Mine, which dates back to lead mining in the 1500s.

Here's the RunKeeper record for the hike.  RunKeeper says we walked 1.7 miles.  The red and green spots don't line up, so maybe it would have been closer to 2 miles if I'd stopped tracking back at the information center where we started.  On the other hand, DWWC says that we're supposed to do the last mile of our hike along the High Peaks Trail.  We clearly didn't.  The red squiqqle close to the beginning is all the wandering we did around the Black Rocks.  More on that later.

Once you leave the information center and start the hike in earnest, the first portion is to climb the spoil heap from the Cromford Moor Mine.

We stopped to look at the horses.  They didn't seem to care much that we were there looking at them. The cattle and sheep we saw later were less nonchalant.  They turned around and walked away as soon as we approached the fence.  Here's the conversation with Clare when we got home and I showed her this photo.
Me: Clare, what's that?
Clare: Cows!
Me: No, those aren't cows.
Clare: It's black and white, so it's a cow.  And that's a horse (pointing to the brown horse on the left).

I realized when we got home that I didn't take any pictures of the entire Black Rocks outcropping.  I'll have to rectify that next time we go.  Both girls had fun climbing on the rocks, so there is definitely going to be a next time.

Elise spotted this narrow spot in the rocks and wanted to climb up.  I was able to squeeze in, give her a boost, and lift Charis up.

I couldn't get up the rocks in that narrow opening, so I took a hero shot and made my way around and up the path on the other side.  Charis took a small tumble on these rocks as she climbed up to the top to meet me.  I'm blaming it on a father who put her in Wellies when he should have bought her hiking boots.  I'm sure it has nothing to do with her cheerful 5yo playfulness, lack of attention to where she was going, and rocks that were slick from all the rain we've had this past week.  Fortunately, she only slid a couple feet, and she landed on one of the many grassy areas between these rocks.  She was more scared than hurt.  Credit both girls for working together to help her recover.  By the time I walked around, they met me at the top with Charis not crying.  They'd decided that she slipped because of the gloves she was wearing.  Elise gave hers to Charis, Charis gave hers to my backpack, and Elise went without (which she probably wanted to do anyway).

The girls named this one Pride Rock, after the Lion King.  They told me they didn't want to climb out onto it.  I told them that was fine, because I didn't want them climbing out onto it.

We spent a good 35 or 40 minutes exploring these rocks.  They've seen rock formations at Turkey Run State Park in the US, but I think this was a first as far as actually getting to walk around on them.

There were a couple different ways to get down off the rocks.  The girls picked the easiest one, which still involved getting hands and trousers a bit muddy.  Insert sigh of relief that I wasn't exploring these rocks on a rainy day with a couple of energetic boys.

The landscape after we left the Black Rocks felt very Tolkien-esque, as interpreted by Peter Jackson.  This part reminded me of the LOTR scenes where Frodo and company are leaving the Shire.  The girls, having diligently studied their father's independence from walking on paths while at Center Parcs, spent most of this portion climbing over rocks.  Their father, having diligently studied his daughters' obedient walking on paths while at Center Parcs, spent most of this portion walking on the path.

I mentioned we've had some rain this past week, didn't I?

The high point, literally, of the hike is this marker at the top of Bole Hill.  Both girls were a little tired of climbing by the time we got here.  It was also starting to mist, so I had visions of getting caught in a rainstorm.  I'd learned enough from our Tissington hike to make sure we had boots, hats, and gloves.  It completely slipped my mind that I should have also brought raincoats.  That's what I get for believing the online weather forecast for the day.

We distracted ourselves from the mist by letting both Elise and Charis have a go at using my camera. My phone pictures on our hikes have been pretty fuzzy, so recently (Center Parcs and today) started carrying the Canon EOS I bought a few years ago on advice from my brother Daniel.  Unlike me, he is both a competent photographer and familiar with different options for gear.  The camera's probably capable of far more than its current owner can do with it, but its current owner still appreciates it as an upgrade over this phone.  Its current owner also appreciates the humor of seeing his 5 yr old daughter trying to take a picture with a camera that is large enough that her fingers struggle to find the shutter button.

Charis was very happy that she got to take a picture with my camera.

Until she realized I was serious about the need to keep walking.

Did I mention that it's been raining in the Midlands for much of the past week?

I had a hard time figuring out when we left the forest whether this area we walked through has been cleared by man, nature, or a combination.  The trees are chopped up in very uneven patterns, which doesn't seem like it would be man-made.  Continuing the Tolkien imagery, I thought this would maybe be the outskirts of Mirkwood.

One more forest to walk through.  I'm proud of the girls.  They pretty much left me in the dust (or mud) once we left the summit of Bole Hill.  My gimpy knees were starting to complain a bit by this point in the hike, so I was glad to reach the flat portion when we joined the High Peak Trail.

We stopped at the mine ruins back at the trail head.  Elise and Charis had a make-believe world they created while walking around this mine.  I didn't catch all of it, but I know there was at least a summer house involved.

I think this hike will get a second round.  There are several other rock formations we didn't even stop to look at, much less to let the girls explore with their active imaginations.  I'm not sure how much I'd trust an energetic 3 yr old on some of these rocks though.  The next visit here could be another one that Clare sits out.