September 26, 2022
Day 20: Cambridge to Oxford
The Long March
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After the exuberant weekend, Cambridge seemed to be getting down to business this cool morning. But getting down to business just meant the drifts of cyclists seemed more focused on getting somewhere. I suppose we were in this category too, because we were heading to the train station for some serious commuting.
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Cambridge has been a shock to our systems, which have become accustomed to bicycles being rather shunned in England. But not only is Cambridge swarming with them, we see lots of "enthusiast" type models, like Baksfiets. In this random photo you see not only a child carrier but also the guy turning is on a tandem.
At the train station there was a constant flow of cyclists in and out. At one point there were three Bromptons lined up to go in, but I missed the shot.
As I stood by watching the cyclists around the station, Dodie was talking to the ticket agent. It was more than 20 minutes before she returned. As expected we would have to go to London to get to Oxford. But in London we would arrive at St Pancras station. The train to Oxford was from Paddington Station. The normal link is the Tube, but our bikes would not be allowed on. So we geared up for a 5 km walk from station to station. Our ticket timings allowed 2 hours to make this transfer. Should be ok. (heh, heh).
The first little hurdle was that our train to St Pancras was leaving in just a few minutes. But it was on a distant platform, meaning we needed to use the lift and bridge. The lift could hold only one bike at a time. So, we missed the train. We needed the lift again to get to a platform for our next hope of getting to St Pancras. Made it, but now we were already 30 minutes behind.
At St Pancras we spent some more valuable minutes figuring out how to walk to Paddington. Once we were on the way, we could look around at London, at least the little slice that was along our route. A lot of St Pancras station seemed to be a giant bland modern building, but perhaps this was also part of it:
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In principle we could have cycled to Paddington. The red lines on the road mean the lane is reserved for busses, taxis, and cycles. But not only was the lane totally clogged with busses and taxis, but the random photo also shows a motorcycle. Oh well, we got to see a lot of the modern style London black cabs, as we pushed the bikes along the sidewalk.
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2 years ago
There were some great landmarks along the way, like Harley Street, famous for expensive doctors. On the other side was Regents Park, where in stories patients go to steady their nerves after getting a bad diagnosis on Harley Street.
We also passed Baker St., where Sherlock Holmes had his residence. His fictional address was #221-B, but we could not check on what is there, since we were passing #131.
And the original Mme Toussaud's.So many well known and interesting things in London.
Paddington Station was in it's own little neighbourhood, different from Harley Street, and featuring a lot of small shops. But the station was not at all decorative, just big. We had long ago missed our train to Oxford, so it was a matter of rebooking. We were told to get on the train to Worcester, leaving real soon. We found it, and it had (one only) a bike designated car. But their idea of how to accommodate bikes was to have two hanging side by side on hooks. That's a joke, but we sort of managed to jam our bikes into the sort of bike space. There was no provision for securing the bikes, so we stood with them for the over an hour ride.
We spent some time plotting exactly how we were going to maneuver the bikes out the narrow door and down the train steps when we would reach the Oxford station. In the end we took off two of the panniers and I just lifted and carried the darn things out.
Being teleported into a strange town is naturally disorienting, and more so for me since Dodie is the one with the GPS on her handlebar. My first view of Oxford looked kind of like the scene below.
But here, Dodie is zeroing in on our little hotel, the Ali Inn. It is actually the building on the corner. That big white truck turned out to be significant, because there is a theatre next door (New Theatre Oxford - has been there in some form since 1836) , and props are being delivered for the show - Dream Girls. It will take many truckloads, but not as many as something like Les Miserables, said the driver.
The proprietor of the Ali is from Afghanistan. We had a nice chat with him, about the Meaning of Life, or something. Most importantly, he found a closet where our bikes could spend the night.
Something that really helped was that the Ali had a tourist map of town. And the map shows how all the major things are clustered together in a small area. It was easy to take a pen and scratch a route from one to the other, ending back "home" for us. Where we did a lot of scratching, beside "New Theatre", that is home!
Having just a couple of hours to go look at stuff on a map is not a recipe for a very in depth experience. But it did give us a feel for the place, much more so than being home and looking at canned photos of the different buildings. So let's go around, readers, and see what we can figure out.
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2 years ago
First up on our scratched in route was the Ashmolean Museum, which covers basically Greek and Roman art and archeology. There is no way to go in to every museum in this town, and in fact there was no way to go in to even this one museum. They have so much stuff, it would literally take a decade to absorb what it all is. So I ran around, snapping this and that, thinking "oh wow", and "I'll be back when I have a spare decade". Here are some of the snaps. (Don't worry, this is the only museum we are looking in!)
Here is the martyrs' memorial, on Broad Street. The martyrs were the Archbishop of Canterbury and two protestant bishops. Their crime, in 1555, was denying the real (rather than symbolic) presence of Christ in the Eucharist. They were burnt at the stake. It seems rather harsh for such a fine point!
Baliol College, Trinity College, the Sheldonian Theatre, Bodleian Library, and the Radcliffe Camera are so famous. Here is what they looked like to us. I hope I have labelled these things mostly correctly.
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Somewhere in here I lost the Bodleian library, which I think is the third round building in the neighbourhood. Oh well, all we are really trying to do is to get the vibe of the area, not report to the correct building for our finals!
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In his poem ‘Thyrsis’ the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold called Oxford ‘the city of dreaming spires’ ,and I found that intriguing. So I was looking to photograph some good spires. Here are some near St Mary, but I think Christ Church (coming) may be the real spot for them.
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Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) of Alice in Wonderland fame, taught at Christ Church. He took Alice Liddell, daughter of the Dean of Christ Church, as inspiration for Alice of the book. Alice used to go to a nearby shop, on St Aldate's Street to buy sweets. Carroll used the shop as "The Old Sheep Shop" in Through the Looking Glass. The shop is still there in its 15th century building, and currently sells Alice memorabilia.
As we passed by, I naturally wanted a photo, from across the street. But a large man was standing right in the shot. We dispatched Dodie to shoo him away. She was of course very polite and made friends with guy. He later joked about maybe blocking the next shot I tried, of Christ Church back across the street.
Our final stop was Oxford's castle, and mainly debtor's prison. The castle was built in 1071, I guess for defensive castle purposes, but it took on a role as a prison. It had a moat, and the earth from making the moat formed a mound, which was also a good defensive structure. For one pound I climbed the mound, hoping for a panorama of Oxford, but there was not so much to see from this angle, except the castle below.
Wow, so there is a whirlwind spin around Oxford. Some observations, aside from the obvious beauty of the buildings: While there are lots of bikes around, Oxford is not as bike crazy as Cambridge. And while there were lots of people about, it was not jammed with tourists, like Cambridge. There was also very little traffic - mainly it was busses and tour busses. Finally, the River Cam seemed to be central to the life of Cambridge, but our tour today in Oxford did not touch on the Thames at all. The Thames is definitely over there, west of downtown, but for example it does not figure in the tourist map at all.
It's hard to say which is the most wonderful city, but we liked them both. One thing about Oxford, look at the train tickets that were needed today to get us here!
Today's ride: 11 km (7 miles)
Total: 661 km (410 miles)
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