Lobsters Ahoy!

Of all the things to do in England, I had to go and get sunburned. Yes, that's right. My face is a nice shade of lobster red. But that happens when you spend two days at the beach in sunny weather. According to my professors who have visited England a number of times, sunshine for these areas is a first for them. Usually the cost is covered in rain. Lucky me.

So the three day trip to the south west started with a stop at Stourhead. Stourhead is a house with surrounding grounds and village. There are no words to describe the beauty of the estate. You can't quite call the landscape gardens; there are no flower beds or vegetable patches. Instead there are large paths through trees around a lake with Roman temples and Gothis grottos hidden along the way. One temple, the Temple of Apollo, was used for Mr. Darcy's first proposal scene in the recent version of Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley. So naturally, a group of forty Jane Austen fangirls made a sort of pilgrimage up the hill to the temple.

After Stourhead we went to Dorchester, home of one of my least favourite authors: Thomas Hardy. Hardy is famous for his novels Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Given the extremely low ceilings and tiny rooms of his cottage, it's no wonder that his novels and poetry are so depressing. The stop in Dorchester was short. We moved on to Penzance, a small coastal town where we stayed for the night at a YMCA. Penzance was the location of the Gilbert and Sullivan play The Pirates of Penzance. In fact, much of the Cornish coast is known for once being the home of pirates and smugglers because of it's sandy coves and beaches hidden among the cliffs.

The next morning we explored one of these beaches. Along one cliffside there were stairs carved up to the Minack Theatre. The Minack is an open amphitheatre carved into the cliff with the audience facing the stage and the sea. The views from the top were incredible. After spending a few hours there and allowing the tide to go out, we headed over to St. Michael's Mount just next to Penzance. The mount is an island during high tide, and when the tide goes out there is a walkway across to the village and castle. It is the English equivalent of Mont Saint Michel just off the coast of France. In fact, a monk from Mont Saint Michel helped to build an abbey on the English island. But through history the abbey turned to a castle and has been home to the St Aubyn family since the mid-seventeenth century. The Mount was also used in the filming of Trevor Nunn's version of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. And again, it was a spectacularly beautiful place that I would put on a list of things to visit again. The whole Cornish coast is a perfect vacation area. There is so much history and things to do in a relatively small area that makes it all very convenient.

And of course, there was still more on our itinerary. After leaving the Mount, we traveled over to Exeter for the night. After visiting the Exeter Cathedral the next morning, we left for the seaside town of Lyme Regis. There I enjoyed a lunch of fish and chips, and then walked out along the cob, a high stone wall circling half of the small harbour. This was another site for the Jane Austen fans, as Lyme holds a prominent spot in the book Persuasion. There was a great deal of reenacting of a scene from the book on the cob, much to the entertainment of the English locals. Luckily, this was the last stop and we were at last heading back to London. Never was rush hour traffic more frustrating.

Pictures will hopefully be available by tomorrow night.