But it's in the <i> north <i>!

But it's not in the grim part.

Lee Ann

YOU PROBABLY WOULDN'T LIKE BAKEWELL OR THE PEAK DISTRICT

No waxworks museums, no immense ferris wheels, very few celebrity sightings. They talk with a funny accent. Also, it's in the North, and you know how things are up there. Best just to stay in London, or better yet dash off to Stonehenge.

But, hold on. I see Cholmondley_Warner mentions it has good points. Very well, then.

Next: WE LOVE BAKEWELL AND THE PEAK DISTRICT.

stokebailey, I don't know WHY I haven't been reading your report all along, but I've been sitting at my office desk trying not to laugh out loud for several minutes now. <i>(not that I would ever log on to Fodors at work... oh, never mind)</i> Can't wait to hear more from you (and also C_W, who appears to be in rare form on this one).

Thank you, jent.

(I am one of those that CW is kinder to than we deserve, no doubt because of all the youthful Kumbaya)

Hi stokebailey, are you going to be posting any photos? No pressure or anything. Well maybe a little bit ((A))

(I am one of those that CW is kinder to than we deserve, no doubt because of all the youthful Kumbaya)>>

Largactyl and Prozac. And Beer.

I can't begin to say how fabulous the Peak District is.

Obviously you will have a fight every night because you are in the north - and all teenagers will instantly become pregnant (and you will have to strangle kestrels). Them's the rules.

But it's damned pretty.

"teenagers will instantly become pregnant (and you will have to strangle kestrels)"

Those are some sexually advanced kestrels.

The two are not inclusive.

So much for kumbaya, then.

Yup, the north is grim.

Please keep travelling-this is fun...

Apres_L, I only ever take a sketchbook and watercolor crayons on trips, so I won't keep feeling obligated to document things. I use the backs of pages for an out of sequence journal.

We sat down quite a few times to draw and paint. For instance, at the British Museum I really liked a Roman bronze statue of a boy dancing, possibly Cupid, and sketching gave me an excuse to sit and look at him for along time. The results don't look like much, but it's restful to do.

I hope to get MC to post some of her photos, though.

THE CROOKED SPIRE COMES INTO VIEW

Chesterfield is 1 hr 45 min north by train from St. Pancras, past pleasant rolling farmland that could pass for Missouri in spots, with the bonus of grazing sheep. Soon we’re in Chesterfield and see the twisted spire of St. Mary’s Church.
http://www.derbyphotos.co.uk/areas_a...terfield03.htm

During our stay in Derbyshire, five different locals wanted to tell us the spire’s “virgin bride” story (too goofy for me to relate)(though one elderly man had the grace to glance at MC before phrasing it as “the bride, um, who hadn’t been with a man”), and then followed with what they each referred to as the real story.

The real versions differed: the lead roof was too heavy or got too hot in the sun, or the beams were unseasoned, or no cross beams. Or the original experienced carpenters died of Plague when the steeple was partly done, leaving the rest to beginners. Our B&B host Gary told us that when the spire first became deformed, they dismantled and rebuilt it, only to have it twist identically a second time. This seems implausible, but I am always glad to believe different true versions of a story. He says that unlike the Pisa Tower it is done settling.

Gary has a new minivan he uses as a taxi all around the area.. One steady customer is a retired cricketer whose name we would recognize if we knew cricket . Our host is energetic and friendly, with a country accent I’d never heard before. He said he’d been to London once, and saw no need ever to go back again. We began to understand his attitude as we got closer to Bakewell.

Once you get past the outskirts of Chesterfield, the country becomes increasingly beautiful as you enter the Peak District National Park. You drive through well-ordered hilly farmland, lovingly tended for thousands of years, with the occasional farmhouse and village, stone walls, and wild flowers everywhere. The book says the Park is the second most visited anywhere next to Fuji in Japan, but we see hardly anyone on the road.

At Everton B&B we meet our hostess Trisha, and find the Blue Room to be immaculate, bright, comfortable, with its own bathroom and a sitting room with tea things. Just right for us simple folk. It’s on Haddon Road, but quiet, and a five minute walk through the city park and along the river to the center of town. ( I did misstate the price earlier, due to my habitual failure mentally to convert GBP to USD. We paid £55/night, or less than one NMS8 with no added tax.)

We settled in and walked into town, admiring the cottage gardens and the River Wye on the way, and it was just 8PM by the time we got to the first eatery-looking place we came upon, The Peacock. They had just finished serving food. Sorry. All right, then. The Castle Inn, The Red Lion. Kitchens just closed. Not a bowl of soup to be had, not even for ready money. The barmaid directed us almost with a sniff to our only possibility so late on a Sunday night, “the Italian place” across the river.

We crossed the ancient bridge and went past the car park to find the elegant Il Felicini. Ristorante, Pizzeria, with very nice dining room, but we wanted to take advantage of the perfect evening and asked to sit on the terrace. The host, later our waiter, took this and all of our requests with an air of surprise, a moment of hesitation, and then as if having overcome any obstacles, agreed. I liked him and the way he and other young men there brush their hair up on top. The terrace has an idyllic setting right on the river, with ducks and swans gliding by, willow trees. It’s the kind of place Bertie Wooster would meet the imposter he means to slip into Blandings. We had bread, olives, cheese, grilled vegetables, and wine. Taken altogether, with the evening, the river, the company and the food, one of the great meals of my life.

THE “BRITISH RESERVE” MYTH

I have to wonder when the British on Fodor’s act as if Americans are always frisking and bleating up to them, tails wagging, to impose our beastly friendship on them. When and where does this happen? Why does no one do that to me here, with the US so full of such people? Why do I always forget to do that when I’m there? (except, I guess, with our genteel young flatterer.)

Maybe being in a B&B is different, and being under the roof constitutes an introduction. Every morning but one in the Everton breakfast room, fellow guests struck up conversations with us as we minded our own business. Maybe because they could tell we were Americans and therefore had lower standoffishness standards?

But there was also the old guy who approached us as we gazed up at the Chesterfield spire, and a Bakewell man who, on greeting us for the second evening in a row as he walked his dog said, “Hello! I talked to you last night!” And since we murmur only in ladylike tones on the streets, our Americosity wouldn’t have been that obvious.

One man in the breakfast room started off by asking what the Americans thought of the Scandal. I hated to tell him that of the maybe 1% who were aware of what was going on there, a tiny percent would have a firm opinion, so I told him what I thought: we’d seen much worse financially, and were a little perplexed at all the fuss. He had driven over from Wales, where he was a Council member, and was attending a conference in town. I congratulated him on spending the public dime at a modest B&B instead of at someplace more Rutland Arms-y.

Another morning in the breakfast room a retired Northamptonshire man with his sweet wife was busy giving a couple of German men the business before he turned to us, and we had the nicest talk through the meal. The posh-accented woman who checked our tickets at Haddon Hall complimented me on my hat, the kind of personal comment I always find acceptable, and we chatted back and for the for awhile on the hat theme. I valued these conversations, and found people pleasant and friendly wherever we went in the country.

(I had encountered one of the Germans in his underwear as I went out for an early walk and he exited the bathroom, so I already felt somewhat aquainted with him. We merely nodded and smiled in our reserved non-British way.)

What were you doing in the German's underwear?

Lee Ann

Once I shot an elephant in my pajamas.

Say, Cholms dear,

Normally I don't run around thrusting advice at people, but since you mention it and I do this for a living:

Chlorpromazine (Largactil) and fluoxetine (Prozac) can cause unfortunate side effects taken together. Like, neurological and cardiac, fairly important systems. Mightn't it be better to be mean and grouchy? Or take one or the other?

<b> The "American Nosiness " reality </b>

Normal touring in sensible parts of Britain and the US isn't that different. Most hotel staff in decent New York hotels ignore their guests as courteously and thoroughly as their peers in London: staff in New York breakfast joints are about as sensibly brusque (and convinced they're "characters") as those in the few remaining London greasy spoons. British B&B owners are as politely conversational as those in touristed America (though generally less prissy): volunteers at National Trust sites as chatty as customer-facing volunteers in US monuments or whatever.

The differences are at the margin:

- There are inevitably more Americans (proportionately) who've never been outside America than Britons who've never been outside Britain. So many US visitors here think they're exotic, are disconcerted to find they're not and feel somehow slighted by the "snobbish" British.

- Equally, every UK visitor to the US has a tale of being buttonholed under bizarre circumstances. I recently got spoken to, unasked, on the New York subway of all places (is NOWHERE sacred?) by an otherwise normal looking person who wanted to tell me about his holiday in England five years ago. Unsolicited conversations on the Tube are grounds for calling in the anti-terrorist police, and we assume similar standards of civilisation elsewhere.

- Unrequested and near-incessant familiarity on the part of waiters in the US (oddly, rarely by the owners of small eating places, who've got better things to do with their time) is a permanent scourge - and one which hasn't crossed the Atlantic yet

- Because businesses are typically less busy in the US, and foreigners more exotic, routine transactions (like buying a shirt at a suburban JC Penney) attract attention, and subsequent uninvited life history sharing, a great deal more often than an American would find at an M&S.

- Most of which is pretty trivial. But there DOES seem a real problem for many Americans moving to Britain, who expect to be pulled into networks, are often disturbed when they're not and create complicated explanations about snootiness or reserve when they've simply not grasped that etiquette's different. It's particularly difficult when people, unthinkingly, move into circumstances where there aren't that many networks anyway, or bring unhelpful attitudes ("I don't like bars so I'm not going to a pub").