beentouring's Guestbook

Another new-to-me park
:-) The scenes are SO different from any of the countryside around Ottawa. (Mind you, like Calgary, the scenery is different depending which direction you go from the city.) Great shots of flowers and bugs. I especially like the colour-coordinated pest. And your shot of the mountains, foreground fence and all, is lovely.

Logistics
I admire your capacity to plan and then execute all the logistics of train & bus travel in another country. (I felt quite proud of myself for making simple point-to-point trips in Scotland, after chickening out of my initial tentative multi-point itinerary.) You used your time well in each spot. It's interesting to get your view of Oxford, which I know only from TV shows and movies, where the architecture is visible but the traffic is not evident.

Heated floors!
Now there's a bright idea. I didn't know the Romans could do that - Britain must have been quite a shock after Italy, although any Romanized gentry wouldn't have the same excuse. Maybe everyone just likes to have warm feet. Your hotel-room views are lovely - the sort of scene that Stephen Pinker argues we evolved to appreciate: gently rolling open grasslands punctuated by small bits of cover, er, trees.

Tapestries and bales of hay
Looking at Catherine's tapestries got me wondering how they were made. I was thinking of needlepoint, I guess, rather than hand-loom weaving. I can understand how you make a pattern in needlepoint, but weaving is beyond me. The detailed scenes they created are quite amazing. And looking at the dates for Catherine, I was surprised to realize she was only 24 when Henry married her. She was 6 years older than he was, which hardly seems to justify all the "older" comments about her that I've read over the years - it's not like she was 40 and he was 20 -- although given the life span of the day, maybe 6 years loomed larger for them than it might for us. As for your landscape photos, those rolling hills are lovely, aren't they? Especially at harvest. The last one could almost be a scene from near Red Deer, although there's something '"wrong" about the trees.

Surfacing
I think I feel now as you did then - inclined to fall asleep at odd moments. I'm catching up in reverse order. This Stratford stay sounds like a stunning addition to your walking tour. The buildings are amazing. Here, I suspect they would have long since been redeveloped, several times - although as I say that I remember old clapboard houses in New England, so maybe not.

Did you visit the library?
I just googled that library and saw some images from it. It looks wonderful. I'd like to visit it and go in and have a look. Did you do that? /Ake

Shorn, sure
Been watching too much "Still Game" - I'm starting to pick up their local idiom-isms. Those sheep are cute, unlike the ones I saw on Shetland in early June - big masses of icky wool. And the brach fungus is odd, indeed. When you say "the end of our walk" do you mean The End of this tour?

On hiking in rain
I made a hike in the Himalayas in Nepal back in the 90-ies. One of the days it was raining but I still decided to walk the entire day. That was a very bad idea. All of a sudden two large boulders came rolling don't the mountain, having been dislodged by the rain, and passed only 20 meters ahead of me. Had one of them hit me it would have killed me. Nowadays we don't hike in rain. We are sunshine walkers and sunshine campers. /Ake

Gear
It sounds like you had at least some of the right stuff. I'd have to buy everything. Here, I'm hardly out in the rain, but i know my kin in Vancouver have efficient and comfortable stuff to wear. What about your feet? And BTW I loved the hall mirror shot,

Fun sign
I am going to add that sign to the sign forum. Hope that's OK with you. /Ake

A purposeful sheep, indeed
There is something very relaxing about being by the ocean; better, in my view, than a lake, although any body of water is better than none. The variability of the coastal "edge" - unscalable cliffs, truly dangerous rock jumbles, sandy beaches - is quite startling. (I think I missed the farmer's trick, but he looks friendly.)