OUTTAKES CONTINUED…
This post is an outtake from my 2015 forty-two places Douglas Adams tour. I’m cutting a lot of 1st-person POV from the upcoming book, Forty-Two Places: A Douglas Adams Travel Guide.
“Mark, Since this will be your first trip to England, is there anything you want to see?”
“The Nerd Big Three: The Rosetta Stone, Big Ben, and Stonehenge.”
Uh Oh. Despite close reads, re-reads, and plain old wishing, no Douglas Adams character visits Westminster or The British Museum. Blast! I thought, I really like multitasking…And, I reminded myself, You REALLY LIKE your husband. You invited him, remember?
I set aside two days of my Douglas Adams Tour 42 for a big rock under glass and a clock. They would be like dinner at Milliways: close-by in geography terms and a helluva long way away measured by time.
The British Museum
Traveling exhibits, movies, and television shows featuring The British Museum have caused an unfortunate side-effect in our modern era: Many of the items on display cause intense deja vu of the haven’t I seen that somewhere before? variety.
Even though I hadn’t ever been to the British Museum, I knew what it would look and feel like. It was a bit overwhelming in scale. The vast collection of antiquities were so much more than any tourist could understand in a single day that I was able to let go of my normal compulsion to binge as much art and history as I could possibly take in.
Instead, we found the Rosetta Stone first and then I followed my husband around. The day was spent enjoying his awe and wonder as well as my own, even if I didn’t get to check anything off of my Douglas Adams tour list.
Big Ben
We crossed Westminster Bridge and got ‘The View’ of Big Ben from the traditional side, abeit alongside hundreds of other tourists. We also walked a bit further. Avoiding crowds and seeing iconic monuments from not-the-obvious places…shooting not-the-same snapshot…that’s a practice I find adds significantly to the fun of travel.
Stonehenge
Day three was an opportunity to multi-task, ticking off one of my forty-two places, because Stonehenge is mentioned by Douglas Adams.
Getting there if you don’t want to drive on the left is tricky, so we decided to take a day tour. We picked International Friends, the company I’ll be using for the upcoming Forty-Two Places Tour next May.
With our names checked off on the guide’s clipboard, we were soon loaded into a roomy touring coach. Designed for about twenty people, seven of us spread out among luxurious, darkly upholstered seats. The windows were huge, providing fantastic views of London as we left the city. To keep the coach cool and cut down on glare, the windows were tinted. Initially I was a bit worried, but it didn’t obscure or discolor the view. The seats had high-backs, so it was impossible to discern anything about your fellow travelers unless they stood up or you stood up, neither recommended in a moving bus. For a tour bus it was comfy and quite posh.
Because it was early in the morning, traffic was light when we pulled away from the Cumberland Hotel and the nearby Marble Arch. Our twenty-something tour guide, whose name I don’t recall, so I will call him Earnest, because he was, began the tour with, “There is a reason why each of you chose the King Arthur’s Realm Tour. I can’t wait to hear what it is.”
His opener made me realize I hadn’t thought through the full implications of the tour I had picked. Yes, it went to two places I needed to visit: Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor. But, as is the hallmark of a true Yvette idea, there was a lot more going on here. I had consigned us to a twelve-hour day in a coach, surrounded by fellow travelers seeking energy circles, sites of mythological significance, and personal brushes with ancient mysticism. I pulled my skeptical gaze from the tour guide and looked at my husband with wide eyes: Is this day about to get really weird?
Mark and I both smirked knowingly for each other. We were Southern Californians, quite at ease among the wooiest of the woo-woo. And, after all, I was in pursuit of an Arthurian-like quest of my own making. Not a holy grail or a healing spring, but I was conducting literary and psychogeographical research. Pursuing my Douglas Adams Tour, drifting wherever Douglas and his characters went.
Determined to have fun, we were ready for the ride, even if it meant a full day of discussing chakras, dousing and ley-line alignment.
To Be Continued…
What do you think?