BOXES 208-209: Paris, London, Dover, Canterbury.

It's a late afternoon in January, 1998, and I'm standing amid the ruins of a medieval abbey, looking beyond it at the magnificent Canterbury Cathedral. This was our UW-Sheboygan group's last afternoon in Canterbury before leaving the next morning for Heathrow to return to the US.

I reported in my previous post on how this trip came about and what we did during our first days in Canterbury. Anne and I had no official responsibilities during this faculty-led trip, whose itinerary included one or two free days. We had brought Becky and Michelle with us for their first European visit (Aron had gone with Anne to Amsterdam some years earlier), and for one of our free days we discovered an opportunity to take them to Paris. A Thomas Cook travel agency down the street from our hotel was advertising a bargain day-trip that even included lunch at a Parisian restaurant along with the round-trip fare. Canterbury is only a short train ride from Ashford, the one stop in England made by the super-express Eurostar before plunging beneath the English Channel on its way to Paris. (Service from Ashford had begun only two years previously.) Several students asked if they could join us, and so one morning we all caught the local train to Ashford and enjoyed the Eurostar experience, arriving at Paris's Gare du Nord about midday.

We took the Métro from the station to the restaurant, located on one of the boulevards not far from the Palais Garnier, the old Opéra. Here are some photos taken during lunch (which some of the students found a very exotic experience: shrimp with their heads still on, steak bleeding into its cream sauce). You can spot Michelle and me in some of the shots, and Becky is with her Sheboygan friend Stephanie.

After lunch we did quite a bit of walking, first toward the Palais Garnier. I took this shot looking north up a side street with a glimpse of Montmartre's Sacre Coeur in the distance:

We passed the Hard Rock Café--a big deal to the students, who made a quick stop inside for souvenirs:

I didn't photograph the opera house, since I had on my first trip to Europe in 1969 (see BOXES 38-39), but I did take note of the nearby ornate Credit Lyonnais headquarters from the same era:

We walked south toward the Seine, passing through the Place Vendome, where the students were fascinated to see the Ritz Hotel because of its Princess Diana connection:

Our next stop was the Tuileries, as you see in the next shots, one with Anne, one with the students:

And here's everyone together at the Seine:

As you can see, most of my 'candid' shots did not turn out well--for example, only Becky and Anne are recognizable in the above shot--but I include them as a record of the day. We walked along the Seine to Notre Dame, which (as with the Opéra) I didn't photograph, though I did take a picture of the nearby Art Nouveau entrance to the Métro:

I don't recall whether we walked or took the Métro to the Eiffel Tower--probably walked, unless we were pressed for time, since we did have to be back at the Gare du Nord for an 8 pm departure. In any case, we had time to ride up to the first platform of the Eiffel Tower to see Paris at twilight and after dark--a highlight of the day for several of the travelers. It was a bit of an effort to herd everyone to the nearest Métro station to get back to the Gare du Nord, because the students lingered over the attractive and affordable watercolors an artist was selling beside the Métro entrance. I didn't take any after-dark photos, though I did attempt one of one of our students inside the Gare du Nord:

When we got back to Canterbury we learned that a larger group of students, ones who couldn't afford the Eurostar ticket to Paris, took a ferry across the Channel to Boulogne, led by Jean Tobin. Such opportunities for spontaneous side trips were one of the things I liked most about our campus trips.

Another day in Canterbury I caught this view of the endlessly photogenic Cathedral looming over some houses:

I think we went to London twice more on this trip, including once to see a West End show that Mark, our Dean and the organizer of the trip, had arranged for everyone to attend. On one of those London excursions I went by myself to see the new British Library, which had just opened a couple of months earlier. I walked north through Bloomsbury to Euston Road, and was stunned by the sight of another building first: St Pancras Station, one of London's greatest works of Victorian architecture, its red bricks glowing in the slanting winter sunlight:

The British Library next door was pretty impressive too:

On what was probably a different London trip I took a photo of the steeple of one of Christopher Wren's churches, St Bride's. And I have a shot of Anne with one of our friends on the trip, outside Charing Cross Station, the terminus of the Canterbury trains:

Our group's last official tour was of Dover Castle, of great historical interest from its Stone Age foundations to its WWII activities. It's not exactly a "castle" but a large fortified complex, partly still in use, partly in ruins. I see from my slidebox scans that I atypically took as many photos of my companions as I did of the place itself, maybe because we were nearing the end of our trip. For starters, here are Jean and Anne at the entrance (to which we had all taken a hefty walk from the train station):

. . . and next, Chris, Becky and Stephanie at an overlook with the town of Dover below:

But here's a view of part of the extensive fortification, with the sea in the background:

More people photos: Mary Beth and the friend from a photo with Anne; and Anne and me:

The next three shots are all within the Castle grounds:

Here are Mary Ann Searle and Anne standing in front of a Victorian building, the Officers' New Barracks:

. . . and here are two photos of Michelle and students (including the three who had joined us on our marketing day in London) at an overlook. In the first, the White Cliffs of Dover are barely glimpsed.

Here's one last view from within Dover Castle:

And here, on the edge of town, is the 13th-Century St. Edmund's Chapel:

As I mentioned at the top of this post, I took a walk to the eastern edge of Canterbury on the last afternoon of our trip to see the ruins of the St Augustine Abbey. Along the way I had this view of the Cathedral:

And another view similar to the one at the top of this post:

And finally, part of the ruin at sunset with a bit of moon in the sky:

I have lots of other good memories of the trip, such as seeing a holiday-season pantomime at the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury, but no photos to go with them. My last shots of the trip, taken doubtless to finish up the slide roll, are from back in Sheboygan, one of Jean and others as they unloaded the bus, and one of Chris and Jim from inside a campus building while awaiting rides home.

We returned to Canterbury a year later, but in the meanwhile, I helped lead a smaller campus excursion that spring--a weekend in Chicago--and in the summer Anne and I returned to Hawai'i. Reports on those in my next post.