River Life

 

I mentioned that our daughters live near Hampton Court and the river Thames - west of London and about 30 min on the overland train from the city's central train station - Waterloo.

The walk to the Thames from each of their houses is only a few minutes and on their side of the river (South Bank) there is a tow path for long stretches along the bank.  The tow path was created years ago during the industrial revolution (1790’s) for horses to pull riverboats along, and is now a 3 person wide walking and cycling path in the navigable areas of the Thames interrupted only where some boating club or properties managed to get exclusive rights to that section of the river bank.  Although the tow path does not provide access for the entire trip there is a 17 day/16 night walking trail that covers the Thames from its source to London with many sections along the tow path.

In West Molesey there are houses right on the edge of the water on the North Bank that appear to be built to float on the river and in some places, small islands on the Thames that are covered by properties with access to the islands only by boat.

A floating house on the river raises a bunch of questions (my granddaughter asked “if you jump really hard in there will the house bounce?”) and of course I’m interested in how you dispose of trash and how the sewage works - particularly if you have one of these houses on an island!

The floating houses are cheaper than the built houses on solid land - in this part of London houses sell for around 875 000 pounds for a family-sized semi-detached, whereas a floating house might cost around 375 000 pounds but comes with the catch that you have long term leases of the river frontage that have to be renewed (and it is not clear how much these leases cost).  20 years is described as a rare long-term lease.

Floating houses take on a new meaning when you come across some of the riverboats moored along the Thames.

  These are like van-life sized boats that are sometimes permanently moored and sometimes living under the threat of action because they are moored illegally.  Boats on the non-tidal part of the Thames (above the many locks that are used for navigation) are allowed to be moored for no longer than 24 hours at a time but owners often park their boats and wait to be cautioned about their mooring before moving a few feet along. 

 In some places the riverboats have little fences and barriers set up to mark off their private property and appear to have been moored there for years. 

 I don’t know if they have special permits or are simple moored somewhere where a blind eye is turned to their illegal mooring.

In January 2022 a man was fined 800 pounds for illegally mooring two riverboats near to a lock in Molesey.  He refused to move other than for a few feet when he was ordered to .  The order claimed that he was blocking navigation at the lock and he was eventually towed while on one of the boats, having refused to speak to the officers.  He “showed contempt for the rules” according to a newspaper report of the court case and had previously been ordered to move.  It took between October 2018 and March 2019 to get him to move and then the court battle took until Jan 2022 where he ended up having to pay the fines and court costs amounting a total of 21 000 pounds.

It is possible to buy a riverboat for less than 100 000 pounds but getting a permanent berth is a big extra expense although it looks like in some areas near here you can get a berth with electricity and a sewage and water hookup for around 11 000 pounds a year.  These are very rare and in high demand.  It looks like for around 200 000 pounds you can buy a boat that has an established mooring agreement but it is not clear how long the mooring leases are in this case either.

The description of what appears to be the perfect mooring arrangement that includes electricity, water and sewage came alongside another that described the preferred sewage mechanism of “cassette” style toilet waste disposal and made me wonder about the summer swims and stand up paddle boards on the Thames in this area…. how many of the people on illegally parked riverboats take the trouble to dispose of their sewage safely?

I'm pretty convinced that living on a boat or on a floating house is not going to be a compelling argument for us - though I can imagine spending maybe six months on one at some point in the future as a potential long vacation... it might have to wait till I retire because I doubt there'll be reliable internet along the way unless the 5G rollout gets us a mobile option.

Bland food in England

 

Our daughters live in West Molesey which is very close to Hampton Court, a castle mostly associated with Henry VIII who must have contemplated ridding himself of his wives during his summer vacations up on his hunting grounds near the River Thames.

We’ve visited here a good few times since we moved to the USA in 2001.  One of the biggest miscalculations in our move to the USA was failing to realize how hard it would be to get visas for our daughters to live there with us.  It turned out to be nearly impossible.

The US immigration rules for my initial work visa (and later as Green Card applicants)  included children under 21 and so Emma (who was already 21) was ruled out and Jess (who was 18) ended up going to University in South Africa and then had to get a visitor’s visa to visit us after she turned 21.  Applying for family members to get across had an approximately 10 year long process time in 2001 when we arrived and if their circumstances changed (marriage and 2 children each) it would set the clock back on the application.   So we gave up on the idea by 2005.  

They both were able to work in the UK on the strength of their grandfather’s birth certificate and each ended up settling here permanently, Emma in 2003 and Jess in 2014.

I remember telling Anne once we had moved to the USA that we had, by implication of being willing to relocate all of us to the USA, given our children permission to settle anywhere in the world and Matt and Nick have embraced traveling since they graduated from university - first Matt (Senegal, Vietnam, South Korea, Vietnam, Guatemala, Mexico) and then Nick (Guatemala, Argentina, Mexico).  Who knows where they’ll settle?

Today I had a ‘brilliant’ breakfast at a cafe down the road from where we are staying:  steak and kidney pie, chips and peas.

 It tasted like cardboard with a soggy wood filling covered in a gravy of warmed wood glue.  They say that English food is bland but unfortunately my meal’s taste was no fault of the chef.  I tested positive for COVID last Monday night and began to realize by Thursday that the reason the orange juice wasn’t as great as in valencia had nothing to do with the juice.  I appear to have no sense of smell or taste at the moment.  Maltesers taste pretty bland too which is a big tragedy.

Anne joined me by testing positive on Thursday - and we are now holed up in a hotel for a few days to try to avoid infecting the rest of our families.

We feel ok - flu symptoms that are relatively mild.  Headaches that are annoying but not debilitating and some coughing.

The current approach to COVID in the UK is pretty relaxed for children 

“They can go back to school, college or childcare when they feel better or do not have a high temperature.” - even if they have mild symptoms such as sore throats and runny noses.

Adults are cautioned to avoid contact with others for 5 days after testing positive and avoid contact for at-risk people for 10 days after testing positive.

This has made me much more aware of how lax my precautions have been against COVID - even though we are not very sick it has been a little costly to have to find a hotel for a few days and it has made things miserable for all of us.

We are responding as we would have in America - where half the population still believe that wearing masks is a good idea in these circumstances - and so we are masking up when we go into the lobby and eating outdoors or in our room. 

 I am on day 6 today but still diligently putting my mask on.  Like the English I want to avoid the embarrassment of looking odd with a mask on but my genuine desire to not inflict COVID on others wins every time.   The net of which is I’d probably rather not leave the room at all for a while if I can help it.

I have been testing how poorly Anne feels by asking her a few "Do you feel like?" questions.

• A long walk?
• A roll in the hay?
• A swim in the Mediterranean?
•  Watching a movie?

This morning the only one Anne agreed she felt like was a swim in the Mediterranean which is pretty impossible right now and so we decided to go for coffee and croissants on the hotel terrace which was immediately ruled out when the hotel staff told me we needed a breakfast voucher from the front desk.  I decided I did not want to pay for a Full English Breakfast if all we wanted was coffee and a fancy French bun and we walked off in a huff.

So, stir crazy with cabin fever, we set off on the long walk that Anne had not wanted - to the nearby town (30min). 

Morning walk back of beyond - photo by Anne

When Anne saw that a large part of this was along a main road she opted to cross the road and go on to a misty field where we re-calibrated our plans after looking at Google Maps.  I found a coffee shop in this direction and it was there that I found my disappointing pot pie breakfast.   

During breakfast I persuaded Anne that we should visit a camera shop in the nearby town - still around 30min walk away - only to find when we were five minutes away that it was closed on Sundays.  

So here we are back in the hotel room and the list of things Anne feels like doing if considerably short.

Valencia

 

We have already decided that we should come back to Valencia despite the celebratory fireworks in the square  outside of the  cathedral “La Seu” causing a momentary panic that there was an active shooter in our vicinity!  As we found in the small towns a string of firecrackers is a common feature punctuating the end of a wedding ceremony.

We caught the train to Valencia from our small village for a 4 day stay right on the beach on the eastern side of the city.  The Mediterranean Sea was warm enough for me to swim a couple of times and the wide, flat beach is a playground and exercise venue for multiple groups who come there every morning.

Daytime temperatures were around 26C (78F) with a cool breeze every evening.  We saw on the news that the October just ended was the warmest on record for Valencia.

Some small palm trees on the edge of the beach promenade made it clear that the wind along this beach is consistent and can be quite strong but the weather was really great for the 4 days we were there.

Our apartment had a little coffee machine but we found it hard to shake the habit of walking to a small breakfast place (we had many to choose from on the beach) for coffee and some toast and the incredible orange juice squeezed fresh from Valencian oranges.

We took advantage of the many bicycle rental places to rent bikes and ride along the old river Turia that was been converted into a green space after it flooded and destroyed a path through the city in 1957. 

The river was diverted to run west of the city and its former path restored.

The city is not massive - it appears to be close in size to what Boston is with 800 000 people in the city and 1.6million including the surrounding areas.  It was founded in 138BC (I know!) by the Romans and has endured tumultuous times through its existence. 

 

The city has an old inner section called the “Centro Historico”

and some really modern museums and artificial edifices in the reclaimed riverbed which were worth a visit.  

We stopped for tapas at a cafe in the Old Town.

 

 

We didn’t visit very many places but the small streets near the beach were as expected, with semi-detached homes crowded against each other in colorful blocks

Riding buses in Valencia is pretty easy if you know which ones to catch.  The paths of the buses are described in an oval on each bus-stop so if you know which bus-stop you need you can probably piece it together.  Our host at the AirBnB was very helpful for our bus-trip into the city on the Saturday which we benefited from because we’d been on a bicycle ride in the vicinity of the central city before we were due to go in for the day.  You can download an app or just hop on and pay one Euro and 50 cents - which you can use over and again for an hour if you need to change buses on your route. 

 

On our last night we were joined by Sharon a friend from Massachusetts who has been traveling since April and had lots to share.  I'd been wanting to eat Paella and we took a vegetarian order for the three of us.  I'll be honest it tasted a little burned but who knows, I'll have to try a few more for comparison when we go back there.

 

Our visit was a little too short but the next stop is West Molesey near London to visit our daughters and their growing children!

Religious Freedom

 We visited a monastery near Potries with the idea of just walking around to see the place only to discover that it is privately owned and you can only visit it as part of a tour group.

Luckily we had timed our visit to coincide with the time of a tour with the idea of maybe choosing to join if we felt like it, turned out we suddenly had no choice.

It was another interesting experience, listening to a Spanish guide and trying hard to decipher what was said - fortunately the guide was aware of the few English speaking visitors and translated many of the important details for us.

 

We didn’t realize as we started the tour how important a commentary it would be on religious freedom. 

 

The monastery was  built on a settlement that was bought from the Moors in 1388 - the Muslim conquerors from North Africa and Syria who occupied much of Spain for 700 years, roughly between 711AD and 1492AD - who had settled and lived there for years.  

The occupation by the Moors had brought a era of religious tolerance that allowed the Catholics, Muslims and Jews to co-exist in what appears to have been a 700 period of growth and trade, with scientific and artistic developments that helped to usher in the the French and Italian Renaissance.

The monastery was given to a group of monks who in 1374 had established a hermitage near the coast in some cave but they were sacked by Berber pirates from North Africa who kidnapped them and demanded a large ransom.  A duke paid their ransom but they were too afraid to return to their hermitage and the land was bought from the Moors and then offered to them as a place for a monastery.

In 1492 King Ferdinand and his wife Isabel heralded the start of a violent repression of religious minorities (and the Spanish Inquisition) which forced Muslims and Jews to start living as Christians or be expelled or enslaved.  A stark contrast to the more tolerant rule by the Moors.

In the late 1700s the monastery had fallen into some disrepair and was not able to keep up with the running costs and resorted to feudal rents and harvest taxes.  

 

It turns out that this was a problem for many monasteries over the centuries world-wide - they accumulated land from benefactors who left the land to the church rather that parceling out to children as inheritance (as was usual with other land) and this built great resentment among people and made the monasteries vulnerable to governments who might one day confiscate the land.

So it was in Spain in the 1800s, decrees were issued that monastery land would be confiscated without compensation.  

 

The prime minister at the time considered the influence of the Catholic Church to be too great and this move effectively suppressed the church with the added benefit of allowing for the distribution of land held by the church.

The justification for the confiscation was that the land would be divided to benefit the poor, but well-connected political figures and the rich were the benefactors instead.

The dislike for the monastery is quite evident in how the people ransacking the monastery tried to deface the statues of monks in the halls.

The monastery was used as a hospital during the Spanish Civil war between 1936 and 1939.  

 

Irish Catholics joined the war to support the Catholics (with Franco, supported by the Germans and Hitler) against the Spanish Republic which had support from the Communists.  One of these Irish families later bought the Monastery and settled in Spain, restoring the buildings after all the destruction that it had witnessed.

Unfortunately the walls inside the cathedral have been lost to history with only a few remnants of they former beauty showing under the plaster and coats of white paint that had been applied when it was used as a hospital. 

And so in this short tour we learned a whole lot of things about religious freedom that I had not known before.

Fresh Air

 

Not long after we arrived in the little town of Potries in Valencia we noticed that there was a lot of smoke in the air.  It appears that the standard practice for clearing off-cuts from pruning the orange trees here is to burn them in a small cylindrical structure made out of concrete bricks.  

 

After several days of this with little wind, we could smell the smoke in the air in the town and it started to affect Anne’s breathing.

A structure for burning off-cuts in the lower left

Mental note to add to the checklist of what to do when traveling:  "Find out how to get to see a doctor when it is urgent"  

 

It all ended well because we managed to get to a private clinic where we were told that the next available appointment was a month away BUT we could either go to an emergency room or check in with a pharmacist.  Anne has had this happen to her a few times before (though admittedly not since the early 2000’s) and so she was able to tell a pharmacist what she needed and he was happy to oblige.  In Spain you don’t need a prescription for steroids and the pharmacist said he could give them to her but not tell her how to take it.

By the weekend, Anne was starting to feel a little better and she had found somewhere that looked like a pretty good place for hiking.  It is called “Via Verde de Serpis” (Via Verde just means “a green way” so many paths and hikes have names that start with this).

We found a guided tour but it turned out that they needed us to check in by 9am and we have duties to perform (walking dogs etc.) in the morning so that was impossible.  So we made our best guess for where to go for the start of the hike but it was confusing!  All the maps showed the destination 6.5km away but when we looked for the route it said the trip would be 1hr13min!

The hiking route is an old rail line that was converted into a walking/biking route and we realized that our directions were showing us a start on the other side of a steep mountain pass.  I thought I would look for a place on the route on this side of the mountain and we could hike in the opposite direction.  So after consulting the maps for a place to park on this side of the mountain we were off…

The town on this side of the mountain is called Vilallonga or Villalonga - which has two versions of the name, one in Spanish and one in Valencian.  We had seen tourist signboards both in Valencia and Spanish at various points in the towns we’d visited and the two languages appear to overlap by about 60-80% with a lot of French-similar words in Valencian.  

We stopped near a Bar on the road that was supposed to be this side of the mountain (and supposedly near the trail) and I confidently asked a man in the parking lot if we were near Via Verde del Serpis.  He said emphatically not!  He then went on to explain to me (I think in Valencian because I understood 20% of it) how I should go to get to the trail.  He warned that it was late in the day and we’d never make it but if we wanted to we should go straight down the road, look for the tobacconist, and then the “????” (I think he said station, but is "estanque" a station?) and then turn left (or was it right?) and and keep going for a long way!

He then said something along the lines of “did you get that?” and I foolishly admitted that I got maybe 30-40% and so he tried again (3 times!) until Anne returned (she had been walking along the road a bit) and told me that “estanque” is a pond, not a station.

So we got into the car and followed the directions on the phone over this incredibly winding and narrow pass - with places where two cars could not pass on tight corners and sheer drops off to the right that left Anne gasping in fright until we came to the other side where the hike began.

The town on this side of the mountain is called L'Orxa (pronounced Lorsha). We parked and hiked for about 60min until we reached the first of the rail tunnels under the mountain

and then turned back -

 the excursion had taken us long enough that we were in danger of getting back late for the dogs’ evening walk.

The fresh air in the mountain and beautiful views had re-energized Anne and she was breathing easily when we got back that evening.

The next day we set off again - this time armed with somewhat of a map of where we needed to go.  I had worked out that the end of the trail on our side of the mountain was a distance down a road that our phones didn’t know too much about so I marked as far along it as I could and we just kept driving when the phone showed us off map.

We found a parking lot with a number of cars and crying children who didn’t want to walk any further and we saw a big sign that seemed to show that we were perfectly on track.  

I confidently led Anne up the road but after a while of walking she said: “Aren’t we just walking up one of the mountain passes that takes us over the mountain?”

I wasn’t about to admit that it was likely so we kept going for a while until Anne said that we should turn around and try the path across the road and down off to the right from where the big sign had been.

Sure enough - after losing an hour to the mountain pass again - we found ourselves on the real Via Verde del Serpis path on the Villalonga side of the mountain.

We walked for another hour, seeing some beautiful views and coming across the ruins of what must have been a monastery right on the river.  

On the way back we found the remnants of large water pipes and sluices along the side of the mountain - what amazing feats of engineering to transport water way above the riverbed!

We drove back with lots for fresh air and beautiful views to fill our souls and went to our favorite bar to have our first dinner out (the menu was brought to our table at 9pm which was the earliest they’d serve dinner).