Friday in the Country

We are back in London after having been driving on the wrong side of the road for three days. We both deserve a lot of credit, I think, and England can breathe a sigh of relief.

Anyway, we had a wonderful weekend, but too much happened for one post, so here is the first of two or three.  Friday we headed for Salisbury, know for its medieval cathedral.  It rained--the first full-out rain I have seen here.  Here's Ellen coping with the weather on one of Salisbury's main streets.

 The town is full of old homes like this one, which was actually the restaurant where we had lunch--The Haunch of Venison-  The meal was really good.  Here's Ellen's Salmon en crute.  I don't mean to be sending so many pictures of food, but come one, this is beautiful.

 I don't know what happened, but England is very different from the one I first visited in the '70s where good food was in very short supply.

This is the Poultry Cross, right across from our restaurant--the place where farmers would come to sell their chickens in the market.

 Like many of the cities we visited over the weekend, Salisbury sits upon the Avon River.  Scenes like this were very common.

 So here is the crown of Salisbury, the cathedral.  Built in the 1200's,  but on the site of a church started around 900, it still doesn't look finished.

 Look at this part of the facade.  Empty places where a statue obviously should be.  And one statue with no head.

 Many others were very damaged.  The problem, said our cathedral guide Roger, was that they were sculpted with the stone aligned in the wrong direction, so they just split--very curious for people who were supposed to be so good at this!

 More empty spaces.  Roger says the statues were  never finished, not, as I thought at first, that they fell or were removed.

The cathedral contains the oldest working clock in the country, perhaps the world.   But to call it "working" is a bit of an overstatement, since, as Roger said, it gives the approximate time.

 Here's the inside of the cathedral.  Very beautiful.  On the other hand, as Roger pointed out, the walls are bowing and some of the "features" of the cathedral were added later as an effort to prevent it falling down.

 Here's one of the most beautiful aspects of the church--the Cloister.  And you can see how green everything is.

 As they say, the great cathedrals are always "a work in progress." Here they demonstrate how they are replacing some of the exterior decoration with new versions.

 There are many very lovely houses in Salisbury.  This one is the Red Lion  Inn.

 We checked into our B&B, the Cricketeer's Fieldhouse--right next to a cricket field (Can anyone explain the game to me?  I am baffled.)  From the owner, we got a recommendation for a pub for a drink and dinner--the Victoria and Albert nearby.  A terrific place that we will be sure to visit again, when and if we ever return. Here we are finally decompressing from the day.

More later about the weekend.  Thanks for any comments.  I think might have made it a bit easier to send them.