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Walking England - End of trek follies
At the beginning of the 20th century, Plymouth was the main arrival port for liners from New York, and many film stars and politicians were guests of the hotel. telecommunications were not particularly efficient then, and when a liner was expected, hotel porters were stationed in the hotel's tower to watch for it to enter Plymouth Sound. During the 1940 Blitz, 1,200 Plymouth civilians were killed, and much of the town was destroyed. Our hotel survived, but every window was blown out. At 9:30 a.m. we left the Duke of Cornwall and walked in a gentle rain to the Plymouth Hoe. A "Hoe" is a flat, green area on a hill - in this case, looking out over a sound. We paused at the statue of Sir Francis Drake for Ken to talk briefly about him. Drake had insisted on finishing a game of lawn bowls here before going after the Spanish Armada in 1588. As we walked away from the statue, out of the mist near the water Sir Francis himself appeared in full Elizabethan costume. Actually, we suspect it was a friend or acquaintence of Ken and Margaret's posing as such, but in appearance, he was quite real. A moment or so later we realized that Lady Drake was with him. They then accompanied us for most of the morning.
We passed The Citadel, where Charles II (1660-1685), well aware that Plymount had stood for the Parliamentarians in the Civil War (1642-1649), had many of the guns face inward, which they still do. A pause in an Elizabethan garden allowed Sir Francis to lead us in performing (loosely) some Elizabethan dances. We learned that the stones in the Plymouth streets came from an area of Dartmoor where we had observed commandos in training.
Our tour guide's name was Jill. She informed us that the facory's building date from the early 1400s. They originally served as a monastery for the Black Friar monks. In 1620 the pilgrim fathers spent their las night here before they sailed on the Mayflower. In 1793 a young man named Coates began distilling Plymouth gin here, and every drop os it since then has been made here. The water that is added to the alcohol comes from Dartmoor, where we had walked. The same recipe has been used since 1793. The gin making takes on day.
Following lunch, anna Bryan and I walked to the Plymouth shopping area to purchase end-of trek gifts for Ken and Margaret: a box of assorted cheeses for Ken, to compensate for Margaret's not allowing him to have the cheese dessert at the Greenway Hotel; and a bottle of lavender perfume for Margaret. We returned to the hotel to deposit our purchases, and I was detained there for about half an hour as members of the group delivered their entries for the book we were preparing for Ken and Margaret. I then departed to walk back to the Plymouth Hoe, but made a wrong turn and wound up back at the hotel. It was a fortuitous wrong turn, however, in that without it I would have missed the information that the park across from our hotel was once the site of the Millcold Mill - Millbay Gaol, where over 1,500 American sailors were held captive between 1777 and 1783 during the Revolutionary War. I made it to the Hoe on my next attempt. En route I paused at a large memorail to the dead from World Wars I and II; there were other references to those wars in the area behind the Sir Francis Drake statue. My objective was to reach a large bookstore members of our group had mentioned. I got diverted into a smaller one nearby where I purchased a volume of Churchill's writings and speeches. By the time I reached the large store (three floors of used books), I only had 10-15 minutes until closing time. That was probably salutary. Clearly, this was a treasure trove of used books. I was seriously temted by a paperback edition of Simon Shama's Citizens, a history of the French Revolution, and some others. The Shama volume was large and would have prsented packing problems, so it is probably good that I lacked adequate time to make reflective purchases. I had a brief but pleasant interval to sit overlooking the water and read from the curchill volume. Back in my room, the women were busily putting together the scrapbook of the trek for Ken and Margaret. Needless to say, I could accomplish nothing while that was occurring. Time then remained only to clean up and dress for the endof trek banquet. Before we were royally entertained by the Hanging Johnny singing group. The Hanging Johnn is a group of singers from East Cornwall and Plymouth who specialize in shanties and sea songs from the great age of sail, together with more contemporary sea songs. The songs were largely those sung by sailors on ships in the 1838-1850 period. The gourp recently became the offficial Shanty Crew for the Dartmouth Yacht Club, which is believed to by the only yacht club in England to have its own Shanty crew. One of the four men was something of a foil for the others ans served as the principal humorist in the group. For example, he looked at Gary Clodfelter's stomack protrusion and called him "a well set up gentleman." Therir songs were "A Whiskey for My Johnny," "Bound for South Australia," "It's 5 o'clock in the Morning," "Edistone Lights," and "The Augie Man." They then talked about the fact that a fair porportion of their songs are about woman and drink. They concluded with two more songs, "Me Jolly, Jolly Grog" and "Round the Corner Sadie." The banquet was a typical Ken and Margaret affair. At one point Ken, Jane Hindsman, Gary Clodfelter and Ron Culler departed. When they returned, they announced themselves as "The Plymouth Mermaid and the Three Old Sweats." Gary stated that we would have to figure out for ourselves which one was the mermaid (it wasn't hard). Ken, Gary and Ron Played "Home on the Range" on kazus while Jane recited lines from "This is the House that Jack Built." Margaret awarded Oscars to me for my performance in Widicombe as Tom Cobleigh and to Steve Hindsman for his performance in Princetown as Dr. Watson. Michelle Rippon received a pony and Steve Hindsman, for his deputy trek leader services, a yak. For my efforts as the group's organizer, Ken and Margaret gave me a book, compiled by Dominque Enright, entitled The Wiked Wit of Winston Churchill. (I have now read it, and it's quite entertaining.) The Big Cheese award, for his chees-throwing superiority demonstrated at Cooper's Hill, went to Jim Sikenat. We presented Ken and Margaret with a book on hiking in the North Carolina mountains that we had purchased at Phillips and Lloyd in Hayesville just before the trip. The author had autographed it and, at my request, had added the inscription, "Now that you've walked over much of England, come to the North Carolina mountains." Margaret got her laveder perfume and Ken his cheeses. Their favorite gift was the scrapbook of the trek with notes from each member of the group. The digital age is amazing; some of the pictrues in the book had been taken that moring.
Wee concluded the occasion with a Lord Winston's closing banquet tradition. We gathered at the from entrance of the Duke of Cornwall hotel to join hands and sing Auld Lang Syne.
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