Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Welcomed to the Lake District, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

It was a dark and stormy night.

The drive up here from Manchester Airport, 130 miles through gathering darkness and increasing rain, was a challenging way to re-remember driving on the left.

But Maureen at Fleatham House in Saint Bees knows how to make people feel welcomed! Tea, which includes scones with strawberry jam and thick cream. The road map, the William Wordsworth book, and the tired but grateful travelers arrived with us.

And tomorrow is another day! (Unless rapture happens tonight, in which case I’m certainly glad that my last meal was so darn delicious.)

Tomorrow the walk across England begins, with the traditional dip of our boots in the cold Irish Sea.

Frank says, “You can can see why Jesus was annoyed.”

Got into Heathrow Terminal 3 at 9 p.m. Normally, airport terminals have lots of choices of banks for an ATM that lets your US cash card buy local currency. But here there’s no way to get local currency unless you buy it at robbery rates from one of the money changing offices (Travelex, American Express, and etc.) I’m not sure how these folks colluded to exclude actual banks, but it isn’t a good thing for travelers.

So today, May 21, is the end of the world? That was something Jesus worried about a lot, the end of the world, although unlike some evangelicals he didn’t have an exact date to mention. Human greed and uncharity were really more on his mind. I wonder what he’d think of the vast money-making and power-acquiring activity that runs so much of America’s right-wing-enabling religion. I think he’d be truly astounded at all the energy poured into demonizing “nonstandard” love, something he never fussed over.

Anyway, we woke up this morning and walked to the High Street, enjoying the beautiful sunshine, and got English money with no fuss or bother. So the money-changers in Terminal 3 are not doing us much harm, I’m glad to say.

Blogging is recursive, a photo by betsythedevine on Flickr.

Waiting for a morning flight to Heathrow. Frank and I will celebrate his birthday this year by doing the Wainwright coast to coast walk across England.

I just blogged a big chunk of Wordsworth’s 1810 thoughts about just how great this time of year is for the Lake District. So now, I photographed my computer, my blog, my coat, my scarf, my favorite pink hoodie, and all the other crazy people in range in this waiting area.

Adventures and more photos follow, but not for a while.

Lakeland view, a photo by eleda 1 on Flickr.

William Wordsworth, 1810, says the Lake District is beautiful this time of year. Sitting in Logan Airport, hoping that’s so ….

Yet, as most travellers are either stinted, or stint themselves, for time, the space between the middle or last week in May, and the middle or last week of June, may be pointed out as affording the best combination of long days, fine weather, and variety of impressions. Few of the native trees are then in full leaf; but, for whatever maybe wanting in depth of shade, more than an equivalent will be found in the diversity of foliage, in the blossoms of the fruit-and-berry-bearing trees which abound in the woods, and in the golden flowers of the broom and other shrubs, with which many of the copses are interveined. In those woods, also, and on those mountain-sides which have a northern aspect, and in the deep dells, many of the spring-flowers still linger; while the open and sunny places are stocked with the flowers of the approaching summer. And, besides, is not an exquisite pleasure still untasted by him who has not heard the choir of linnets and thrushes chaunting their love-songs in the copses, woods, and hedge-rows of a mountainous country; safe from the birds of prey, which build in the inaccessible crags, and are at all hours seen or heard wheeling about in the air? The number of these formidable creatures is probably the cause, why, in the narrow vallies, there are no skylarks; as the destroyer would be enabled to dart upon them from the near and surrounding crags, before they could descend to their ground-nests for protection. It is not often that the nightingale resorts to these vales; but almost all the other tribes of our English warblers are numerous; and their notes, when listened to by the side of broad still waters, or when heard in unison with the murmuring of mountain-brooks, have the compass of their power enlarged accordingly.

There is also an imaginative influence in the voice of the cuckoo, when that voice has taken possession of a deep mountain valley, very different from any thing which can be excited by the same sound in a flat country. Nor must a circumstance be omitted, which here renders the close of spring especially interesting; I mean the practice of bringing down the ewes from the mountains to yean in the vallies and enclosed grounds. The herbage being thus cropped as it springs, that first tender emerald green of the season, which would otherwise have lasted little more than a fortnight, is prolonged in the pastures and meadows for many weeks: while they are farther enlivened by the multitude of lambs bleating and skipping about. These sportive creatures, as they gather strength, are turned out upon the open mountains, and with their slender limbs, their snow-white colour, and their wild and light motions, beautifully accord or contrast with the rocks and lawns, upon which they must now begin to seek their food.