Another trip to the Europe to visit family and friends - mine in the UK and Diana's in Bosnia. To save a bit of money we flew from San Francisco to London via Frankfurt. I don't know if the cost savings were worth the extra time it took to fly over London and then come back again. Particularly when the flight from Frankfurt was delayed because they didn't have bus to take us to the plane in Frankfurt - Frankfurt uses a lot of buses and only has a few proper gates - still the lack of a bus seems a pretty weak excuse for a delayed flight.
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| One of the last 747's flying passengers |
Anyway we got to fly in a 747 one more time. Most airlines have moved on from the old 747's but Lufthansa still has a few still flying. It was a very comfortable flight.
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| View from the flat window |
The flat in Cressbrook was pretty cold when we arrived and it took a few days for the chill of the stone building to warm up. The addition of two electric throws (blankets) made the environment a little more bearable. The sheep in the field outside the window made the view outside even more beautiful. They grazed on the grass from sun up to sun down - endlessly chewing the grass.
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| Mum's and my Grandparent's grave |
We visited Staveley and checked out how the new gravestone on my mum's grave was surviving. All was well and the cemetery police had not noticed the illegal gravestone.
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| The new canal footbridge in Staveley |
We also saw the biggest change to Staveley in recent years - the addition of a major new bridge over the soon to be excavated Chesterfield canal. It takes what once was the LNER rail line from Staveley to Sheffield and which now is a bike/hiking trail over what will be the further excavations of the canal. They are really pouring a lot of money into this canal restoration project. It is a wonderful thing.
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| Yorkshire Sculpture Park - Jaume Plensa - Wilsis |
Early on in our stay we visited the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It is a beautiful park with a wonderful collection of sculptures. I have visited it a few times before but this was Diana's first visit. It is quite a hike around the property but well worth it.
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| Andy Goldsworthy - Hanging Trees |
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| Sean Henry - Seated Figure |
I particularly like the Andy Goldsworthy dry stone wall works and the seated man on the ridge above the park is terrific. There is so much to see in the park, we couldn't get around all of it, so we will be back.
Our next visit was to the Chatsworth House Christmas Market. I wasn't sure what to expect at the market. I only knew that it had been very popular and very busy. We bought tickets for Friday evening. We entered along with a long stream of cars and made our way to the market. This was just the usual stuff - christmas ornaments, winter clothing, various winter food items, coffee stands, etc - nothing special.
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| Chatsworth House Gardens - Christmas Lights |
However we also had entry to the gardens where it was now dark and where there was a spectacular light show. There was spacy atmospheric music playing all around the gardens and the lighting was amazing - whole trees colorfully lit, the cascading waterfall full of lights, dancing white lights in the bushes, and an epic light show being projected against the side of the house.
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| Chatsworth House |
What a remarkable installation - we walked around in never ending surprise at how beautiful things were and I am not usually one impressed by such things.
On the Tuesday morning, 19 November, we woke up to snow. The field outside the flat was completely covered and the sheep that had been grazing there the prior day were nowhere to be seen. Fortunately the roads were clear. The road from Cressbrook up to Bakewell being a bus route always gets cleared and gritted.
On the Wednesday, my friends from University days came down to visit. Stuart and Paul came from Scotland and John came up from Birmingham. They could find affordable accommodation in Bakewell so we all decamped to the Little John Hotel in Hathersage a few miles away. We had a wonderful time reminiscing on our old exploits while at Queen Mary College. John particularly impressed Diana with his stories of his travels and exploits around the world - he has had a rich and varied life.
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| Monsal Viaduct |
The next day we spent most of the day just talking and not really doing much. We did make it out to Hathersage Church and Little John's grave and we did a little walk on the Monsal Trail near my flat but other than that we sat around drinking coffee and tea.
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| Warming by the fire - Three Stags Head |
In the evening we visited the Three Stags Head in Wardlow Mires for a beer. It was an old haunt of our caving days. We had spent many a night there drinking way too much before driving home - somehow we survived without harming ourselves or anyone else.
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| David Mellor's Cutlery Factory - Hathersage |
In the little town of Hathersage there is also a cutlery factory. An odd thing for a small town in the Peak District but the David Mellor Cutlery Factory is there. They design and make quite high-end cutlery and other related items. David Mellor was a Sheffield craftsman who relocated his work to Hathersage and built a rather interesting small factory on the base of an old gas storage tank - it is a round building.
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| Traffic Lights, Post Box, Bus Shelter by David Mellor |
David Mellor has also designed various other items that are seen around the UK - traffic lights, post boxes, bus shelters - examples of all these are in the factory grounds.
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| Filey from Filey Brigg |
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| St Oswald's Church, Filey |
We visited the lovely St Oswald's Church and its graveyard. We walked across the beach to the jetty.
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| Whitby |
In the afternoon we drove over to Whitby. This is a seaside town that does suffer from too much tourism. It is a beautiful port town, the place where James Cook learned his sailing skills. It has the ruin of an old Abbey on top of the adjacent hill and it was featured in Bram Stoker's Dracula. As a result of the Dracula association it has become a mecca for fans of Goth. Whitby is also famous for its fish and chips so of course we indulged at the very fine Trenchers Fish Restaurant.
At the end of our stay in the UK we decided to meet my friends Steve and Yvonne in Cambridge before our flight to Sarajevo the next day. We drove down in the morning and explored the city.
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| Emmanuel College, Cambridge |
We first stumbled into Emmanuel College and admired the courtyard and fine buildings.
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| Shackleton's Boat at the Polar Research Institute |
From there we walked over to the Scott Polar Research Institute where our friend Howard had studied for a year. Shackleton's boat is outside the institute.
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| Punting on the Cam |
We then walked on towards the River Cam and walked over Coe Fen towards the center of town. They were many options for punting tours along the Cam both guided and self directed, however, it was a little too chilly for a boat trip for us.
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| The Mathematical Bridge |
On the west side of the Cam is Queen's College. Another fine old college in beautiful old buildings. The Mathematical Bridge is next to Queen's - a structure built of wood where each member of the structure is either a radius or a tangent.
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| Kings College |
Moving on we came across the splendid King's College - such a wonderful complex of buildings.
Meanwhile my friends, Steve and Yvonne, were stuck in traffic - seriously stuck on a closed motorway. They were not going to make it for lunch and after 5 hours in traffic for what should have been a 45 minute journey they turned back home. We will see them another time.
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| King's College Chapel |
All the finer colleges charge an entry fee for tourists to go inside their campus. We chose to visit King's College, particularly their chapel. This is a most amazing structure - built in the 15th and 16th centuries. It has the largest fan vault ceiling in the world and the stained glass windows are huge. The rood screen between the chancel and the nave is also quite wonderful - erected in the 16th century by Henry VIII to celebrate his marriage to Anne Boleyn.
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| The Vaulted Ceiling and Rood Screen - King's College Chapel |
We walked on further past Trinity College, and St John's College. Both of them quite spectacular. What a place to go for an education.
After dinner in Cambridge we drove over to Luton where we were staying for the night before our early morning flight to Sarajevo. One small hiccup in the evening - I had expected to drop our Hertz rental car off at Luton Airport, but was surprised to find that there was no Hertz office at the airport and after futile Google Maps trips to alleged Hertz locations we found there was no Hertz location in Luton. What to do? We decided to drive the 50 minutes to Heathrow Airport drop off the car and get an Uber back to Luton. We were in bed by midnight and up again at 4:00 am.
The early morning flight to Sarajevo on Wizz Air was uneventful. In Sarajevo there were more car woes - they wouldn't let us self insure the car insurance without taking $5,000 on our credit card. Not a hold but a charge, to be refunded later.
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| Sarajevo from Biljiana's Balcony |
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| Still signs of the war in Sarajevo |
Sarajevo was not too cold though it was cloudy with light rain. We visited Diana's friends, Masud and Biljana and had lunch with them at their apartment. Then it was off on the road to Zenica and Diana's sister's apartment where we were staying for the week.
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| Zenica |
This was my second visit to Zenica so I was pretty familiar with the place. The Bosna river, the Mosques, the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church and so many coffee shops - they are everywhere.
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| The Busovaca House |
We did get out of town a little - first to see Diana's sister's home in Busovaca, a short distance from Zenica. It was kind of a dacha for the family. Unfortunately due to their absence from the country during the war it fell into disrepair and is now in quite a bad state - overgrown, vandalized and falling apart. That is not unusual in Bosnia, there are so many abandoned homes that people just walked away from during the war and never came back to.
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| The alleged pre-historic cement, Visoko |
We also visited the Bosnia pyramids in Visoko. A strange site that has been popularized by a Bosnian pseudoscientist, Semir Osmanagic. He makes the claim that the hills outside Visoko are really ancient pyramids created some 34,000 years ago. He also claims that the pyramids are perfectly aligned with along a N-S axis and that they are covered in an ancient cement that somehow the locals at that time knew how to work with and that is much harder than modern day concrete.
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However things get weirder and Osmanagic goes off into la la land with claims about the standing waves that travel faster than the speed of light and that can be used to communicate with other galaxies. He promotes the health giving and curative properties of the internal radiation in the tunnels he has found under the pyramids. People flock there to meditate in the tunnels or just sit absorbing the radiation in an attempt to cure their cancers. We did go take the tour of the tunnels and politely listened to the weird and wonderful claims about the radiation frequencies, the beneficial effects of the pure water in the tunnels, the rocks with quartz crystals embedded inside them,...
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| Tunnels beneath the pyramid |
Novak Djokovic is a big fan and has visited the site several times. He features quite prominently in the promotions for the site. It is one of the main tourist destinations in Bosnia. What a shame that poor old Bosnia has to be strung along by such a ridiculous hoax.
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| Departing Sarajevo |
After a week in Zenica we left on the Saturday morning to go back to Sarajevo to catch our flight to London. In London we stayed with our friends Peter and Lisa for a couple of nights before flying back to the USA.
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| The Shard from the Millenium Bridge |
In London the weather was awful - high winds and rain made it the coldest day of our trip. We went into London to visit the Tate Modern (a great free art gallery).
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| St Paul's Cathedral |
We then walked across the new Millennium footbridge over the Thames to St Pauls. There was a choral evensong going on so we sat in the pews to listen for a while - very moving.
We left London the next day on a flight to Zurich where we changed to our flight to San Francisco. Again a little longer way around as we flew back over the UK after leaving Zurich.
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