Rain, rain, rain

Well, hopefully not in Portugal ;) This morning as I once again woke up to rain pelting (no longer pattering) against the window, my thoughts did turn to sunny Portugal. It will be a nice break even if I'll be going back a few weeks later to more sun in Arizona/New Mexico. We don't have an ocean there.


Yesterday morning I went into "the shops" in Burnham. Burnham is a small village with only one real High Street of shopping. Many of the shops are actually charity shops, kind of like Deseret or Goodwill or Sally Ann. When I first arrived last week, I was surprised to see so many and thought that the Brits really are the masters of recycling. But Sheila told me that actually, the reason there are so many charity shops is that other shops can't afford the rent. The council charges the charity shops less so they can afford to be there. So there is a shop for the RSPCA, a shop for the cancer society, for the local hospitals, etc.... And they all sell secondhand stuff. My friends who love scavenging flea markets would be in heaven. I actually thought of looking for another dress but I really don't need one. I brought one dress and one skirt, which are perfectly sufficient for Church. I'll bring the skirt up with me to the Hebrides in case I get asked to country dance at a ceilidh.


My main shopping mission yesterday was to pick up things for dinner last night. Shopping is a daily experience; I actually shop like this back home as well. I picked the habit up when I lived in England 33 years ago and it stuck. Equipped with my shopping bag and list I tackled the supermarket and was successful with everything except for the meat. They didn't have pig's liver so went back to the High Street to the butcher for that. And I did have to search a bit for custard. Custard on pie--how many of you reading this have ever had it? It's lovely; English custard is not like the custard we might have had as children. It's not solid, it's creamy, like cream actually. But with a vanilla taste. And not as rich.


Can you tell I didn't do anything terribly exciting yesterday and am drivelling on? Well, actually I did do something that was quite "exciting"--as in at times heart-in-throat--Sheila and I bicycled back to Brent and went for a walk in the fields there. As I've said in the past, I'm only just getting back to bicycling. I do like it though; much more than I did when I had the mountain bike in Richland and in Las Vegas. This bike

is either easier to handle than my mountain bike or I'm in better shape. Hope it's the latter! Anyway, I like bicycling but admit that I am very nervous on the roads. To get to Brent, we had to cycle across a few roads, around roundabouts and ride on a path right beside the A370, which is a "dual carriageway" (minor highway). One side lorries and cars speeding past, the other brambly hedges and a ditch. I knew which way I wanted to fall if it happened. Which it didn't, thank goodness. It was exhilarating and scary at the same time.

Once we arrived in Brent and locked our bicycles, we went for a tramp through a field, wanting to get to the Edithmead "cathedral." The rain, which had been merely spitting, now started to pour. We walked along the rhyne (ditch full of water) for probably .75 mile and came to another fence with a stile. On the other side in the field were cows--no, I think they were bulls.

Those specks in the photo above. It's not a very good photo I'm afraid. First it was pouring rain and second I only had my Blackberry phone camera. And third I haven't put any of these photos through my photo program on my Macbook athat would enhance them. It's quite time consuming to do a really good photo layout as my Macbook isn't connected to the Internet right now. So all work that I do on it has to be downloaded to a USB then I move it over to Sheila's computer, which is a PC and I have to reformat. . .and so on. Today's blog is just not that fancy. I'm writing it on Sheila's computer and just uploading the photos from Yahoo, where I sent them from the Blackberry. Sometime, when I have a connection with my Macbook again, I'll go through these blogs and fix up the photos. For now, you'll just have to use your imagination. There ARE bulls in that photo. With horns.

Anyway, back to us standing on one side of the fence with the bulls looking at us speculatively from the other side. I am a city girl, I don't know a whole lot about cows/bulls/calves. As in--do they charge people who are walking quietly along a footpath? If they charge do you run or lie down?? Sheila didn't seem to know either and as it was raining so hard anyway, this is what we did,

walked back to where we'd left the bikes at the bottom of the Tor. And cycled to the "cathedral" instead.

Some cathedral, hmmm? It is a Mission Chapel and actually considered a tourist spot because there aren't many tin tabernacles left in England. Courtesy of the website, www.tintabernacles.com, this is their story: "The mission halls, chapels and churches were built economically and quickly to service the needs of small groups of worshippers from about the 1870s onwards. Often referred to as 'Tin Tabernacles' they were built as temporary accommodation and the vast majority of them have already disappeared. Many were built as prefabricated kits bought from builders merchants. They were quite often dismantled and moved to new locations so one building may have served several communities." Your piece of information for today.

Today probably won't be any more exciting. It's 11:00 a.m. and I am going to put my rain cape on and go back into town to see if they can tell me why my mobile phone isn't working. Yep, £15.- and I can't even call locally. I had to use my Blackberry phone yesterday and, at a $1.00 a minute, it's not conducive to long conversations. Then Sheila and I are going into the larger town of Weston. I've finished one of my books and only have two more. They won't get me through the evenings in Scotland next weekend so I'll look around Smiths. Come to think of it though, those charity shops in Burnham have secondhand books....