diaskeuasis

Geoff and I walked in the Pride march last Saturday with my congregation as part of a multifaith coalition, and it was great: perfect weather, lots of people lining the streets cheering, multiple women wearing "Mom Hugs" t-shirts (why no "Dad Hugs"?), innumerable children of all ages waving rainbow flags. I do sort of miss the marches of my 20s in Boston, with so many thousands of people and dozens of groups marching (I was often with the Gaylaxians). But of course Boston is larger than my current city by, like, two orders of magnitude! As I remember them, the Boston marches always ended with the contingent of queer police, and they would get a huge cheer from everyone hanging out at the end of the route watching the marchers come in; that sure feels like a different era. Geoff and I walked around Kingston's post-march festival to check it out, but didn't feel any need to hang out for a lengthy period of time.

I had proposed getting takeout burgers for dinner, but Geoff pointed out that we were already downtown, so instead we had a huge late lunch at a downtown pub, which killed any need to have dinner at all. It was 2 pm and they served their breakfast menu until 3, so we both got their "breakfast burger": beef patty, lettuce and tomato and onion, a fried egg, cheese, bacon, and bacon marmalade. It was ridiculously good, especially the bacon marmalade. I took one bite and said, "I have to figure out how to make this"; but the research I did afterward suggested that homemade bacon jam has to be eaten within a week or two even if it's kept in the fridge, whereas the commercial stuff can last as long as any other commercial jam, so if I want some I guess I'll just buy it. First I need to figure out what, besides burgers, I could put it on, though -- we don't usually make burgers at home!

I have a Pride umbrella that I had brought to the march to loan to anyone who wanted to use it as a sunshade; it's tagged with my name, address, and phone, and I figured that either it would get back to me or someone else would make good use of it going forward. And indeed, I quickly lost track of who had it, and then yesterday someone from my congregation called me up and said she had it, was now a good time to stop by and give it back? Definitely, I said, pleased. Now it's back in the closet on the shelf until the next appropriate rally. I don't usually like to use umbrellas against rain, because I don't like having my hand tied up by holding it and I'd generally rather just be in a good raincoat and put a cover on my pack, but I'm very glad I have this one!

Tomorrow we go to Montreal for an overnight to see a friend and have a Father's Day dinner with Geoff's family, and then I immediately leave for eight days in rural PA with my best friend, our annual vacation together. Ever since the border reopened as the pandemic eased, we've rented a place halfway between us (except for last year when we went to see a third friend in NC) and we just hang out and talk and watch TV (I am going to show her Heated Rivalry! I cannot wait) and cook together (she is an amazing cook) and we're going to be staying next to a fair-trade farm-to-table chocolate-and-coffee factory; we stayed there two years ago, went on a tour, and then spent like $150 each in their gift shop. I brought so many treats back for Geoff and for my local book group! I expect the same will happen this year; plus this year we'll be there over my birthday, so I am anticipating a phenomenally good birthday dinner.

Every month Chicago University Press offers a free ebook, and sometimes they're terrific. This Pride month it's Jonathan Ned Katz's "The Invention of Heterosexuality" (2007), available at https://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html. Judging by my experience over many years, CUP will not spam you or sell your email address. I'm grabbing it now, maybe you want to too!

Going Home, part 2

Our flights were uneventful, although the five-hour layover in Heathrow was, you know, five hours long. I had a window seat on the hop from Jersey to Heathrow, putting Geoff in the middle so that I could have the view, but on the transatlantic flight I took the middle and gave him the aisle, so he could have a little more legroom. Our rowmate in the window seat was the first person on the entire trip to be freaked out by our masking; she was afraid that we were masking because we were sick, and stammered several sentence fragments of inquiry without actually managing to say it. "I mean, it's just that-- Most people don't-- Are you--? Or do you just--?" I took pity on her and told her that we were fine, we just always mask, and added, "Look at it this way: you know we're careful. You have no idea how careful any of these other people are!" which she more or less acknowledged the truth of, but I'm not sure she entirely believed me that we weren't sick. I felt for her, but I also felt like, you know, if you're worried, then there's a fairly simple way you can give yourself significant protection against airborne diseases! Have you considered wearing a mask?

On that flight I watched the 2018 film Boy Erased, based on the memoir of a young gay man whose parents sent him to conversion therapy. It was good, but it also made me think of Jacob Tierney talking about wanting to represent queer joy in Heated Rivalry; this movie is exactly the kind of queerness-as-trauma story he was reacting against.

On arrival in Canada we spent the night in an airport hotel, which was exactly as forgettable as every other two-star airport hotel. Eating those pour-your-own waffles and weird-textured scrambled eggs and sausage always makes me nostalgic for VividCon. Then a train home, which ran almost two hours late, whee, but at least it didn't do that on the outbound leg and risk us being late for our plane! (The train runs late so often that there's a standard protocol for apology credits; we have each been given the equivalent of a $14 travel voucher. Gee, thanks.) And our own bed is soooooo comfortable, and our shower has such good water pressure (not only did all the Channel Islands hotels have feeble showers, even the Canadian airport hotel did), and I went shopping today and have a chicken in the oven for tonight and a fridge full of fresh food for later. I have to figure out what to do with the Guernsey chili crisp with seaweed; I'd love to find a recipe that really shines with it. Not that I've opened a jar to taste it, yet... Maybe I'll slather it on salmon or a firm white fish. Ideas welcome!

Today I crossed sixteen items off my to-do list, but it just keeps growing, as I find more and more things I need to catch up on...

Our cab was booked for 5:40 this morning; we set an alarm for 5:00 and were outside ready at 5:25, and he pulled up three minutes later! A smooth and quick ride to the port, a handing over of most of my British cash (which I had because I had not forgotten my wallet, yay again for Past Me), and we checked in for our ferry back to Jersey.

We had asked Ank, our host at our hotel who booked the taxi for us, if he would take payment by credit card, and she was like, "...if he has to." I had British £20 and £10 bills, and a Jersey £1; we hadn't done anything in cash on Guernsey to get Guernsey bills. The taxi fare came to £21 and a bit, and rather than try to fuss with change when we're about to leave the country anyway I just gave him both British bills, which he was happy about although he did jokingly grumble a bit at getting British currency. He also said that Guernsey currency isn't usable in the UK, which makes me assume that Jersey currency isn't either, which surprises me; certainly Scottish currency is, but then again Scotland is part of the UK, which Jersey and Guernsey aren't.

I took a pill because I am anxious, but the ocean was completely calm ("like a millpond," remarked our taxi driver) and in retrospect I'm sure I didn't need it. Never hurts to be sure, though! It probably did help me doze en route.

Once arrived back in St Helier, we trudged up the hill to our one-night hotel carrying everything; I am incredibly glad we are physically able to do that in our sixties, and not sure for how many more years that will be true. But we'll be booking a cab to the airport tomorrow morning instead of walking back down to the bus station, because that much of a load, at the temperature it had already reached even at that early hour, just leaves Geoff too overheated. The hotel obviously didn't have a room for us yet (I mean, it was eight-thirty in the morning!), but we were able to tuck our big bags safely away behind the front desk, and they were nice enough to let us have breakfast this morning since we won't be here to have it next morning. It was definitely a come-down from what we've been eating, but it included coffee, so yay. I gave Geoff all my beans in return for all his mushrooms. (We've been carrying the bag with the food our Guernsey hotel gave us; I think Geoff talked the front desk into putting it in a fridge while I was in the lobby ladies' room elsewhere.)

Since then we've just been sitting out in their pleasant (and pleasantly shaded) back garden, blogging and catching up on email. There were a lot of people here earlier, along with a woman enthusiastically and coaxingly booking city tours for them, but now everyone else has left except for one small group and one elderly man sitting alone in the sun; it's quiet except for the burbling of the hotel's fountain and one of the group occasionally murmuring. (Or coughing. We haven't seen a single other person masking the entire time we've been in the islands, and we haven't masked in our hotels and have eaten indoors in restaurants when necessary -- and have mainlined the antiviral nasal spray throughout the trip -- but our resolve to continue masking in public places, and not to eat indoors in restaurants at home, is unchanged.) Happily, the smokers have left. trepkos and partner will pick us up in about half an hour.

but we did sort of succeed at taking it easy?

Today we took a bus to a local weekly market on the grounds of Sausmarez Manor, a stately home that has been in the same family since, like, the twelfth century. Well, the estate has; of course there have been several houses on the site, and the family is not currently living in the height of twelfth-century architecture. (Although the then-seigneur's refusal to have the house wired for electricity saved it from being commandeered by the occupying Nazis, who wanted mod cons.) I had high hopes for the market, since I love farmers markets, but it turned out not to be one. There was one person selling food (sausage rolls and similar), a number of people selling handmade crafts, and several people selling mass-produced tat. I was disappointed. But it was still interesting to poke about the property! There's a sculpture garden with an enormous scorpion that I found quite disturbing (I do not like bugs, especially giant ones) and a cobra that I didn't mind but that Geoff found disturbing, and a quite wonderful lioness depicted lolling atop a stone wall, among others. And a small antiques sale was going on, and a sale of Oriental rugs: nothing that held our interest for long, but all together enough to keep us interested for an hour or so. I enjoyed paging through a pamphlet of "107 Things to See in Guernsey" from 1902, and Geoff bought a collection of some British comic strip he had fond memories of.

Then we walked ten minutes up the road to see La Gran'Mère de Chimquiere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Gran%2527_M%C3%A8re_de_Chimquiere), a stone female figure that was originally carved about four thousand years ago, recarved about two thousand years ago, broken in half by a cranky Christian authority about two hundred years ago and promptly put back together at the insistence of the local population, and that now stands at the entrance to the driveway of a local parish church. History is just lying around everywhere! In itself it's not that much to look at, but contemplating it and the thousands of years of changing worship and veneration was quite moving.

Then we walked forty minutes back to the hotel, along quiet pretty residential back roads much more pleasant than the main drag. At one point a woman in a car pulled up next to us to ask where we were from and generally chat, and in the course of conversation told us that Paul Revere, of American Revolutionary War fame, had roots in Guernsey. (Wikipedia has no mention of this, fwiw.) I said something like "wow, I never knew that" and she said something like "well, it's family history," and I had the feeling that she meant less that she herself was related to him than that all Guernseyites are somehow related? But idk.

I have, by the way, been 100% describing myself as Canadian to everyone we meet. I admit to US roots only in particular circumstances and after some preliminary conversation, and when I do the conversation almost invariably turns to spend some time on "Isn't he awful."

Once back at the hotel, Geoff zonked out for two hours while I faffed about on the internet, and then we walked half an hour north along quiet pretty residential and agricultural back roads to a cidery where we had booked a tour (https://www.rocquettecider.com/). According to the tour guide, although not quite in these words, a super-rich family bought the whole valley in the 1990s, and a friend of theirs who had experience running a cidery in England told them, you know, the microclimate of this valley is excellent for growing cider apples, and it turned out that there had actually been a cidery there until it folded just after WW2, so they bought a few thousand apple trees and went into business. You can do that kind of thing on a whim when you're that rich, I guess; and it does seem to be a good business. It was an interesting tour, not deep but fun, and ended with free half-pints of their cider (which, unfortunately, was the local one I hadn't much liked a few days before; I still didn't like it and Geoff finished mine), plus gin and vodka liqueurs (?? no idea exactly what they were but the vodka one was deep red [?!] and very tasty) and their apple brandy, which was powerfully delicious). Also cheese and crackers and tasty house-made chutney so we didn't all die, drinking that much alcohol on empty stomachs on a very hot and sunny day.

We walked -- or staggered -- back to the hotel just in time for another tapas dinner, which they do here every Saturday. This one was perhaps even more delicious than last week's, and we were seated with an English couple from Reading, whom we very much enjoyed talking with; everybody else had finished and left by the time we said goodnight.

For us this counted as a quiet restful day: only about 100 minutes of walking, and all of it more or less level and on pavement! No idea what we'll do tomorrow, but I am babying a blister, so probably another quiet day?

Today was supposed to be a nice short easy walk of a day.

We started walking a few minutes after eleven. We caught the bus home -- well, to the pub down the road from our hotel for dinner, because once we got to the hotel boy howdy were we not leaving again -- at quarter past five.

It wasn't challenging walking, it was all basically level and the hardest part was that we were often walking in roadways, pressing ourselves against the hedge or ducking into driveways when a car went by. And we did see some lovely things, including another dolmen, and we walked out onto a part-time island that's only accessible at low tide, which was very cool. But we also walked through a bunch of not that interesting residential areas, and had to scramble across a rocky beach and clamber up its bank onto private land and sneak away to the road when our GPS utterly lied to us; we think its trail was probably programmed before all the residential construction we were walking past and through, because it absolutely insisted that we were supposed to be walking through places that were absolutely not possible to walk through.

Anyway, I am wiped, and we have to be up and out early to get to the ferry port for our day trip to the even smaller island of Sark, population 500 people (rising to 1,000 in the tourist season when seasonal tourism workers arrive) and zero cars. Fortunately I do not need to squeeze in time for breakfast, since the only thing I'll be consuming before we make landfall is a pill. But we'll ask if we can grab some bread and cheese and breakfast meat from the cold buffet before we leave, and picnic when we get to Sark.

As for recounting today's adventures, though, that's not happening tonight, and probably not tomorrow either, given our schedule. Geoff's blog of today is up, though, with a few pictures; he is less wiped than me, and also he travels with his laptop so he can type on a proper keyboard whereas I'm swipe-typing on my iPad.

G'night.

but I just had a pint of cider, so I can't say how this will go

Yesterday we wandered around St Peter's Port just looking around, and also I went to Boots and dithered between the motion sickness med that the pharmacist said was stronger and the one he said was less likely to knock me out. (Not in those words, but basically.) I ended up picking the "less drowsy" and therefore "less effective" one, started stressing about it as soon as we walked out of the store, and was relived this morning to look up the active ingredient and discover/decide that I could definitely safely take another half-pill if I felt I needed it.

One thing I've noticed both here and in Jersey, btw, is that we haven't seen a single person begging on the street or apparently homeless. Very very different from home.

Anyway, after a while we headed off to the Guernsey Museum, which is an interesting combination of "neat temporary exhibits on subjects of local interest", "permanent exhibits on the history and culture of our island," and "IDK, somebody gave us this stuff and I guess it's interesting?" One of the temporary exhibits was partly focused on the tradition of "hedge veg": produce (and plants, eggs, etc.) set out for sale in a small unstaffed roadside shed or stand, with an "honesty box" for people to leave money in. I had noticed numbers of such stands both here and in Jersey -- these days, as well as or even instead of a box for cash, they may have a note posted saying how to electronically transfer payment to the seller for whatever you're taking. I always like seeing honesty boxes; they give me such a good feeling about the local culture.

I also liked the exhibit on the history of human habitation of the island, from neolithic times onward, and very much enjoyed the recorded samples of sayings and adages in Guernésiais, with both literal and idiomatic translations into English. (I always want both literal and idiomatic translations! Literal translations are fascinating!) Mostly the Guernésiais is entirely incomprehensible to me, and then every now and then a word that's exactly the same as modern French pops up and I have a total Steve Rogers moment: "I understood that reference!"

Many other things were also interesting: "here's a display about a nineteenth-century glassblower who made replicas of ocean invertebrates!" "here's a selection of local traditional medicine!" "here's a Haida totem pole!" (that one was very much in the "IDK, somebody gave it to us" category), but after a while I started fading. Also, as well as motion sickness meds, I had also bought more contact lens solution at Boots and had stopped in at the visitor information centre and bought two jars of the seaweed chili crisp, so my bag was quite heavy. Back we went to the hotel, to rest up before dinner.

Dinner was "pie night" at the local pub, which was definitely in part a way for them to use up the leftovers from carvery night -- chicken and ham pie, you say? shepherd's pie (the proper kind, with lamb), you say? Remarkably familiar roasted potatoes and carrots and parsnips? -- but was tasty and fun anyway. The beef and mushroom, chicken and ham, and roasted vegetable pies had pastry top crusts; the shepherd's pie and the seafood pie were topped with mashed potato (which explains where the previous night's baked potatoes went). All were quite tasty except the seafood pie, in which I found the seafood sadly indistinguishable from the potato. Ah, well, it was a fun experience anyway.

Today we had a slower morning and a later start than usual, but it was nice not charging off to do something right away. The hotel had done a load of laundry for us, so we tidied our luggage up a bit. We also asked the woman staffing the desk (the hotel's co-owner) about the best way to book a cab for next week: we have to catch a 7 am ferry back to Jersey on Tuesday, which means being at the ferry port at six, and the buses don't run that early. They have a list of all the taxi operators and their phone numbers posted (some of them are company names and some are just somebody's name) and at first she just recommended one of them, and then she was like, eh, what the heck, and called him up herself and made a booking for us right then ("Hi, Glen, it's Ank; do you have a cab for 5:45 Tuesday morning? Yes, it's for two of our guests here, they have to catch the ferry. Great, thanks"). It's fun getting to see some inner workings of a community I'm only visiting!

Eventually we pulled ourselves together and walked an hour northward to the Folk and Costume Museum. The walk was along quiet streets, past homes and farms and schools. I don't know if all the schoolkids here wear uniforms or if it's just that we only recognize as schoolkids the ones who are in uniforms, but we certainly have seen a lot of crowds of boys in matching dark trousers and jackets and ties (Geoff was incredibly amused at the sight of a troop of boys heading out for phys ed or whatever they call it here, running out onto the soccer field in their jackets and ties), and crowds of girls in matching jackets and sometimes ties and often the shortest skirts I could possibly imagine. Like, are you for real with that? Those are the kinds of skirts that girls in some schools elsewhere get sent home to change out of!

(I think I've seen one or two girls in school-uniform trousers, but they might have been feminine-looking boys; it's not like I was going to stare at and scrutinize them, I was just privately going "huh, hm?" as they went by. I am somewhat curious about how -- and whether -- schools that demand gendered uniforms deal with trans, nb, or gnc kids.)

Anyway, we got to the park where the museum was supposed to be, didn't see it, but did enjoy wandering through a reproduction of a Victorian kitchen garden (artichokes always look so... unlikely! and I'm not sure I'd ever actually seen espaliered fruit trees before), and then we found the park's cafe and split a plate of chips; we were about to eat them at one of the outside tables but it started to rain, so we took hits of our antiviral nasal spray and went in to eat. And after that it had stopped raining and we managed to find the museum, right next door. The power of fried potatoes, I guess?

I don't have a lot to say about the museum; it was all interesting but I'm kind of out of energy to describe it. More reproductions of period rooms, mostly nineteenth century (I was most interested in the kitchen, dairying, and laundry spaces), and collections of farm equipment and craft/professional tools (all men's crafts: tinsmithing, carpentry, etc.), and a whole series of dresses (and a few men's clothes) from the early nineteenth century through to the 1970s. The descriptions of how the older dresses had been repeatedly mended, and altered, and let in and out, were the most interesting to me there; obviously the ones that survived to be put in a museum a century or two later were the ones owned by people who never threw anything out if it could possibly still be used, but even if they're not fully representative (and certainly people kept clothes much longer then than they do now), it's fascinating to think about the human history sewn into them.

The rain had passed over while we were in the museum, yay! We caught a bus to St Peter Port and wandered out on a long pier at the south end of the harbor to Castle Cornet, part of which I think dates back to like the twelfth century, if I remember the signage correctly, and part of which was built by the Germans when they updated and extended its fortifications against the expected English attempt at recapture. The Channel Islands weren't in fact counter-invaded by the Allies, of course, but the signage told us that the Allies did attack Guernsey forcefully to neutralize Nazi intelligence and anti-aircraft capability in advance of D-Day. It wryly remarked that Castle Cornet is probably the only British castle ever to be strafed by the RAF... I got a photo that, if it comes out, should show the centuries-old stone walls, and buildings inside them that at a guess are nineteenth or early twentieth century, and then on top of the walls a concrete bunker that I'm confident was a German emplacement. (We didn't pay to go into the castle, so we were just spectating and speculating from outside.)

Then we wandered back through the pedestrianized shopping area and bought some sandwiches and drinks at the M&S food hall (is it no longer called Marks & Spencer?) to bring home and eat in our hotel room in lieu of another restaurant meal. A very welcome shower, food, a bitter beer for Geoff and the aforementioned pint of cider for me, and I've been blogging ever since!

And I believe that by now, two hours later, I have both caught up and sobered up.

I forgot to say that, as we were making our way along the wooded trail south, I saw a little spur track jut off it to the left (i.e., toward the edge of the sea cliff) and peering down it I saw a small building with a historical-marker sign, so we went to look. It turned out to be a stone two-room hut built as a watch post against the French in, iirc, the late seventeenth century -- and right behind it (that is, on the landward side) was a 4,800-year-old passage grave! Just minding its business and its dead for almost five thousand years. (This is it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Couperon_dolmen) It's so cool to be somewhere where we can just stumble upon such things!

More about yesterday, and also about today

I (we) didn't blow off dinner last night, in the end; we went back to that Spanish-Asian fusion place and I had scallops and also some of Geoff's duck gyoza and crispy beef tataki roll, which latter was so good (and food had woken me up enough) that we split a second one. Also a pint of Liberation ale, and I also had some of his dessert. We do like sharing food. (Though I eat several things he doesn't care for, and there's almost nothing he eats that I won't, so I generally get the better of the deal! He did taste a bit of a scallop since he'd never had one before, though he usually detests shellfish, and while he didn't detest it he didn't much like it, either. So they were mine all mine.)

We were eating outside -- well, the restaurant had basically enclosed their entire dining patio in transparent plastic sheeting for warmth and against the possible rain, so it wasn't really "outside" any more, but it was certainly better ventilated than inside, and the only people eating out there were a couple who finished and left soon after we arrived, and a woman who sat down a few tables away and had a couple glasses of wine which going through her various bags. The restaurant had draped cushy blankets over the backs of most of the outside seating, for the use of customers who might be chilly, and also had a couple of outdoor heaters going: very civilized! Plus the seating on the side the woman was on was more like couches and coffee tables than chairs and dining tables; it was clearly meant for socializing more than meals. Anyway, by the time we were finishing dinner and she was finishing her second big glass of wine, our eyes met and we started chatting. She was from Ireland but had lived on Jersey for like forty years; she basically told us her whole life story, but I've forgotten almost all of it (look, I was really tired) except for her saying to me, "I lost my virginity here, darling." Oooookay, enough wine for you, maybe? She was yet another person who, on hearing that we're going to Guernsey for ten days, boggled at the idea. She said that Jersey is, like, ten years behind the UK, and Guernsey is fifteen years behind Jersey, but she didn't specify what scale she was measuring on, and I didn't want to ask... Look, Guernsey has decent bus service and wifi in our hotel, it's modern enough for us. (Also, during dinner I did a bit of phone research and turned up this page https://www.visitguernsey.com/articles/2023/local-beverages-tours-and-tastings-in-guernsey/ which looks like it can keep us entertained for a while 😀)

Then we came home and I slept really well, although I had climate-catastrophe dreams. Kind of like living in a disaster movie.

Today we did our last serious hike on Jersey, from Rozel at pretty much the northeast corner to Mount Orguiel castle and the town of Gorey below it, about halfway down the east coast. It took us maybe three hours? More of the same, basically: footpaths through woodland and small roads through residential areas and great views across the rocky and/or sandy tidal flats across the ocean to France on the horizon; one road was scarcely a car-width wide but was officially two-way and had a couple of tiny pullouts marked "passing place", but if you encountered an oncoming car anywhere else, one of you would be backing up a looooong way! I'm also interested by how it's completely unremarkable to park facing oncoming traffic (on what we in the US and Canada would call the wrong side of the road), and the way that parked cars can legally just take up the traffic lane, so that the two-way road functionally narrows to one lane and cars have to take turns going through. I think a lot of Jersey traffic patterns are only workable because there isn't much traffic in the first place.

We walked past the same enormous breakwater we had gone to with trepkos, but we didn't go out on it this time. The wind and water were much calmer than they'd been on our previous visit, and Geoff got an ice cream and we sat and watched the bay for a bit. Further down the coast we enjoyed a rocky promontory called Jeffrey's Leap (or Geoffrey's; different authorities give different spellings) where a malefactor named Jeffrey or Geoffrey or Geffray or Geffroy was supposedly condemned to death and thrown off the rocks; the story is that he landed in the water, survived, boasted that he could do it again, jumped, hit the rocks that time, and died. Geoff took a picture of the site marker but did not replicate his namesake's foolhardiness.

And that only gets me halfway through today, but it's six-thirty and we have to go to dinner because we have to get up at crack of dawn tomorrow for the ferry. So I will continue this later...

Another walk, this time partly in rain

I slept badly last night for no particular reason, just woke up at 3:30, managed to doze for a while, but was basically awake from 4:30 on. Bah.

Breakfast this morning was the sauteed veggies again, yay, but our host Elena says she'll make pancakes tomorrow morning. A day or two ago she gave us some pre-made maple(-flavoured?) pancakes from Marks&Spencer, which were fine I guess but certainly didn't feel nourishing; but now she's saying she's going to make pancakes with the bananas that are starting to go spotty brown on the sideboard. I am curious to see what they'll be like...

Today the forecast was for intermittent rain, possibly heavy at times, with a fairly strong wind from the northwest. So we decided to do a walk along the west coast, going from north to south so the wind would be at our backs. We caught a bus to our starting point, L'Etacq, about two-thirds of the way up the west coast (our big walk two days ago started at the northwest tip of the island). The bus ride there was almost an hour; taking the bus incidentally also gives us informal tours around! Also, this bus runs northward up the coast, the same route we planned to walk southward down, meaning that we could pretty easily bail out and catch it to go home at any point if we wanted to; worst-case scenario we'd have to wait an hour for the next one, but we wouldn't have to walk far to get to a stop.

There were ominously dark clouds approaching, so as soon as we got off the bus at its northernmost terminus we put on our rain gear: rain jackets and pants (and gaiters for me, because the rain pants I got in Wales last year are slightly too short and dump rain into my boots otherwise), and rain covers on our packs. This time I have a proper pack cover, unlike last year when I had to carefully dry out my passport and a lot of paper currency post-drenching.

I had downloaded a GPS track again, but we hardly needed it, since all we had to do was keep the ocean close on our right. It was about 11 am and the tide was out, although just beginning to start in again, so we went down onto the currently enormously wide beach and walked along it. It was VERY windy, enough to make me wobble on my feet a few times, and I had to put my wool hat on not only to keep my ears from freezing but also to keep my hair out of my eyes; I didn't think to bring any kind of headband on this trip. But thankfully the wind was indeed at our backs, shoving us along! And it did indeed start to rain after ten or fifteen minutes -- not a heavy downpour, but stinging painfully on my face whenever I turned to look to the side, because the wind was so fierce. Rain gear happily doubles as excellent windbreaking gear; thermal layers under it are definitely nice too.

The beach sand was hard-packed enough that walking wasn't difficult, and the views were hazed but dramatic, clouds and waves breaking on rocks and the vast curve of the bay; that whole coastline looks like a closing parenthesis. There are occasional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century towers and other structures, and also frequent German bunkers; the whole coast was heavily fortified against an expected British assault.

One of the buildings we passed was a small, mostly white-painted old stone house with a few windows and absolutely no indication of mod cons after about 1880; a sign outside indicated that (like the Seymour Tower we walked to across the seabed on our first real day here) it can be rented for overnight stays. However, your £400 rental fee doesn't buy you beds or toilets: https://www.nationaltrust.je/stay-hire/properties-for-hire/le-don-hilton/

(Again, we were walking at low tide, across a beach that was maybe seventy meters wide at that time; Geoff will doubtless post some pictures soon. If you want to see what high tide can look like there, go to the page I just linked, click "view all photos," and look for the one with crashing waves! All the coastal walks come with big warnings about not getting trapped by the incoming tide. Trudie, who led our Seymour Tower walk, told us about the rule of twelves: in the first hour the tide is coming in, a twelfth of it comes in; in the second hour, two twelfths, in the third hour, three twelfths; and then back down three, two, one over the next three hours. Which means that if you notice the tide starting to come in, calculate how fast it's moving, and from there assume you know how much time you have before you're cut off, trapped, and drowned, no you do not; it's soon going to be coming in two and three times as fast as you're currently allowing for.)

We also passed a handful of seaside cafes, ranging from fairly swanky restaurants to parked vans; about half of them were actually open. I stopped in to one of the swankier ones to pretend to consult their menu but really just to use their bathroom 😈. We also saw two intrepid and possibly utterly mad people going into the surf, I assume to in fact surf although they were a little too far away for me to see surfboards. We lost sight of them as soon as they went into the water, so I hope they managed all right! Other than them, it was far too rainy and windy for anyone to be on the beach.

After an hour or so the rain stopped and the sky largely cleared (it was still windy, so the clouds were moving at a good clip!); we took off our rain gear and enjoyed the amazing unhazed views. And after about three hours in all we reached our endpoint, the La Courbière lighthouse at the island's southwest tip. Well, not the lighthouse itself; the tide had by now come in enough that the causeway that connects the lighthouse's rocky perch to the mainland was underwater. But the ice cream van parked at the top of the causeway was also worth visiting!

Ice cream consumed, we walked a little further up the road to where a bus home was due in ten minutes. Perfect timing.

What with having slept badly and then a three-hour hike, I was getting really groggy and sleepy on the bus! We pondered stopping for coffee on our way home from the main bus station, and wandered through the pedestrianized shopping areas eyeing various cafes, but weren't really feeling coffee. We did, however, split a very acceptable cinnamon roll from Marks & Spencer's food hall.

Also we realized that we had wandered pretty near a restaurant that Elena, our host, had recommended to us. She's Latvian, and her daughter married a Kenyan man, and they've recently opened this Kenyan restaurant here! So we went by to check it out; it was about 4:00 pm at that point, and the restaurant was closed for the gap between lunch and dinner, but we admired the menu posted outside, and then through the glass door I saw a woman with a child I recognized as Elena's granddaughter, who was here the other day while we were having breakfast. The woman saw me seeing them and came to the door to ask if we needed anything, and I said "Are you Elena's daughter?" and of course she was, and we made a dinner reservation for six pm. before finally heading back to the guesthouse.

Having collapsed for a while, showered, and collapsed for another while, I was pretty stiff when it was time to slog out again to dinner. But it was worth it! We split an appetizer of "Swahili-style" potato croquettes stuffed with minced beef, with a cloud of parmesan shreds on top and tomato salsa on the side, which were excellent. Then I had grilled cod, which came with various veggies in a pool of a smoky tomato sauce surrounded by a hot green herby sauce, and ugali on the side; Geoff had a goat coconut-milk curry and a tomato and cucumber salad dressed with the same hot green herby sauce. Everything was delicious, although I would like goat more if it weren't always so bony. Then for dessert we split a fantastic hot chewy chocolate brownie and vanilla ice cream, which probably isn't particularly Kenyan except in the sense that Kenyans know a good dessert when they see one 🤤 Oh, and we also shared a Kenyan lager called Tusker, which was very good. The waitress told us that if we ever ordered beer in Kenya it would be served warm unless we specified we wanted it cold, but I don't remember how she taught us to ask for it cold.

And it didn't rain on us either going to or coming back from dinner, hurrah!

Tomorrow is forecast to be "rather cloudy with showers, perhaps heavy or prolonged." Thanks for the specificity, folks. We're planning on going to the Jersey Zoo, which is run by the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, of which Geoff is a big fan. ("He was one of my boyhood heroes," he says.) That should give us a fair number of indoor things to see, so we're not outside getting rained on all day. But first I'm going to take a sleep aid tonight, and we'll probably take it easy tomorrow. On top of three hours of actual hiking today, Geoff reminded me that we did more than an hour of just going back and forth through town.

For now, we are curled up in our warm room, blogging. And as soon as I post this, it's time to relax with a Heated Rivalry story 🏒🍆😍

Today the weather was absolutely gorgeous, sunny and mildly warm and a steady wind from the north -- and that last was important because today was our day to do a challenging hike along the north coast, and the last thing you want is a wind blowing you off the cliff!

Spoiler: we did not get blown off the cliff.

We had another huge breakfast at the guesthouse -- honestly, I'm becoming less able to eat them as the week goes on. I'm just not used to either that much volume of food at breakfast, or that much dietary fat; fat is very filling! And today's omelet/scramble included the bacon I didn't eat yesterday. We asked for vegetables tomorrow, lots of veggies please. After that I think I may opt out of cooked breakfast entirely for a day or so, and just have muesli with fruit and milk; it's still got a lot of nuts, but that fat doesn't gorge me the way eggs and bacon do.

Anyway, after that we caught a bus up to the northwest corner of the island, to a ruin called Grosnez Castle. We weren't quite sure which way it was from the bus stop, but we got to chatting with a slightly older couple who had also gotten off the bus, and they were confident it was thataway, so off we all went. Except that we walked faster than them, and anyway they were going to be turning left/counterclockwise at the edge of the land to go geocaching, while we were turning right/clockwise to pick up a coastal trail. A few days ago we overheard a woman complaining to a group of friends that the trail she'd tried to follow had been really poorly marked and she'd ended up walking several kilometers further than she should have had to, but we found it pretty clear throughout the day; the path was always obvious, and there were occasional signs. The only problem was that sometimes there were a couple of possible paths and we weren't sure which one was best -- but I had downloaded a GPS app and loaded into it a trail from I think it was a Jersey Heritage site? Anyway it kept us on the extremely curvy and narrow.

We didn't bother exploring the castle ruin, because we wanted to get walking; we knew where we were hoping to end up but really weren't sure how long it would take us to get there. So off we went!

The trail was much like the cliff trails we were on in Wales last year: narrow, often only a yard or so from Certain Death but safe enough if you weren't stupid about it, with absolutely gorgeous views along the cliffs and out to sea, where we could see Guernsey and Sark (and probably Herm too) in the distance. And also France, but that's old hat to us by now. (I was amused to get a text from our mobile-phone provider informing me that I was now roaming on a French network, though!) We tromped along happily, admiring everything including our own stamina. There was a lot of up and down, as the trail wended its way through and around and down into the places where the sea has cut deeply into the land.

There are supposed to be a few puffins in that area, a small colony, but we didn't expect to see them, and indeed we did not. We did, however, see the giant statue of a pair of puffins that has been put up to mark their presence!

We had caught a 10:30 bus and started walking at 11:30, and at about 1:30 we arrived in the town of Grève de Lecq, which greeted us with perfectly salubrious public toilets, and a beautiful curving stretch of sand beach, and a very nice beachside cafe with outdoor seating. As I said to Geoff, that's my kind of hiking: rugged terrain, gorgeous views, crashing ocean waves, and a pub every two hours! We split a pint of Liberation ale (unfortunately no longer actually brewed on Jersey) and a piping hot plate of chips with a sort of chili mayo dip, and Geoff also bought me a bottle of water, because I hate the taste of the tap water at our guesthouse and had meant to bring an empty water bottle to fill along the way but forgot. (Look, I was managing all the logistics of getting us to the start of the hike, and keeping us on the right trail, and keeping an eye on the bus times to get us home again from various possible bailout points, and I did remember to bring the bag of trail mix. I dropped one stitch. And then I had a bottle of tasty water anyway!)

We headed out again at two, but fortunately only got about five minutes down the road before Geoff realized he'd left his camera on the table! So I waited while he went back for it; the waitress had kindly set it aside when she saw it had been forgotten. So Geoff ended up walking a bit further than me today, and accordingly has slightly greater bragging rights 😀

Anyway, from there we continued on the same kind of cliffside trail (and occasionally road), except that we made a small detour around a recreational shooting range that was flying the red flags that meant, according to all the signs, ACTIVE SHOOTING IN PROGRESS, DO NOT ENTER. We did not enter! We did see a couple of guys with bows as we skirted the edge of the restricted area, and a little further on we heard a fair amount of gunfire.

Right at the point where we detoured, we also stopped to look at some odd-looking sheep grazing in a field beside the road. Another couple of hikers were already there, looking at the sheep and chatting with the shepherd, a young man who was happy to tell us that they were an unusual breed called Manx Loaghtan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manx_Loaghtan); he said, and we could see, that they often had four horns, but Wikipedia says they sometimes have six! We definitely didn't see any six-horned ones. And a signpost next to the field he and they were in told us that the conical hill in the center of the field, on the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean, was an ancient hill fort, which had been fortified in various ways by multiple succeeding cultures and forces. So much history, just lying around everywhere!

We walked past many many potato fields, and startled several grouse out of the gorse as we walked by, and saw a tractor moving through a field and followed by a flock of hopeful gulls (or similar), and encountered a fair number of other walkers, either coming the other way or overtaking us. We don't generally overtake others, except for one older couple whom we leapfrogged a few times as we and they alternately stopped to rest, snack, or don or doff layers. Strange to think that we also qualify as an older couple now!

We made it to our ultimate goal, the evocatively named Devil's Hole, a deep crater and blowhole in the oceanside cliff, at about 3:15. Except that we weren't actually there yet; we had arrived at the Devil's Hole bus stop, from which we could get home, but the Devil's Hole itself was a ten-minute walk further on, steeply down through woods as we approached the edge of the water. Climbing back up was not fun ("ten minutes there, fifteen minutes back"), but the Devil's Hole itself was worth it: a wide and dramatically deep and dangerous hole in the rock, and fascinating to stare down into. A signboard warned onlookers that the ground beyond the constructed path and viewing platform was crumbly and unstable, adding, almost but not quite in these words, "Jersey Fire and Rescue rescues twenty or thirty people a year who try to climb down there and can't get back up, don't be a dumbass!" It was indeed sooooo tempting to hop the fence just to get a better look down the throat of the crater, but we generally try not to be dumbasses, so we did not. Sadly it was low tide, so the seawater was not crashing in the crater, but we could see it ominously slapping around at the bottom, as the waves washed the outer side of the rock.

There was also a big statue of the devil beside the path down, mostly cheesy but fun to see.

We slogged back up the path to the parking lot where the bus would stop, had about twenty minutes to sit and rest, and then the bus arrived that would take us back home! Excellent timing. Well, first it took us five or six stops further out, to the end of its route, and then it turned around and took us home.

You could not pay me to drive on these roads. The roadway was often barely six inches wider than the bus, and yet was a two-way road; several times either the bus or the oncoming vehicle had to brake hard, back up, and pull into some invisible but marginally wider spot -- or just into someone's driveway -- so that we could squeeze past each other. Truck drivers and oncoming buses often flipped their rear-view mirrors in to make more room. In the more rural northern part of the route, the bus driver often honked several times as he approached blind curves. If there was a bicyclist in the road, there would often be a line of several cars creeping along behind them, since it was rarely possible to get around them (and you couldn't pay me to bike these roads either). As an admiring and occasionally freaked out passenger, though, bus rides like that are pretty cool! Also, the bus we took home was a newer one, and it actually announced every upcoming stop both aloud and on an electronic screen, which was remarkably civilized compared to the way I'd had to carefully track our progress on previous bus rides so as to know where we were and when we should get off. It wasn't actually helpful, though, since we were going to the end of the line, the big main bus station in the center of town, so we didn't need help identifying it. But it's good to know that some buses, at least, have that system!

Rather than get home and then drag ourselves out again for dinner, on our way home from the bus station we stopped at a likely-looking pub that had outdoor seating and split a big order of fish and chips; a "coronation chicken tart" that turned out to be curried chicken salad on top of a flaky pastry, garnished with salad greens; and another pint of Liberation Ale. Then back to the room for collapsing, showering, and blogging. And here we are!

Turns out that trepkos lives nearby! We've been internet acquaintances since forever, and this morning we met in person at the same cafe where Geoff and I had dinner last night: a great time chatting, and she has kindly offered to show us around some favorite places on Sunday!

But today she went to run errands and we headed off to catch a bus to a three-hour guided walk across the seabed where huge swaths are exposed at low tide (the sea floor slopes quite gradually and some of the tides are quite huge). I don't have time or brain to write it up properly but it was wonderful: lots of information about shellfish (our guide showed us a live limpet! I've always heard "clung like a limpet" and so on, but she knocked one off a rock so we could see the actual animal. And then put it back, and we could see it shimmy about a little as it resettled itself), and about neanderthal and later early human inhabitants, and anecdotes of people trapped by the rapidly rising tides, and just incredible views across the exposed sand flats and rocks, and channels still running with the tide going out (and later in again), and some commercial oyster beds. There were nine other folks on the tour, and we enjoyed chatting with them too.

Bus back to the main depot in the center of town, where we located the place to catch another bus at 9 tomorrow morning for our kayaking tour with a parallel branch of the same company (probably led by today's guide's husband; she's originally from Germany and met him when she came here and went on a kayak trip he led!). Then we stopped for dinner at a likely looking restaurant in a square on the way home: also very tasty. I pulled out my phone and booked us a table at last night's cafe for Saturday night (day after tomorrow); Saturday is Liberation Day, the 61st anniversary of the island's liberation from Nazi occupation, and there will be big celebrations (the guy in the tourist info centre said ten thousand people would be in town!), and we don't want to have to worry about finding a place that evening.

And now it is late and I must go to bed. The time change and being brain-fried yesterday led me to break my 220-plus Wordle streak, darn it!

Monday Me put it in a secure inner pocket of my backpack that At The Airport Me forgot even existed, but On The Plane Me found it! Hurrah for my health card, my British currency, my backup credit card, and my faith in myself. Also my UK eSIM is working.

Unfortunately, Geoff's phone is completely refusing to boot. Whee!

ETA: Also, while Geoff's checked bag made the transfer at Heathrow and arrived in Jersey with us, mine did not. They promise to deliver it to our B&B, maaaaaybe this evening, probably tomorrow, hopefully not later than that? Good thing this isn't the kind of trip where we're moving every day.

Now off to the nearest thing to an Apple store so Geoff can have them poke at his phone...

EATA: They prodded his phone with a secret special boot sequence and it started up fine. Yay! Now to hope my luggage arrives. Baggage assistance at the airport said it would arrive on the four pm flight, and I've received automated email saying it's being sent, but they missed a whole lot of bags, and they also admitted at the airport that until they knew exactly how many bags they had to deliver to what places on the island, they couldn't have any real idea just how long delivery would take. I think they have only one van for it.