England was the first country we had been to in 9 months where English was the official language. We were excited at the idea of being able to fully communicate with everyone we meet, eat some familiar food we were missing and the general ease of doing anything when you can fluently speak the language. While we enjoy the challenge and interest of learning language and customs of new places, it is also nice to have a break. Sometimes travelling can feel a bit lonely as we have been unable to fully communicate with people we meet along the way. I think before leaving New Zealand I thought that we would find common ways to get past it, and this has been true at times, but I would say that most of the time I simply do not have the words to communicate more than absolute basics and neither do they. I’m a real people person and I like to chat and talk about anything with anyone, so found this language barrier isolating at times. It also puts more pressure on the 4 of us, as we are then all each other has. It doesn’t really matter how much you like someone when they are all the communication you have and there are no new novel topics as we know each others story and daily events intimately. I had had a taste of this on a recent (brief) trip to London, where I revelled and delighted in chatting to all the shopkeepers, strangers, ticket sellers etc I met. It was just so easy. I was really looking forward to 3 months of this.
We flew into Manchester and made our way to our first stop which was a Workaway stay near Worcester. Workaway is a work exchange for room and board and we were there to help with some gardening and building projects, as well as helping with minding the seven new Golden Doodle puppies which had been born less than 2 weeks prior to our arrival. Our hosts Ruth and Mark were absolutely lovely and to say the puppies were gorgeous is such an understatement. It is so rare to be able to see and touch puppies at this age. The boys were entranced by these small, blind little creatures, but did not get much hands on time due to them being so little.
We enjoyed the work, which was quite physical and it felt good to use our bodies for something other than sitting and sightseeing! It was also nice to see the result of a project and the garden and new patio started to take shape. The boys joined in and loved digging, feeding worms to the chickens.
We also enjoyed talking with new people and eating some English food. We made a list of things we should eat while in England. I have lost the list but I think it had; pies, mash and gravy, chips and curry, Indian food, Ploughmans lunch, Sunday carvery with yorkshire pud, salt and vinegar chips and Devonshire tea. Alex has certainly done his bit with the pies, eating at least 3 each week. We also had wheels, having bought a car, so it was great to be able to venture out wherever we wanted. England is just so pretty to drive around with the tidy hedgerow fields, leafy lanes and narrow roads.
This stay was interrupted by a trip further up north, first to the Kendal calling music festival (there is a blog post specifically on this muddy topic) and then a two week house/pet sit in Manchester.
One of the highlights from this part of our stay was enjoying the English countryside. We rambled through fields (that unique English thing where you can walk all over the countryside) picked lots of blackberries, made blackberry turnovers and blackberry jam, made huts in the woods and marvelled at cute cottages and large country estates. We also enjoyed visiting charity shops and being able to get as many books in English as we wanted.
While there is an endless number of things to do in the UK (castles, country houses, gardens, historical ruins and forts, movies, jump worlds, soft play centres etc etc) we really can’t see them all, the children would kill us if we tried and it would break the bank. Like most countries we have visited we made the conscious decision to see a few key things and relax and enjoy the “being in England experience”, rather than trying to see it all.
We did see a movie (in English yay!!!) and had a full day at Warwick castle; which included a jousting show, falconry display, firing the trebuchet, lots of weapons, suits of armour, maze and playground. It was a great castle and even though we had a full day there we didn’t quite see everything.
We finished up with Ruth and Mark, said goodbye (many times, involving much kissing of puppies) and headed south to Dorset for our next house sit.