England Part II: Totnes

Two blog posts in a week?!  Wow, that's impressive.  Also, it gets dark rather early here in Oslo (where I'm writing from, not writing about), so I've got a bit more free time.  I'm also nearly finished planning out the rest of my trip, so that helps too!

 Were you aware that Dawlish is a town in England?  I thought it was just a character from Harry Potter... Well, turns out it's a town, and it's got some mad-crazy tidal flats!  We're journeying along the southern coast here, and the tide's out.  This part of England sees ~9 meter tides, which is pretty incredible to think about.

We made it!  And, in true Danish fashion, our first activity was food.   Good food.  I'm still not certain what all of it was, but it was all fantastic, and all was about as local as possible; there's not even any sugar in there!  Still tasted great though, so it's all good.

Second task: watch Bill McKibbon speak at the local church.  He's the guy on the right.  If you don't know who he is, you've clearly not been following national or environmental news; he's a leader of the anti-Keystone movement, and managed to get himself arrested during the protest.  We weren't certain we were going to be able to see him speak, because he was almost barred from leaving the US -- turns out that potential convicts aren't allowed out very often.  Thankfully, the judge kinda rolled his eyes and let him make the trip.  Yay!

 FOOD!  If you hadn't yet noticed, today's post is roughly half food-related.  Here's lunch!  It's a pasty, from a place called Riverford -- you'll hear about them later.  For now, just think about how tasty that looks.

But before we move on, a tidbit of informations: though you've probably heard of 'Cornish pasties', this isn't one of them -- even though it's the exact same thing.  This was prepared and cooked in Devon, not Cornwall.  In Europe, they've got a thing called Protected Geographical Indication, or Protected Designation of Origin, status, meaning that certain products can only be considered real, or 'legit', if they're actually made there.  Prosciutto di Parma, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and a bunch of others are examples.  Yay information!

 Here, we get into the meat of the visit: Transition Town Totnes.  It's an initiative that has spawned a couple hundred duplicates across the world.  The basic idea is that, as Peak Oil hits and energy becomes more expensive, these communities will be insulated from the price shocks by the steps they've taken to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.  One of their big initiatives, and you can see it in this picture, is the expansion of productive green space in the town.  This is a corner of a small park.  There's quite a lot going on!

This one's even better!  They've also got a bunch of allotment gardens parceled out on a hillside near the edge of town.  They're quite popular, and I think there's even a waiting list!  There is one problem, though -- because they're Brits, and because the access is on top of a pretty steep hill, they invariably drive there.  So that's a problem...

This one's pretty exciting, too -- it's a shoe-maker!  Cobbler?  I dunno.  Point is, they make shoes.  They're apparently super awesome, and they're custom-measured to your feet.  I believe they're made from mostly scraps and leather that wasn't quite good enough for the luxury purse folks, so it's even pretty sustainable as well.  My sustainability professor has a pair of these, they've supposedly lasted her 7 years so far, with only one re-soling operation -- and still going strong.  Pretty impressive, I'd say. 

Beer!  There's a small pub down the street from the B&B where we stayed (we filled two whole operations ourselves, it was pretty impressive), called the Albert Inn.  This one's Realitivity, I think.  Relativity, but British, so they spelled it wrong. 

And the other, Albert Ale.  Ales are pretty great, it turns out. 

The next day, we went adventuring!  We took a small bus and another car up to Dartmoor, a sort of national park.  It's a pretty spectacular place.  It's a pretty big climb up there from the lowlands, and the first thing you notice is that it's crazy windy.  And cold.  It's cold up there.  I'm not really certain exactly why we went all the way up there -- it took about 45 minutes to drive there -- but I'm glad we did, it was beautiful.

See?  Beautiful.

Still pretty awesome.  Oh, and nestled amongst those rocks, we sat down and had a discussion session on various environmentalist theories and constructs.  So that was fun, too!

Even the bits without rocks are great!  Doesn't hurt that there's a lake, I suppose.

Here's the part I was really excited for: food.  I wasn't kidding when I said this is basically a food post.  Anyways, so after the Dartmoor visit, we went to check out Riverford Farms.  It's a giant 'veg-box' scheme, the largest in the world.  Basically, it's a CSA (community supported agriculture) writ-large.  There are both positives and negatives to growing the scheme so large, but I'm choosing to focus for now on one thing: the field kitchen.  They've got basically the best food ever.  I mean, seriously -- roast duck, some amazing scalloped potatoes, fantastic beets, a squash salad, and some other stuff, too.  Grand stuff.  I liked it so much I bought the cookbook, something ~50% of our crew did.  

We're having a splendid time, you can see!

This here, this was the clincher.  It's Sticky. Toffee. Pudding.  Don't ask me what it is, because I'm not really sure.  Something involving plums?  I dunno.  At any rate, it was the best thing that's ever happened to me.

That was just an excellent day, really.  After lunch at Riverford, we went to an old estate turned non-profit vineyard.  It's located right at a bend of the river Dart -- that's actually the order they say it over there -- so of course it's quite beautiful. 

We didn't spend much time up there though; instead, we headed down to the river.  I must say, it was even more beautiful from up close, so I wasn't complaining.  This was a sort of wrap-up night, and we ended up staying from ~2 till ~10.  We had all sorts of fun reflection time, and a "date with nature", which was -- to say the least -- interesting; the goal was to go alone and find some piece of nature that we could just kind of sit and watch for half an hour.  Odd, to be sure, but an interesting idea nonetheless.  I got to know an oak tree, leaning over a bend in the river.  We're good friends now.

Finally, exciting part!  Food.  Yes, food again.  We built ourselves a fine little campfire, and got started on some sausages -- locally raised, of course.  We had some salad too, and a few other things.  Great stuff! 

Oh yeah, and that guy with the grate, he's Hal.  He lives in Totnes, and he's one of the trainers for the Transition Town movement.  Cool guy. 

The next day, we took the train back towards London.  We stopped first, though, at Windsor Castle.  It's a pretty amazing place, though I must question how useful it would have been in an actual war, post-1740s.  It was largely stone walls, rather than earthen works, and would have fallen apart even more quickly than Minas Tirith under cannon fire.  This is but a small part of it, it's a very sprawling compound. 

Here's a bit more of it.  This shows just how sprawled it really is; you can see no more than 1/5 of the compound, and it's quite an encompassing shot.

The church!  All self-respecting royal castles have a church, I'm told.  The church here is St. George's Chapel, and it's a pretty fantastic building.  Pictures weren't allowed inside, but you can see just how ornately it was built.  This particular construction style uses these things called 'flying buttresses' to hold the weight of the roof; if you look, you can seethat the wall is actually two, spaced by about 15 feet, with diagonal stone structures connecting the outer wall and the inner.  Without these, the triangular shape of the roof, and the immense weight, would cause the walls to fold outward.  Kinda cool, I think.

And of course, what church would be complete without a unicorn statue guarding the front entrance?  The horn's a bit tough to see, but it's there, I promise. 

Finally, we went for tea after the Castle.  The thing about British Tea, though, is that it's not just tea.  There are cakes, too!  Loads of cakes, or biscuits, or whatever the Brits call 'em.  I'm not sure whether it's standard or whether there was an error in ordering, but we ended up with about 2 of these trays for every 3 of us.  It was the best thing, especially those ones in the middle. 

After that, we hopped on a bus and headed back off to Heathrow, flew SAS to Copenhagen, and went home!  Great trip.  I know I didn't count or delineate between the days very well, but there were 6 nights, 7 days in total. 

And now, I'm... still more than 2 months behind.  Oh well, we'll get there.  Finally, I'm actually in Bergen now; between beginning and finishing this post, I took the train from Oslo to Bergen.  More on that, of course, soon.  Though if the past is any indication, it'll probably be a few months...