Friends, please take this advice. If you have the opportunity to rent a car and drive out of London: Don’t.
Instead, find an Underground stop on the way out of town in the direction you want to go. Find a car rental place at that stop. Take that train and rent from there. And you are welcome.
It isn’t about driving on the left side of the road, which The Yankee did very well:
But that city wasn’t made for you. It was made for people on bicycles with a death wish. And cabbies. Who drink. And not your GPS. Just don’t.
Anyway, we rented a car, we got lost. We got lost while lost. The GPS had no idea. We drove about five miles in almost two hours. We finally made our way out of town in one of those mornings where nothing went right. (And this was the day we chose to rent a car!) Once you get out of London everything is fine. Hence my advice above. And so we drove about two hours to Dover.
No one in Dover knows where anything is. So that’s an adventure unto itself. Also, our GPS did not know.
We were going to take a tour on the water, but the guy that gives the tours was MIA. And also not answering his phone.
There is one other game in town, a speedboat game. So we donned splash suits and climbed into a Zodiac and bounced our way out to the cliffs. They look like this. (There is more writing below.)
Also, here is a panorama of the Dover castle above it all. As always, click to embiggen.
In this next picture, do you see that line that goes from the top of the cliff all the way to the shore? The cliffs are made of a chalk, and thus are soft. The locals, our guide told us, would often hoist up items from shipwrecks (or from smuggling) from the top of the cliffs. The ropes carved their way into the cliffs. In 1910 the Preussen, the largest ship of its kind in the world, found her fate on these shores. She was carrying pianos. The story goes that they all went into locals’ homes, via rope lines like these:
See the holes in the cliff face below? The British dug those out and mounted lights in there during World War II. Our guide told us that Dover never really recovered from the war economically, but not because of those lights. They were afraid of invasion from across the channel — France is only 26 miles away — and before radar they were lighting up ships at night.
Erosion happens. Thousands of tons fell to the shore last year.
This, we were told, is party of the area that always shows up in films:
This is one of the lighthouse markers that sits on top of the barrier wall at the harbor. These days fishermen pay good money to spend days or weeks on end out there, fishing and living in dank conditions. They made it sound miserable.
This is the old Customs Watch House, designed by architect Arthur Beresford Pite and built 1909-1911.
We ordered lunch from Sue, who works out of a truck. And her seafood is fresh.
Not sure what this is about, though:
But the seagulls approve.
The place we did not eat, but I wanted too. I’ve always wanted to try a burguer. But not a Donner.
