The Bank Holiday Weekend, Part 2

An entrance to a swimming spot.

After our terrible night's sleep, we roused ourselves for hotel breakfast, as the boys, who are huge devotees, call it. 

We bought some snacks and walked nearly three miles across lovely spring meadows to Grantchester. 

Another entrance to a swimming hole

From Rupert Brooke's "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester":

Would I were
In Grantchester, in Grantchester! —
Some, it may be, can get in touch
With Nature there, or Earth, or such.
And clever modern men have seen
A Faun a-peeping through the green,
And felt the Classics were not dead,
To glimpse a Naiad’s reedy head,
Or hear the Goat-foot piping low: . . .
But these are things I do not know.
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester. . . .

Francisco and I did this walk to The Orchard together eleven years ago; it was nice to bring the boys this time. 

The punter sinks his pole.
In Byron's pool
Cattails part where the tame cygnets steer.
It is a country on a nursery plate.
Spotted cows revolve their jaws and crop
Red clover or gnaw beetroot
Bellied on a nimbus of sun-glazed buttercup.
Hedging meadows of benign
Arcadian green
The blood-berried hawthorn hides its spines with white.

                                            --Sylvia Plath's "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows" 

At the end of the walk is The Orchard, a lovely tea garden set in an orchard, that has a great history back to Rupert Brooke and his friends. We had tea and scones--sadly it started to rain lightly, so we ended up having them inside. 

Then we headed back to Cambridge--Francisco to the Blake exhibit; the kids and I to a bell ringing workshop!!! I was so excited that I was able to bring them. I'd heard about change ringing mostly from Dorothy Sayers's novel, which I read in college (need to reread). 

The tower has six bells and it's all set up for education--when they're giving these workshops the clapper in the bells is stilled so you can't hear them ring except on the computer in the room with us--but you can see the movement of the bells on a screen (aside from two bells that we actually rung--one 600 pound bell that we actually moved and one that is I think more than a ton, but when you pull the cord, it just moves the clapper). 

The very nice volunteer/experienced bell ringer gave us an explanation of how change ringing works (I don't fully get it and the numbers made me a bit dizzy), then showed us how he could ring, double ring, balance the bell upside down--on both sides. Then he let us ring and get going faster and faster. The boys loved this part. Then they both rang the bells at the same time. Then we called it a day. 

It was a pretty nice little workshop tailored just to us (we were the only ones there). The volunteer said that Blaze at 5.5 was one of the youngest kids ever to ring these bells. 

The boys were happy. When we got home, at the volunteer's suggestion, we started the Midsomer Murder episode focused on change ringing (not kid appropriate, but we're rolling with it). 

Then we took our complicated way home--the trains service was interrupted both ways so we had to train and bus.