Well today was supposed to be a trip to my mom’s house which is on the border between Wales and England. The contrast between where we live, in the centre of a big city, and her house, basically in the countryside in the middle of nowhere, could not be more stark. However, as I came to check up the train times last night, I discovered that they had all been cancelled due to flooding. So we spent a frantci hour last night trying to come up with a new plan. We eventually settled on going to Hereford, a place that is still quite low lying,but on a train route that goes in a different direction.
Hereford is 55 miles from here on the train, which takes about 90 minutes – it’s not the quickest of trains, but it was quite comfortable. We also got a nice view of the Malvern Hills from the train, despite the inclement weather.
When we met up with my mom, we decided to go to a cafe for a quick drink. This was already the second of my 3 hot chocolates today. The cafe was also ‘dog friendly’ as was the rest of the town, I’ve enver seen so many dogs in shops!
We then went to visit the cathedral, it was a lot more interesting than it sounds. Firstly because of Edward Elgar on a Bicycle – not him precisely, but a statue of him, it looked great, even in the rain. The cathedral itself is beautiful and well maintained. The architecture inside is stunning as there were also lots of secret rooms there to be discovered. What was interesting is that many video games have been clearly inspired by this sort of architecture.
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That’s not the main reason for visiting the cathedral though. It has the mappa mundi. Now this isn’t a map of a Monday, which is the obvious joke we all made, but it refers to being a map of the world. It was created in the 1300’s – its not geographically accurate, but shows that we already knew about a lot of places at this point, there’s much detail about engl;and and france, as well as the middle easy, russia and africa. We particularly enjoyed a 3d model they had made of it (the real one being behind glass) so we could enjoy the tactile experience. There was also the chained library, which is as it sounds, the ancient books were all attached to chains to the scholars couldn’t take them. This area looked like a scene from Harry Potter.
Lunch wasn’t super exciting, it was pouring with rain, so we just ran to the nearest place. However, we did manage to go down to the river which was flowing super fast and the river level was very high, having covered over some of the paths.
We left early, but not before having the final hot chocolate of the day in Costa Coffee.
As we said our goodbyes, my mom gave us the Yule log she had made for us, which we will enjoy tonight.