Our Day in Warwick was … Mint

Fun day Sundayt, took the train from the Marylebone Station (love that name, Marylebone) this morning and traveled to the small town of Warwick, to meet the family who will be renting our house in Santa Rosa this fall. They suggested the kids would like to visit Warwick Castle, which dates from 1068 (history and more information about the castle is here).

We got up very early and were out by 8, taking the Tube to Marylebone (you have to hear the woman on the Tube say it to appreciate it, trust me), then a train to Warwick. I envy the public transit system here. The underground, even if sometimes crowded, is highly efficient (we have seldom waited more than a few minutes for a train), the railway was comfortable, quiet, smooth, and right on time, and all of it is relatively cheap. Probably because more people use it here, you don’t get the feeling that you’ve descended into some kind of odd realm of the damned when using public transit, as is usually the case at home. The public spaces of the stations are also splendid:

The trip took just under two hours, and as we got further and further away from London and into the countryside, I could feel myself starting to relax. Once we arrived in Warwick and walked from the station through the small town, London seemed very far away.

I started worrying a bit when we got to the entrance to the castle, where we were to meet our hosts; it had a bit of the “tourist trap” look to it. As an example, I give you Will and Lawrence Sloan (son of our hosts) in the obligatory stocks photo:

But once we got inside and started to tour, it was actually impressive. They had retained a large number of older artifacts, and had set up the various rooms to mimic how they would have looked at various points in the castle’s history.

One cool thing at the castle was one of the few working models of a medieval trebuchet. If you are saying “huh,” I wouldn’t have know what one was either, except that my son Andrew did a project on castles last semester, so I learned that a trebuchet is what we commonly call a catapult, something to launch rocks, dead and diseased animals, or burning wood into the interior of a fortified space. They did a short presentation showing how one worked and how you got it ready to fire, and then they fired it, throwing a very heavy rock and remarkably large distance. (This is a picture of it stationary).

The best part of the trip was meeting the Sloans and their two boys. Our kids hit it off with their kids, we hit if off with them, and we had a spendid day together. He’s an electrical engineer and a university professor who is going to be on sabbatical at Agilent in Santa Rosa, and she works for the National Health Service as a health educator. Very nice, funny, intelligent, gentle people. We are glad they are going to be staying in our place. Below is the only picture I managed of them. They also taught us several British expressions, including my favorite, which found its way into the title of this post, ‘mint,’ which means ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ or ‘attractive,’ and which can be modified for emphasis by the word ‘well,’ to give the expression, ‘well mint,’ which, I believe, can also be used to describe an attractive member of the opposite sex.

Although the interior of the castle was nice, it was the exterior, and the setting, that was outstanding. Set on a hill above the river Avon (upstream, by several miles, from a more well-known town-on-Avon), its old stone walls and two high turrets proved very photogenic. So I’ll close with a few pictures of the place.