Abroad, for pleasure, as I was a-walking
May. 21st, 2013 11:02 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ventaOn Saturday afternoon ChrisC and I hopped on the 65 bus. It runs from Ealing Broadway down to Richmond; I use it reasonably often. However, on Saturday we elected to stay on it all the way to its terminus at Kingston-upon-Thames just to see what Kingston was like.
The journey takes getting on for an hour, and once we were out of the familiar bit it was quite exciting. The bus runs along narrow roads, past the posh houses of Ham and down to Kingston. At one point, a glimpse over a wall into a garden suggested that a house has giant topiary elephants. Giant topiary elephants! That's the kind of thing you get around Ham.
(Incidentally, Ham is a place. If you are like me, you will find phrases like "Ham House" and "Ham Common" and "the Ham bus" funny every time.)
Anyway, we sat on the top deck of the bus and gleefully pointed out Things like the overly-enthusiastic tourists we are.
One of the first Things we found in Kingston was some Big Art called Out of Order.
This is (as far as I can tell) the second most exciting thing in Kingston. The most exciting thing will be getting its own post shortly. We pottered about briefly, stopped to look at the third most exciting thing (a shop called Mosaic King which had various mosaics in the window, including a square made up of tiny black and white tiles which formed a QR code to take you to their website), and started walking towards Richmond Park.
In some ways, we're very good at walking - we'll happily prowl around all day. In other ways, we're awful at it because we constantly get distracted. By shiny objects, or ornamental lampposts, or (in this case) a weird-looking church. Just looking at one side of the building, it appeared to be made from around six different kinds of material ranging from old-looking cut stone to poured concrete. We eventually (and very probably incorrectly) diagnosed a hasty post-war rebuild after bomb-damage and carried on.
Once in Richmond Park, I demanded to go to the Isabella Plantation and we set off in vaguely the right direction. Only to get distracted by a tree with a really big hole in it.
A really big hole. I mean, you could fit an entire person in there.
Inside the tree, you could look up and see right through to the sky. It still seemed to be perfectly happily growing away, though.
Here it is, from the other side, looking like the staunch oak that it is.
Many years ago, someone recommended the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park to me (perhaps it was![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ebee?) I think I wandered along, and didn't really see why it was so exciting. However! In late May it is extremely exciting, being chock full of various kinds of rhododendrons which are all flowering. You can potter round the little winding paths and on every side there's a total riot of coloured flowers.
We also found a whole soap opera of wildfowl going on in one of the ponds - moorhen chicks separated from their parents, mandarin ducks having long-running, noisy and inexplicable battles, and Canada geese looking on superciliously.
All the trees in Richmond Park have a curiously tidy look, their leaves stop at around five feet above the ground. I think this is because that's about the height your average deer can nibble to. Wandering through the northern reaches of the park, we saw three fallow deer hiding in the grass. (Yes, I did say "Dear, dear, dear". You have met me, right?) We tried to get a little closer to photograph them, but fallow deer are very skittish and they eventually headed back to join the massive herd of fallow deer which we had unaccountably failed to notice till then. Just before leaving the park, we spotted a lone red deer munching quietly on grass.
It proved to be a stag, and he seemed completely ambivalent about us trying to creep closer to photograph him. In fact, at about the time I decided I probably shouldn't get any nearer to him, he regarded me with utter contempt and barged right past me to get at the much nicer grass on the other side. Another stag trotted up to us to see what all the excitement was about, and obligingly posed against the horizon. On exit, I found a sign warning that wild deer roam in the park, and that one shouldn't get closer than 50m. I had been much closer than that; up till that point I'd only seen one of those signs, and I couldn't read it because there was a bloody great big deer in the way.
(Some of these photos are on Flickr - the ones I think are nice pictures, rather than quick snaps of me up a tree. You can see more deer and flowers there. I am being a little bewildered by newFlickr, though rather pleased that instead of 200 pictures with a free account you now get a Terabyte. That's quite a difference.)
The journey takes getting on for an hour, and once we were out of the familiar bit it was quite exciting. The bus runs along narrow roads, past the posh houses of Ham and down to Kingston. At one point, a glimpse over a wall into a garden suggested that a house has giant topiary elephants. Giant topiary elephants! That's the kind of thing you get around Ham.
(Incidentally, Ham is a place. If you are like me, you will find phrases like "Ham House" and "Ham Common" and "the Ham bus" funny every time.)
Anyway, we sat on the top deck of the bus and gleefully pointed out Things like the overly-enthusiastic tourists we are.
One of the first Things we found in Kingston was some Big Art called Out of Order.
This is (as far as I can tell) the second most exciting thing in Kingston. The most exciting thing will be getting its own post shortly. We pottered about briefly, stopped to look at the third most exciting thing (a shop called Mosaic King which had various mosaics in the window, including a square made up of tiny black and white tiles which formed a QR code to take you to their website), and started walking towards Richmond Park.
In some ways, we're very good at walking - we'll happily prowl around all day. In other ways, we're awful at it because we constantly get distracted. By shiny objects, or ornamental lampposts, or (in this case) a weird-looking church. Just looking at one side of the building, it appeared to be made from around six different kinds of material ranging from old-looking cut stone to poured concrete. We eventually (and very probably incorrectly) diagnosed a hasty post-war rebuild after bomb-damage and carried on.
Once in Richmond Park, I demanded to go to the Isabella Plantation and we set off in vaguely the right direction. Only to get distracted by a tree with a really big hole in it.
A really big hole. I mean, you could fit an entire person in there.
Inside the tree, you could look up and see right through to the sky. It still seemed to be perfectly happily growing away, though.
Here it is, from the other side, looking like the staunch oak that it is.
Many years ago, someone recommended the Isabella Plantation in Richmond Park to me (perhaps it was
ebee?) I think I wandered along, and didn't really see why it was so exciting. However! In late May it is extremely exciting, being chock full of various kinds of rhododendrons which are all flowering. You can potter round the little winding paths and on every side there's a total riot of coloured flowers. We also found a whole soap opera of wildfowl going on in one of the ponds - moorhen chicks separated from their parents, mandarin ducks having long-running, noisy and inexplicable battles, and Canada geese looking on superciliously.
All the trees in Richmond Park have a curiously tidy look, their leaves stop at around five feet above the ground. I think this is because that's about the height your average deer can nibble to. Wandering through the northern reaches of the park, we saw three fallow deer hiding in the grass. (Yes, I did say "Dear, dear, dear". You have met me, right?) We tried to get a little closer to photograph them, but fallow deer are very skittish and they eventually headed back to join the massive herd of fallow deer which we had unaccountably failed to notice till then. Just before leaving the park, we spotted a lone red deer munching quietly on grass.
It proved to be a stag, and he seemed completely ambivalent about us trying to creep closer to photograph him. In fact, at about the time I decided I probably shouldn't get any nearer to him, he regarded me with utter contempt and barged right past me to get at the much nicer grass on the other side. Another stag trotted up to us to see what all the excitement was about, and obligingly posed against the horizon. On exit, I found a sign warning that wild deer roam in the park, and that one shouldn't get closer than 50m. I had been much closer than that; up till that point I'd only seen one of those signs, and I couldn't read it because there was a bloody great big deer in the way.
(Some of these photos are on Flickr - the ones I think are nice pictures, rather than quick snaps of me up a tree. You can see more deer and flowers there. I am being a little bewildered by newFlickr, though rather pleased that instead of 200 pictures with a free account you now get a Terabyte. That's quite a difference.)
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no subject
Date: 2013-05-21 10:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-21 10:57 am (UTC)I'm a bit hazy about when the Most Exciting Thing arrived, but I strongly suspect it's far too recent to have been there when you were growing up. Post coming soon, hopefully!
no subject
Date: 2013-05-21 10:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-22 11:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-21 11:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-21 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-22 09:24 am (UTC)Still a few dents and bits of damage where they've obviously been climbed on, though :(
no subject
Date: 2013-05-22 01:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-22 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-05-22 05:42 pm (UTC)