As Cool As We'll Ever Be

Nick and I are terribly, embarrassingly behind on blog posts! The fact that we still haven’t written about Brussels is just shameful, and now we are multiple countries and two amazing visitors behind! We will be working over-time during the month of April to catch up!

We had the great privilege of being two of the adult leaders on B1’s (our church here) First Kids’ Weekend Away. B1 is rather small, and there are only 6 ‘kids’ between the ages of 10 and 16 (hopefully none of them will find this blog, as I’m sure they would be insulted to be called kids instead of super-cool teens!), and we took these kids and one or two friends of each away for the weekend to the Peak District. It was boisterous, exhausting and all-together memorable.

The weekend was organized and directed by Colin, who used to be in the army and has also worked for an outdoor adventure camp, so as you can imagine he had planned an action-packed weekend. From the minute we got in Friday evening until we left Sunday after lunch, there were events and activities happening, on top of cooking all of the meals (no packed lunches for these kids!). Friday night we just ate soup and did some ice breakers, including the ‘cup game’ where you each person has a plastic cup and you pass it around the circle to an intricate rhythm. My family will be delighted to hear I have finally found other people to play the cup game with, because once I learned it in high school I would do it for hours, to everyone’s general annoyance. Apparently I’m not the only one to have fallen under the spell of the cup game – one of the youngest girls was such a fan she carried a cup around with her and beat on it ALL weekend, to the slight annoyance but wary tolerance of the rest of the kids.

Saturday was much more intense – even though the kids didn’t go to bed until 11:30 (3 hours later than the normal bedtime of the youngest kids!), we had a 6:30 am wake-up call, a hot breakfast, and then it was off to the first of two of the weekend’s extreme activities: caving! The pictures at the beginning and end of the post show us before and after the adventure. Everyone loved caving, because it was whatever you made it. We crawled through the narrowest cave entrance possibly known to man, and then were allowed to explore the nooks and crannies to our heart’s content before meeting up at various points for a buddy check. The older boys could be as extreme as they wanted to be, while the girls were able to take their time more. After crawling on his stomach through water Nick doesn’t think he would do it again, because he’s a bit claustrophobic and it was surprisingly difficult and intense for a group of young caving novices!

We were just beginning, though – the afternoon included a low ropes course – which again the kids LOVED – and an orienteering walk through freezing rain in muddy fields. The course was so muddy that one of the boys stepped into mud up to his waste, and lost a shoe! He had to walk a mile in socks just to get back since the mud devoured his footwear.

After those adventures, it was time a for a big dinner, after which some of us girls went on a night walk while the boys stayed back to help Nick build the campfire. The nightwalk was incredible – I’ve done nightwalks before through woods, but this was through wide open fields under a really low cloud covering, so that you literally couldn’t see the person walking in front of you. It felt spooky. At one point, Colin lost the path and left us standing in a field while he went in search of the way. At first the girls screamed a lot and were really scared. Then they realized that by turning on and off their ‘torches’ (brit-speak for flashlight), it looked like a ‘disco’ (brit speak for school dance), and so they threw a disco, dancing and singing in the field. Once Colin finally found the way, we winded our way back to the camp site where a huge, warm campfire greeted us.

The campfire was one of the weekend’s highlights, because we had imported the ingredients for that great American treat: Smores! Smores are a completely foreign concept here, since they don’t have Hershey’s and they don’t have anything that even remotely resembles graham crackers. They were a huge hit, especially with the older guys. People kept saying ‘These – what are they called again? – are amazing!’ And ‘I love shmores!’ They couldn’t believe that people have these all the time in the States. Nick and I were so excited to share an American classic with people who were so appreciative! You’d think that would be enough for Saturday night, but we still had more games to play! We did games and icebreakers until midnight, at which point we finally convinced them it was probably best to get some sleep.

At Sunday’s 6:30 am wake-up call, a lot of the pep had gone – they were dragging. The day’s big activity, abseiling, cured that! Abseiling is essentially rappelling, and Nick was thrilled and the kids were scared that we were rappelling off of a 60 ft tall bridge. They gave us the option of going with someone else or alone, and most people tried it with their friend first and then by themselves on their second go (everyone got in three tries because they were so well-behaved and coordinated – the instructors said they were the best group they had worked with – we felt proud!), with the exception of the two youngest girls. They both wanted to go with me before they went alone. The one, who all weekend had seemed confident and outgoing, turned out to be terrified. She cried and cried as we stood at the top of the bridge, with all the kids trying to talk her into going. The instructor finally convinced her to go, and the entire way down with me she was shaking and crying and saying ‘Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.’ Over and over. When we reached the bottom I thought ‘well, she completely regrets that!’ And she said ‘Let’s go again!’ For the majority of the kids, both caving and abseiling were completely new, and it was amazing to get to share those adventures with them.

Truthfully, though, the highlight of the weekend was their complete love of and fascination with all things American. I think it’s a combination of their age and the fact that most of the pop culture that they like is imported from the states, but they just can’t get enough of it! They were asking us questions all weekend, the older boys grilling Nick and the girls quizzing me. The girls were hilarious – they asked ‘What’s the mall like?’ And ‘What’s a skate park like?’ And asking what words we had for different things and how we pronounce them. They also asked ‘What words do you use for amazing?’ I said ‘awesome’, and one of the boys said ‘Americans say radical a lot’ – I tried to tell them otherwise but they weren’t having it.

They then used this new-found knowledge to come up with a conversation, which they repeated over and over the same way kids do when they’re learning a foreign language. Imagine the following in a fake, wisconsiny type accent:

‘What are you doing today?’ ‘I’m going to the skate park and then I’m going to the mallll’ ‘Really? That’s awesome!’ ‘Yeah, I’m going to see a movie.’ ‘What’s it called?’ ‘To-may-toes and Pot-ay-toes.’ ‘Radical!’ ‘Yeah, and then I’m going to buy sneakers and galoshes.' ‘That’s awesome!’

They just couldn’t get enough Americana. I don’t think we’ve ever felt so cool or popular! You can see more pics from the weekend here.

Weekend Peugeot-ventures

The Era of British Roadtrips has begun. With hundreds of miles of UK highway stretching out from Birmingham in all directions and our new car sitting on the street just a key turn from ignition, it’s going to be hard to stay inside writing blog posts on weekends. Hundreds of towns, hedgerows, hamlets, cities, bridges, and castles are out there waiting for us, and we can’t disappoint.

We began our auto travels a few weekends back when our friend Anthony (or Mitri, as he's better known) from Pitt came to England for work and spent an extra weekend hanging out with us. Though people here are a bit down on it, we’ve wanted to visit nearby Nottingham since we arrived. Robin Hood, Sherwood Forest, the Sheriff; we figured Disney had pretty accurately shown what the place is like and expected to be greeted by friendly, lovable talking animals when we parked and heading into town.

The Robin Hood angle was pretty disappointing; no animals AND turns out there is no real record of him actually existing and most historians doubt he did, but Nottingham was still really cool. We visited the world's oldest pub, from 1189AD, called Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem, so named because of the trip Richard "the Lion-hearted" took in the 3rd Crusade at this time. It is built on the front face of a cliff, with Nottingham castle built into the cliff above, and has multiple, winding rooms carved into the stone, so it has a sort of cave/pub feel. It was really impressive.

Maybe it's because Nottingham is not a big tourist destination, but we've never had so many people hear our accents and want to talk with us! First we spent 2 hours in a pub with these two local guys talking about England and the US, and a lot about the election (EVERYONE here wants to talk about the election). Their main observation about the US was that you can get a bag of chips so big you can dive in and just eat your way out. We didn’t mention how pathetically small we’ve always found their chip bags here.

In Ye Olde Trip we ended up talking to a group of 20 Welsh nationalists full of revolutionary fervor out for a bachelor party ('stag do' as they're called here) and through this learned a lot about Wales. These guys did NOT like England, and all spoke Welsh as their first language, which is pretty cool. We were joking about how it would have been smart to snap a picture with them to document the time we had a pint with the future leaders of the Glorious Welsh Revolution. One question we never managed to ask was why they came so far into England if they didn’t like the English?

Since Nottingham just occupied our Saturday, we rounded the weekend off with a Sunday trip to the Black Country Living Museum, which documents life in the first industrial settlement in the world, just west of Birmingham where industrial iron-making was invented. The area was called the black country because clouds of soot and smoke blackened the sky. They told us it was “black by day and glowed red by night.” Many think JR Tolkien based Mordor in the Lord of the Rings on this area. We had a great time seeing the old cottages and mines with some of our friends from here - the captions of the pictures really say it all! Check out pictures of our journey back in time.

Yanks in the UK Official Road Trip Tracker - measuring our farthest road trip to date: