Lovely walk in the Bishop's Garden and my hair is cut!

My foot was considerably better this morning and I suggested a walk to John.  My appointment to get my hair cut was at 2:00 so we couldn't do a day trip far from town..  We decided to go along the Thames Walk which is about 20 minutes away and walk toward London to Bishop Fulham's Palace.  By the way, our street is off Fulham's Palace Road, a very busy street, so we were going along the river to the park because it's pretty and quiet.  The Palace was the home of bishops for hundreds of years with the site occupied for over 1300 years by clerics.  "The medieval Great Hall has been the scene of royal banquets and supposedly the persecution of protestant heretics whose ghosts are said to haunt the Palace corridors.  The surviving building dates from 1495 and is Grade One Listed." (www.fulhampalace.org) It was once moated and the gardens have had many botanical firsts.  The house wasn't open today but it is worthy of a return visit.  It reportedly has ghosts!

On the way we passed the Fulham Football Club stadium.  Football - soccer to us - is BIG here.  This is the local club and I don't think they have made it into too many finals but the stadium is close enough to Ellen and Philip's that they left us a schedule so we would be aware of game days.  Apparently, parking spaces are at a premium and it's a good idea not to go anywhere on game day for fear when you return to your own street there will be no place to park your car for hours!

As we walked along the river, we could see the rowing teams practicing and hear their coaches on loud speakers urging them on and commenting on their form.  The tide was in and the river was high. John took this picture yesterday when he walked to the Fuller brewery for a tour.

This is the same spot after the tour!  The Thames is a tidal river and sometimes the tide rises and falls between 15 and 21 feet.

When we got to the parks that surround the "palace", we saw many little people with little soccer balls and little goal posts practicing their game on a great big field with lots of big people supervising and helping along.  Seemed to be very informal and low key, not quite like our soccer games with the kids. 

Down the wide tree-lined pathway, we came upon a VERY LARGE sandbox and matching wading pool with fountains filled with more little people building castles and stomping in the water, even riding their scooters into the water.  We watched for quite awhile, enjoying the pleasure and happiness of the scene.

A walk through the palace grounds and back on to the pathway brought us back home after about two hours.  The weather was beautiful, the sky clear and the breeze pleasant in the shade.  In the sun, I was wishing for the cool days that had recently left us.

At 1:30, I began my walk to the beauty parlor to get my hair cut.  It's a bit nerve-wracking to go to a stranger in another country to have your hair cut when you had been using the same hairdresser for about 20 years but it worked out okay so I'm pleased.  That was a hurdle I hadn't been looking forward to.

We're going out of town again tomorrow for three days - to East Anglia where most of the American WWII airbases existed.  John's uncle, Frances Robin Graham, was a B17 pilot who was killed over the North Sea in 1944 on a run to Berlin.  The squadron was told to turn around because of  fog and when Robin turned his plane around not all the B17s had gotten the message.  There was a crash and the debris from that crash hit his plane and it went down.  Tragic, really.  We have been to Robin's air base in Rattlesden and want to find the pub that the airmen went to.  It's reported that many of them signed the walls of the pubs around their air fields so we want to see if we can find his signature.  Hope to leave early in the morning.  We're meeting Mary, a lovely young American woman we met in Oberammergau who was there with her father.  She is living in England for three years about 65 miles from where we will be so we'll  meet at an old pub for lunch.

By the way, John had a good time at the brewery's pub!