April 7

After yesterday's fiasco, what with the snow, and our travel problems, today was a great day! We were picked up by a cab at 8:30 am, and had a nice trip to Canterbury (for $24.00!) The driver had been to Canada and was familiar with a lot of BC. He told us that the taxis in Canterbury overcharged tourists, especially on Sundays. In hindsight, we would have been better off calling them to come get us yesterday.

We were at the rental place by 9:00 am, and processed all the paperwork. The car is very nice, although not a match to our Accord. It has no GPS so the portable one I brought from home was very useful.

Our first destination was Canterbury Cathedral, but we had no street address to input into our GPS. We could have put in the name of the place and the GPS would find it, but we didn't find that out until our next destination.



Once we found a place to park the car, we walked into the walled city and wandered the narrow crowded streets until we came to the cathedral entrance. When we walked into the church we immediately stepped into the gothic time period, depicted by the archways in the nave. Further down, we entered the Norman era in the quire and finally in the crypt, the oldest part of the church, we found the Saxon influence. The church itself was not nearly as glittery as some others we have seen, but it was very peaceful. We had lunch in a small pub on the way back to the car, where the service was great and the food was cheap.



Now comes the fun part. We entered "Leeds Castle" into the GPS, and it found the address, generated a route and took us right to it. For Jan it was much more than she expected. It was picture card perfect. At the car park we met a guy who was born in Canada, but has lived most of his life in England. He was recently in BC, knew Vancouver, Penticton, Prince George, and Williams Lake. He shared with us where we should go to eat near the castle and also near our hotel. Here is a selection of some pictures.



This is the entrance to Leeds Castle, and the Castle itself. It is one of the few fully-moated castles. It was voted one of the most beautiful castles in the world. The last owner, Lady Baillie was very much into wildlife and nature, and birds in particular.



The black swans were brought to Leeds castle and are now synonymous with Leeds Castle.

When we left, we decided to follow the directions we were given, to the pub for dinner, however, when we arrived we found that they had a private function going on. We decided to go the the town close to the hotel, and let the GPS guide us. Consider our surprise when it told us to turn onto this little 'track' that was like a driveway, wide enough maybe for my little car, that we had to follow, weaving here and there for miles before we found a major roadway.



Fortunately, my surprise was somewhat alleviated when I looked into my mirror and found another car following us. Obviously the GPS knew where it was taking us. And we did not meet any traffic head-on. LOL