You probably have a list like mine, the one on which you keep all the things you want to do in your life? Well, today we checked one off of my list--visit Sherwood Forest in the springtime. I can hear the loud, cosmic chalk scraping a check onto my list.
To tell you the truth, Sherwood Forest and the whole Robin Hood side of Nottingham is a bit cheesy (okay, a lot cheesy), which should come as no surprise. We felt a bit out of place, being the only adults there without children running around in green felt hats with cheap longbows. But it was a fun kind of cheesy. The legend of Robin Hood is one of my favorite things, and I have always wanted to visit the greenwood when things were bursting to life in the spring.
So here we are.
We took a train up this morning, tooled around Nottingham trying to find the visitor's centre, and eventually convinced the fellow at the information desk that yes, we did want to spend most of our limited time in his town riding a bus 50 minutes each way to see what was left of the famous forest. Today was the first really cloudy
day of our visit, but still no rain (!!! You have to realize that when I lived in England for 3 months it was the rainiest period in the last 100 years of British history. No rain is a spectacular thing to me.), so we charted our way through the path and to the visitor's center. We laughed a lot. Mostly at my insane desire to visit Sherwood Forest in the springtime.
It was colder in Nottingham than in London, so there wasn't as much green on the trees as I'd imagined, but it was still great, cheesy fun. You'll see us here in front of the "Major Oak," which is somewhere between 500 and 1000 years old (and obviously too ancient to hold up its own branches). Legend has it that the merry men used the Oak as a meeting place. We also visited St. Mary's church, which is also going on 1000 years old, the reputed site of the wedding of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. And we bought Cole a few things that he will enjoy in about three years.
Most importantly, we stood in the middle of Sherwood Forest and frolicked (in our imaginations--okay, MY imagination). Chhhheck!
The whole trip really was an adventure. I'm not sure if you've searched for Robin Hood visits on the internet, but they are pretty well hidden, so we weren't able to plan our trip very well (not a good place for Jason to be). All went relatively smoothly until we took the advice of the lady at the visitor's centre and decided to catch the bus back to Nottingham at the closer bus stop. After over an hour and an international phone call to the bus company, we finally followed our gut and walked back to the bus stop at which we'd dropped off, half a mile away, and caught the next bus in 15 minutes. Running late now, we literally ran through Nottingham for a quick photo at the castle and the statue (read more about the statue in the flickr comment), and jumped onto the London-bound bus.
We had a late and delicious Asian-fusion dinner with Jimmy and Kayrn, who graciously let us stay at their place this weekend while they were on holiday in Spain. It was so lovely of them and delightful to have our own place to come home to at night! We watched the highlights of the English football matches tonight, and now Jason is soundly sleeping. I think that sprint through Nottingham really wore him out!
* A lovely little weekend jaunt up to Boston to surprise Kim (who just finished her PhD) and Patrick (who is celebrating an important anniversary of his 29th birthday). On Saturday night we took the T downtown into the North End, where the Italian festival was alive and well. Delicious Italian food, street fair fun, and, of course, a stop in at Mike's Pastry made for a really fun night. But Marbs, we missed you!
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