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  • Day 30

    Bristol Fashion

    September 25, 2022 in England ⋅ ⛅ 12 °C

    Day 30 of this bizarre Odyssey. Who knows what's going on back in Ithaca. I'm sure Penelope and Telemachus have everything in hand.

    Today was another day of weird delays and detours. There's nothing to do at this point but to lean into it, and to see every plan of action as a mere prayer to some foreign and capricious god.

    Our plan was to head out to the Clifton Suspension Bridge at 8am, then have a coffee in Clifton, come home and rest, and I would go for a massage on my legs for which I've been taking pain pills.

    What happened instead was we went for coffee at Caffe Nero, took an hour to get the bus to Clifton (our tickets didn't even work), ended up spending an inordinate amount of time at the Visitor's Centre (the charming woman there wanted to give us a free TED talk on the fate of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but it was pretty cool I will admit), then after coffee we got stuck in a traffic jam on the way home because of the Great Bristol Run. At home, we had to change hotel rooms because the toilet wouldn't flush (right when flushing was R E Q U I R E D [I said "Abandon Shit" and Stu said "Shit shape and Bristol Fashion."]) and then we ended up walking to a super scruffy part of Bristol, me holding onto a failing bag of laundry like a body bag (we lost a sock, and then picked it out of the gutter on the way home), and then FINALLY, I went for my massage and the guy used a massage gun and wouldn't stop telling me conspiracy theories.

    But you know what? Today was GREAT. Coffee at Bar Chocolat in Clifton was beautiful, and the bus ride was fun. We saw SO many great buildings we would never have noticed driving around. The suspension bridge was astonishing, and I loved seeing the rejected designs at the Visitor's Centre, especially a gaudy Victorian gothic style design by the Colossus of Roads, Thomas Telford. I K Brunel's Egyptian styled suspension design is peerless, and in real life, it takes your breath away.

    I got to see two parts of Bristol that tourists wouldn't normally see, a Redcliffe Council Estate and the St Judes market: so much poverty, so much struggle, so much ugliness, and so much camaraderie and nobility.

    And after it all, Stu and I went to The Wellhead and recited the rivers we had now seen:

    The River Thames
    The River Tillingbourne
    The Trent
    The Foss
    The Ouse
    The Tyne
    The Tweed
    The Waters of Leith
    The Clyde
    The Tay
    The River Ness
    and now
    The River Avon.

    Bristol is a jewel of a place. I'm having a great time. And I have a working toilet too.
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