Dover

[Whoa! First, everybody head over to Hoss's place and say congratulations on his main squeeze new wife!]

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Here are the famed White Cliffs of Dover. The castle on top was frequented by Winston Churchill during the war, where he would strategize with his advisors and peer across the channel through binoculars. The coast of France is just 18 miles away.

As an aside, I have often wondered how it is that English cuisine (how is that for an oxymoron?) is so awful, yet the best cooking in the western world is just across the channel. How did that happen? Anyway, back to Dover ...

The beach is not sandy, but heavily pebbled. It's very difficult to walk on, and the guide told us that if it weren't for the heat that day, very few people would have been out. She also said it was good luck to take a pebble from Dover home, so that's what we did.

Speaking of our guide, I should have mentioned yesterday in my post about Leeds Castle that she was Scottish, so there was a language barrier. She said that inside the Castle, we would occasionally see a gate in front of a room. The presence of the gate meant that we could not enter the room, BUT it was perfectly all right to ASK the gate to tell us about it. ??? After a moment or two, we realized that she was talking about a "guide," not a "gate." :)