Travels Before I Met Katherine

Before I encountered the successfully surviving Katherine Parr, I had spent several days as an American abroad seeing the English town and country. My parents accompanied me for the first ten days of my trip and the three of us did some sightseeing before I was off to Oxford for research. This blog entry mostly documents a few of the sights we took in together before Katherine and I hit upon the brilliant idea of documenting her survival. So, if you are only interested in following Katherine's travels and have no other interest in this blogger's tourist activities, then you are forewarned to skip this entry and move on to the next one.


First of all we spent five days in the beautiful and exciting city of London. The picture above shows two famous features of that city: the tower at parliament commonly known as "Big Ben" (though apparently "Big Ben" is technically the name of the bell inside the tower) and the London eye.The clock around Big Ben is shown again, slightly larger, below.


Below is a snap of Trafalgar square, another famous spot in London Town:



Me hanging out with one of the Trafalgar lions:



The Tower Bridge:



St. Paul's Cathedral:



The Royal Horse Guards:



Also while in London my Mum and I went out to a champagne tea at the elegant Dorchester Hotel. High tea at its height:





After our stay in London, the folks and I continued our sightseeing in the countryside, where my intrepid father learned how to drive on the left side of the road and we all enjoyed taking in the sight of beautiful rolling green hills and a few ancient monuments. September being a good month for apples, there were plenty to be had, and fortunately there were many convenient spots to set them down on:



Unfortunately some of the fruit was so large that it was almost too much for local monuments to bear:



Right near Stonehenge is the idyllic Cathedral town of Salisbury, where we found these lovely sheep grazing as though they had just stepped out of a Constable painting:



Here is the Tudor Hotel, "The Rose and Crown" where I once stayed for a night with my grandmother years ago, and where we had a lovely lunch:



And here is the view of the river from The Rose and Crown, taken out the window whilst dining:





Here I am with the spire of Salisbury Cathedral in the background:



And these are a few pictures of the Cathedral itself, which is charmingly stony and Gothic without and is very beautiful and full of light within:










NEXT TIME: Katherine and I meet up in Bath!

Katherine Parr History Fun Fact: Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church in order to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.

Katherine Who? What?

I imagine there are two groups of people who will find themselves at this page: those whom the author has directed here and thus have some idea of what is going on, and those who have ended up here after a particularly eccentric and long ranging wave somehow carried them all the way to these shores during a session of internet surfing. For those in either group the first question may well be: who in heaven's name is Katherine Parr and why is she the subject of a blog? To answer the first part of this question, Katherine Parr was the sixth and last wife of king Henry VIII of England. One of her great achievements was outliving Henry who, some will recall from their history lessons, went through 6 wives in total and beheaded a few along the way. As to the second part of your question--why is KP the subject of a blog?--I am tempted to respond by simply saying, why wouldn't Katherine Parr, fascinating person that she was, be the subject of a blog? If one must have a reason, however, then I shall tell you how I, a humble graduate student of Renaissance poetry on a two month research trip to England, have recently discovered that Katherine not only survived her husband but survived to the present day. The purpose of this blog is to document how both she and I have survived on our travels through England. Enjoy!

Katherine Parr History Fun Fact: Henry VIII had 6 wives who all met various fates. The easy way to remember what happened to each of them is by reciting: "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived." Our friend Katherine Parr was the lucky sixth one who survived.