We of course had the worst time of mooring over the whole two days, trying to get it to the dock of the marina at the end of the trip. Almost put Darlene in the brink, and managed to totally blow it as far as my skipper credibility is concerned...sigh.
The folks at the marina seemed to be quite inattentive and not helpful, different from all the other folks we had met so far who went out of their ways to help. So we were not unhappy to get a cab back to the Gobowen train station, then a short twenty-minute ride to Shrewsbury. On the train we met a man in his late sixties who had just completed a 14-day walk along the Offas Dyke, for which he was justly proud.
Why Shrewsbury, you might ask? Well, it is a town with many virtues. Charles Darwin was born and bred here. There is a history and architecture going back to the Elizabethan times, with buildings of the timber and stucco variety all over, some of them quite askew. It is imminently walkable, and so far a real pleasure to do. And we will catch, in a few days, a train back into Wales, to Swansea and the Mumbles (so named because a French soldier thought the hills looked like boobs and called them the mamelles.
We went to the Tourist Bureau to get our accommodation worked out. The trip there was one of those up-hill-down-hill-all-about-the-town trips, dragging our bags behind us. But we were rewarded with a very pleasant lady at the Bureau who got us a good price (for England) on a room at the Prince Rupert Hotel, right in the centre of the oldest part of Shrewsbury. This hotel, it turns out, goes back almost 900 years, with the original part inside the current hotel and still having its rooms rented: we explored that part, with stairs and walls at all angles, and a sense of a ghost lurking somewhere. We walked out and around the streets, each with their own curves and hills, described in our book as a spaghetti structure, which I think is apt. Lots of houses from Tudor times, as well as Elizabethan and Georgian times. Also buildings into the 20th Century, and clearly a working town. We fell in love with it at once, and decided to stay an extra day.
Lunch at Cromwells, more walking, including a visit to the Dingle (a wonderful formal gardens), then time for a pint, which we got at The Three Fishes, a traditional pub. An excellent supper at a pub called The Golden Cross, one of the oldest in Britain (licensed for 600 years), and a talk with Gareth, the owner, who proudly showed off his rooms upstairs, decorated like a bordello, but wonderful in their excessiveness and their history.
The next morning was slow to get going, but we managed to get out of the hotel in time to catch a walking tour, presented by a former cop, of the town and some of its history. We decided to have supper at the Drapers Hall ("drapers" are wool merchants, interesting in part because Darlene's grandfather Izatt was a draper), again a very old building.
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