Day tripper… part 1… (or); chasing the Beatles…

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My daughter, my wife and I took a day trip from Leyland to Liverpool. This was one of Mollie’s big dreams for her first trip to Europe, to see where the Beatles grew up and the famous Beatles museum there.

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As you can see from this handy map which I have thoughtfully included, Liverpool is not all that far from Leyland and cousin Dot’s house.

a 2I must admit that the museum was pretty awesome. We learned lots of interesting things, like the fact that the city of Liverpool now paints the name Penny Lane on walls on Penny Lane because if they put up signs, the fans just steal them.

a 3There is a recreation of some room where John Lennon wrote some songs, but the guitar and or the piano might actually have been his.

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That is George Harrison’s first guitar.

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And there is a full-scale recreation of the Cavern Club, one of their early venues.

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This was where they honed their sound and met their future manager, Brian Epstein.

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That is Mollie doing the Vanna White hands to a famous Beatles poster. Unfortunately I had to cut the rest of her out because of security regulations laid down by my wife.

a 8If you ever wondered who all those people are…

a 9I hope you return later for some more of our adventures in Liverpool. What, you know I turn every day into an adventure, right?

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The real England… part 5… (or); A really big fuss over a really small horse…

Towards the end of that fabulous day in the English countryside with our cousin Dot, where I had shared an early morning walk with my daughter, we had visited deceased relatives, and a weird house built in the freekin’ 1300’s, we went out to dinner with a few other relatives of the non-deceased variety.

During this lovely meal, one of my distant kin asked me what else I really wanted to see during our time in Great Britain. Hey, you know me. I am all about the babies, dogs and horses. I had met dogs and babies.. but no horses…

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Well, the relatives all tried their best to figure out where I could met a proper English horse, and they all figured the best chance, without driving for miles and miles, would be out in the pasture lands located conveniently on the other side of a popular ice cream place. This allowed me to sweet talk my wife into letting me wander off to meet a horse while they all took care of their dessert needs.

a 2I strolled down a hill and over a bridge above a canal. See that canal boat up there? Look to the left, between those two big trees, and past those white flowers… which turned out to be stinging nettles, by the way… and you will see a little field behind a fence. That is where I would meet my new little friend… and a bunch of those stinging nettles… after I hiked way the hell past this point…

a 3And past a bunch of sheep… one of whom, a baby, had crawled under the fence and me and a nice English couple had to herd him back to his mommy…

a 4And then I looked back… and hey… that looks like a horse… right back where I was ten minutes ago… but I was on an adventure now and was sure I could find a whole herd of horses to meet…

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But after climbing a fence or two… I mean, not trespassing, there were these steps built over the fences for people… but then again, maybe I was because who knows how that works in the United Kingdom… But I was suddenly in an open field with a bunch of cows… and not a horse in sight…

a 6So I went all the way back, over the fences, down the hill, over that bridge, along the canal…

a 7And met this little guy… and what is more English than a Shetland pony? (Okay, technically, the Shetland islands are part of Scotland, but I am Scottish Lord after all)… so…

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A story… about a guy… with some pictures thrown in…

Once there was a guy who had a dream, a dream of conquering the world… with nothing more dangerous than a silly blog…

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He was sure that people would follow him…

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But he began to have doubts. What if his head was just swollen with false pride?

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All of his illusions began to shatter…

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He felt like he was just a clown…

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His world felt like it was falling to pieces…

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He felt like small change…

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He just wanted to give the gift of laughter to the people!

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He pulled himself together and stepped away from the dark side of his own mind…

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I am the best, he told himself…

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I am not just an ornament…

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I am a hero, the stuff of legends…

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I have value…

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And he suddenly realized that he didn’t suck…

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People liked him…

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They really liked him…

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I mean, they really liked him a lot…

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And he knew that people would keep a bit of him with them forever…

a 1 a 75He knew that he had the right stuff…

a 1 a 79And he was sure that if he could just draw enough people in…

a 1 a 77 If he could just get the people on board…

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That his flame would burn brightly…

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And the world would be his…

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Okay, you have probably figured out by now that this posts is not really a short story at all. No, it is just a clever way to use up more of the old pieces of art with pieces of Art… me… in them from all my old posts. I am still going through them all to organize them. But I finally figured out that you were all getting sick of my silly ‘name that piece of Art’ series where I thinly disguised the pictures as a ‘come up with a clever name’ contest.

Anyway, it was fun to see if I could come up with a story to link together a whole bunch of pictures from a whole bunch of posts that originally had absolutely nothing to do with each other.

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The real England… part 4… (or); Well, it ain’t exactly Downton Abbey, but…

After our trip to the cemetery to visit a bunch of our no-longer-amongst-the-living relatives, our cousin took us to what they call in England a ‘stately home’. This term generally refers to huge estates and mansions, but it also includes historic places such as this wonderful dwelling… which, technically was a huge estate and mansion back in its day, so never mind…

a 1I know, it is hard to wrap your head around what you are seeing. This is partly because the photos don’t do it justice, partly because of the unusual architectural style, and partly because you are not used to seeing buildings from this part of history.

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We are used to modern buildings, and we are used to really old buildings, usually found surrounded by ruins and often in ruins themselves. For some reason, building from ancient times, those in Italy and Greece for example, do not seem that outlandish to us. I think this is because so many of our modern buildings… almost all the government buildings to use an example… are done in the classic Greek style. Big columns on huge, white edifices do not shock us. This building is from that strange time between the ancient and modern eras…

a 3I think it is done in the Tudor style, but you would have to Google Samlesbury Hall. I just went there. I didn’t memorize every plaque and sign… (ironically, I had to Google ‘plaque’ to make sure that was the right word for those little signs that tell you about historic places and not just that stuff that grows on your teeth… ha)…

a 4It really was awesome. I am not going to show every picture of the rose garden, the extensive grounds covered with lush greenery, the little goat farm or us eating ice cream on a bench in the courtyard…

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If I showed you every picture of our trip, you would all leave. But look at that piano in an alcove surrounded by old stained glass windows…

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I guess what I try to do is give you a taste, a feel, for the places I have been lucky enough to go.

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That is really the best I can do, to make you want to go to some of these places.

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While the rest of us walked around, my mom managed to find a chair that befits her status… HA!

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The real England… part 3… (or); I see dead people…

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Well, we have reached the 6th day of our fabulous trip to Europe. I took Mollie on one of my patented early morning adventure walks. We set out from cousin Dot’s house at the crack of dawn, and soon found the old village church. We are still in the town of Leyland in Lancashire, Northwest of London. I will post another map later.

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We saw other interesting things on our adventure walk, my daughter and I, but most of the pictures either have her in them, which I am not supposed to share, or just aren’t all that exciting.

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But there is something awesome about an old English church in an old English town, especially on an overcast morning. There were some really old headstones in that cemetery. You can’t help but think of all those families, going to this church for generations, living long and short lives and then ending up right back at the church where they had been christened and baptized and probably married as well… talk about the circle of life.

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Also, that church and its attendant burial ground leads us neatly to this church, which we visited later on the way to another adventure. Dot took us to this church to see this headstone…

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This is a little confusing, but that is a big piece of our family history, way back before some of us moved to America and somehow ended up with the ‘E’ on the end of our last name. George and Cicely are my dad’s grandparents. So Tom was my great-uncle… I guess… except for the fact that I was adopted… but other than that, this where I come from.

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So that church played a huge role in my family’s history.

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There is my mom and aunt Dot… who, I may have forgotten to mention is also our cousin Lynne’s mom, and Josh’s grandmother, if you remember them from our time in London… posing with this remarkable headstone.

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Is it weird to pose around a headstone?

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That one is a bunch of other cousins, and later on, Mollie, with the help of my mom and Dot, recreated our entire family tree… which I probably won’t bore you with… but who knows.

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Donald Trump is being a Dick…

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Did you even notice that isn’t a picture of Donald Trump? No, you didn’t, because all you saw was the hair. That is actually a picture of Dick Cheney with Donald Trump’s hair stuck on him. So my title doesn’t force me to give up my G-rating and more-or-less-family-friendly vibe. But I would like to point out that if Donald Trump is ever elected as President, he will make that Dick up there look like Santa Claus… no… not literally… I mean Trump would be way more evil than… what? NO! I am not going to Photoshop Dick Cheney and Santa Claus together… that would be wrong… well… let me think about it… because it might be pretty funny… I did do that series about Conan the barbarian coming to my house at Christmas and that turned out… ahhh… stupid crack squirrels in my head… stop getting distracted by shiny things!

The only good thing about Donald Trump is his hair. It is so distinctive that you can stick it on anything and it makes it funny…

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Okay… that is funny and a little scary…

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Squirrels… don’t make me come up there…

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Okay, that’s better… I don’t like the way the top of his hairdo is cut off… that is just sloppy Photoshop work… what do I pay you for… oh, right, I don’t.

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An apple? Really? That is just silly… yes… I did notice that it was a sour green apple… very clever…

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Let’s just stop now… but that one is pretty cute.

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The real England… part 2… (or); trains, old trucks, and where the Pope sat…

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There is my mom at the Preston train station. Preston isn’t actually the closest town to where our cousin Dot lives, but it is closest to the rental car place…

a 1It was awesome to get out of London and into the country.

a 2Traveling by train is always exciting.

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I guess I am sharing the pictures of the station because it made me feel like I was in a Harry Potter movie.

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As soon as we dropped our bags off at Dot’s house, she took us to this place… Leyland used to be the home of a huge factory that made vehicles. Dot’s friend works at the museum in town. He took us on a free tour, even though it was closed, and we had the whole place to ourselves.

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It was really fun, even if you aren’t excited about vehicles.

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We got to climb all over and inside of these things. That is an actual Pope-mobile. Mollie and my wife sat where a Pope once sat. Now that is living history.

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The older the vehicles were, the more I liked them. That bus is a work of art.

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Remember when milk came to your house? I mean, I don’t… I’m not that old… but still…

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That fire engine was damaged by fragments of German bombs during the blitz.

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And look at the detailing.

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They just don’t make stuff like that anymore.

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Now we are all the way back in World War One.

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We are like Time Lords!

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Okay, that might be the most British sign ever…

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Oh… whoops… did you notice that I just accidentally posted a photo of Mollie… which I am not supposed to do… but it does give you a scale to compare the size of that thing… so… shhhhhhh…

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And that is what buses looked like when they were still pulled by horses.

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If you are interested, you can always Google Leyland Motors… or Leyland… just sayin’…

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Words for a friend… (or); does this ever happen to you???

Have you ever reached into your washing machine and grabbed a handful of clothes to pull out and stuff into the dryer only to have the clothes stop in midair as if they are terrified to leave the dark comfort of the machine, and you can’t for the life of you figure out what the heck is going on, and you are reasonably certain that there is some mysterious force involved…  some cosmic event that is transpiring… that maybe the bottom of your washing machine is connected to a black hole and the other end of that handful of damp clothes is now being chewed on by some fantastic alien on a planet on the other side of the universe… or maybe in another universe all together… and then you realize that the elastic on a pair of underwear is hooked on the bottom edge of one of those agitator things that help move your laundry around to get it clean?

I would like to dedicate this post to my friend, Nurse Kelly, at; http://nursekellyknows.com/   because she says I don’t do enough writing on my blog nowadays, what with me being all caught up with doing pictures of me… and pictures of our trip to Europe… and she likes when I write… and I do try to make this an interactive blog…

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Hey, wordpress, I hate to keep bugging you… but…

How come when I see my posts in your topic wall things… whatever you call the pages where our posts go when we tag them as ‘humor’ or ‘art’ or whatever… you can’t see the first photo from my post? I see other people’s photos. Why do you hate me, wordpress? I wrote that love poem to you. Is this still about that time I typed up a short paragraph that sounded like spam and then pasted it into hundreds of random blog comment boxes and your bots thought I really was spam and you kicked me off wordpress for 5 days while humans… I am assuming there really are humans who work at your offices and keep making all these changes we never asked for and most of us hate, and not just more advanced bots… tried to figure out I am a real human being… because I apologized for that spam joke and I thought we had moved past it?

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The real England… part 1…

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After our exciting three-or-so days in London, we left the big city for the rural countryside. I am not saying that London is not the real England too, but going there and only seeing London is like going to San Francisco or New York and saying you saw America. And, oh yeah… tea and scones!!!

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That is my mom gazing wistfully out of the train window as we journeyed through the farmlands of England.

a 3And there is my mom… on the right… talking to our cousin, Dot… on the left. Dot let us stay in her house in the little town of Leyland. The first picture… the one with the tea and the scone… is a picture out her front window. We stayed with Dot for three magical days.

a 4And we did some awesome things. This picture of Dot, once again on the left, and my mom, will make more sense after the next post.

a 5That is Dot’s garden. I think you get to know a place when you smell the flowers and the grass and the trees, when you feel the soil and walk the neighborhoods that most tourists never see. Don’t just meet people who work in the tourist industry. Get out and meet people from all walks of life.

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It is by using all your senses that a new place comes alive. I never feel like I know a country at all until I meet some people from small towns and villages, and walk in the woods, and pet some animals and make some babies smile… but maybe that’s just me.

a 7This is the real England. It isn’t the seat of government. It isn’t where history is made, but it is where history happens. It is where life happens.

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Look at Mollie, reading the British paper in a British house in a British town in the country, learning about the world… sniff…

a 9I stood in the garden feeling the mist land on my cheeks, I smelled the flowers, touched the soil, listened to the birds and the sounds of playing children. And I felt that I got to know England in a true and meaningful way.

a 10There is my mom, enjoying a quiet moment in Dot’s living room. I am strangely moved to be sharing these pictures with you, I must admit.

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