I looked for the chalky cliffs

On the last day of our trip we started out with one last walk around Bristol.  We went hunting for pictures of Banksey, who's this unknown artist that apparently travels all over England (originating in Bristol and doing lots of pictures in London) and he paints on the side of random buildings, boats, and other old structures.  So essentially it's graffiti and most of it is quite strongly political, but it's so good that they never paint it over and instead work at preserving it.  The art just sort of magically appears in the night as well, which is why they don't know who Banksey is.  Yeah, so that was cool.

We checked out of our hostel and headed off to Wells.  There was a little confusion concerning the difference between Wells and Wales.  So just to get that out of the way, Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom (and has a dragon on its flag making it the coolest flag ever) while Wells is a small cathedral town (town that came into being because of the cathedral) in Somerset (that's a county), England.

So.  Wells.  At first I was thinking oh great, ANOTHER cathedral.  I forgot to mention this, but after Banksey a couple of us stopped off at the cathedral in Bristol to see what that was like.  Somebody said Queen Victoria said something about how pretty is was or something, so we took a look at it.  So the whole Wells cathedral thing was the second that day.  And so we walk in and I'm trying to be positive and interested.  But THEN . . .

I saw this clock.  

And you're all thinking, yeah, neat, so what?  Well, first of all this is the second oldest working clock in the world.  It's been running for over 600 years, which is totally insane.  It's the oldest working clock with the original dials, so you could say that it's the oldest working complete clock.  But the best part is what happens every quarter of an hour.  You can't really see in this picture, but on the platform above the clock are little wooden knights on horseback.  When the quarter hour hits, the little horses go around in circles and the knights joust.  One of them gets knocked backwards every time they go around, and then pops up as they circle behind so that he can be knocked off again.  He's been getting knocked off his horse every quarter hour for 600 years.  I can't help but fear for what that's doing for his self-esteem.  It was so cool that I watched it twice.

Yeah, so then we did our typical walk around the city, until just as we were leaving our professor's wife called us all to go look at this cute little street that seems to have been stuck in the Medieval Times.  It was pretty neat, but the best part was the sign that I found on the way back.

Can you see the name on it?  William Turner.

Yes, this was a Pirates moment.  Forget the Father of English Botany, William Turner's from Pirates of the Caribbean  and that's really all that matters.  It basically made this town just that much better.  

After Wells we drove down to the coast and visited Durdle Door beach.  It kind of reminded me of going to the beach at Tahoe because it was rather cold and exceedingly windy and the beach was all rocky, although the predominate color of rock was brown.  It was pretty cold, so when we got to the actual beach I didn't really want to sit there that long.  It was the sort of beach that made brooding very easy, but boy was it beautiful.  In order to actually get down to the beach we had to walk up and over this really tall and rather steep hill and then back down to the beach (the second slope was much more gradual).  I was reminded that it's been quite a few years since I've quit pointe, which means that my legs don't get the good workout that they used to all the time.  

Not the best picture of me, but you can kind of see the cliffs behind me.

This is a better picture of the cliffs.  They're white and chalky, you see?

It was a nice experience and a pretty decent beach.  I didn't put my feet in the water (sorry folks) because it was cold and I also didn't really want to get dirt and rocks and dust all over my feet because I wasn't really wearing the proper shoes for it.  I've been in the ocean before, unlike many of the people in our group, so it wasn't that big of a deal for me.  I mostly liked looking at the cliffs and the water meeting the sky and pondering.  I took a lot of pictures of the water actually.

And that concludes my trip to the west.  We headed back to London that night, and that's where we've been ever since.  Saturday was the National Portrait Gallery (see a few posts back) and you'll just have to wait to hear about Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.