A quick Gloucester day trip from London
After the conference concluded around 5:15 pm, I hurried to London’s Victoria Coach station to catch the bus to Gloucester. This south English city is probably not high on most travelers’ lists, especially those visiting the UK for the first time and only for 4 days (with 2 days attending conference full-day). But I was going there to visit an important friend, as well as fragments of a memory more than a decade ago.
According to my initial calculation, it should be feasible to walk all the way from the Royal Society to Victoria Station, while getting some good shots of the Buckingham Palace along the way. I was greedy enough to even plan on a detour to check Westminster and the Big Ben. Bad idea indeed.
But as I walked pass the park, I quickly realized how stupid this plan was. I arrived at Westminster church, appreciated the architecture for 10 seconds, took a good shot and ran. I also saw the Westminster Parliament building, the one V the vendetta blew up. However what I saw was actually a closed gate, nowhere close to the photo I took via a small hole on the gate here.
Running in Westminster station to find the right platform, squeezing through the crowds to board a train, when I finally arrived at Victoria Station, I realized the Coach Station wasn’t right there. So another sprint underneath the lovely London sky.
Barely made it to the coach station 10 minutes before my bus departed. The National Express bus was a lot cheaper than the train, and taking long-haul buses in foreign countries always gave me the badly-needed adrenaline in my travels.
The bus left London at 6pm and arrived at Gloucester at 9:15pm. Evelyn was waiting for me at the station, looking much more mature and having picked up an authentic British accent. Many things had changed, but some remained the same.
The night was spent in this nice classic pub next to the station. It’s a fabulous place to sit down and have deep conversations, instead of the American ones with only loud music and loud people.
One decade was enough to transform us from naive teens to adolescence with early mid-life crisis. Ten years of lives were squeezed into a three-hour talk that passed too quickly. The next morning I realized I left my earphone in the pub, and it was nowhere to be found. But the reunion, of course, was well worth it.
The next morning, while Evelyn headed to work, I walked around in downtown Gloucester by myself.
The architecture, the drizzle, the gloomy sky and the falling leaves all reminded me of New England. I guess there were some clues — cars driving in the left, the middle white lines (US always use middle yellow lines), the yellow rear license plates, and perhaps most important of which, a sense of compactness — American towns would be much more spread out.
Entering a mall in Gloucester waterfront, likely the biggest shopping center in Gloucester. Few people were shopping, understandably, on a Wednesday morning in this quiet little town.
Gloucester rugby — the most important professional sports team in town.
The historic Gloucester dock. Located by a canal, Gloucester was once an important hub for timber trade in the early 19th century. A number of huge warehouses could still be seen stand by the river, one of which had become the National Waterways Museum.
I grabbed some British breakfast at another pub by the dock. The pub had similar vibe with the one we went last night — soft music, strong tea, even some slot machines.
The hustle and bustle was left in the previous century, but Gloucester’s maritime history remained.
Interestingly, on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, another Gloucester exists, a fishing port in northern Massachusetts with the motto of “America’s oldest seaport.” The two Gloucesters seemed to share the fate of maritime ports by coincidence.
Walking back from the dock to the bus station, I realized this was Gloucester’s main road with all the stores, markets and restaurants. The other one I walked earlier was mainly residential. I had to visit the famous Gloucester Cathedral on my way back. But my first attempt was unsuccessful — lady inside this cathedral told me this was not the “famous one” and pointed me the way (a bit of detour was needed).
Statue of the Roman emperor Nerva stood in the middle of the main road — something a visitor to England wouldn’t have expected to see. Colonia Nervia Glevensium, what Gloucester was called back then, was established by Nerva as one of the empire’s front line fortresses during the British campaign.
Since I was so shocked by London’s exorbitant prices, I walked around to check out prices of several restaurants in Gloucester — turned out it wasn’t as bad, certainly cheaper than the Bay Area (considering tips are included, it actually is even cheaper). I also saw advertisements from real estate agents earlier by the dock — the cheapest housing unit only cost around 100 thousand grands. This seems like quite an affordable price.
The Gloucester Cathedral, arguably the biggest attraction of the town, was truly magnificent. A quick search tells that an Anglo-Saxon king was buried at this very site. I didn’t expect seeing such impressive architecture in a random town in England — no London, no Edinburgh, but a non-touristy town, architecture that had witnessed more than a thousand years of rise and fall. In fact this cathedral also had been used as filming location in one of the Harry Porter movies.
I met Evelyn again in the hospital she worked to have lunch together before my departure. The hospital complex covered a wide area, which I easily got lost within, and needed to request her to rescue me from some kind of dumpster area.
The hospital cafeteria offered very cheap food (around 2–3 pounds), much cheaper and tastier than those in Stanford Hospital.
“So how was Gloucester?”
“I already like it better than Palo Alto!”
Waving farewell to Evelyn, we wished each other best of luck in overcoming our ongoing challenges, and hoped to see each other again in less than 11 years. I headed back to Heathrow Airport by the National Express bus to end my 4-day trip in the UK. The ride was far from a smooth one, as the bus stopped abruptly multiple times and made me very dizzy. I’m no stranger to long-haul bus rides in the US, but I succumbed to carsick this time, and exhaustion, sleep deprivation and coldness certainly didn’t help.
Finally arriving in Heathrow, I felt even more tired thinking about the overnight red-eye flight I was about to board. What kind of trouble have I got myself into?
