Day 12: The Workhouse: Living on the Streets Might Be a Better Choice

RANDOMOSITIES

Getting from point A to point B requires a lot of zigzagging from road to road, unlike at home, hopping on I35 and driving straight from Minnesota to Texas.

It's so weird to be driving along la-de-da-de-dah and blammo! There's a castle.

Note to self: find out what the heck a verge is. Apparently there are soft ones on the road we travelled.

A 32 oz. bottle of water at the beginning of a 4 hour trip is a bad idea. There are no rest stops in this country. Instead, there's a thing called a Lay By, which is really just a place for 3 or 4 cars to pull over and park. Sometimes there's a food cart parked there for snacks, but no bathrooms.

Seriously . . .  could road signs get any smaller? Isn't the point for drivers to be able to actually see them?

I have seen zero school buses. Parents walk their kids to school. Imagine. No, not the junior or senior highers. They walk in herds or take the city bus.

I love how the all the horse trailers are marked with the word "Horses" . . . as if a passerby might get confused and think that elephants were being transported to and fro.

TIMELINE

8:30-10:00 Take a last stroll on the wall around York and grab breakfast at a bike/coffee shop (which felt a lot like home).

10-2:00 Long drive to Gressenhall Farm and Workhouse.

2-5:00 Tour the workhouse and farm.

5:00 Drive to Ipswich to find our lodging for the night - not an Air BnB this time. A "for real" hotel.

7:30 Dinner at a cute little pub called The Beagle. The construction timbers are so old that there are worm holes in them.

THOUGHTS

Welfare has been around for a long time. Gressenhall Workhouse was built in 1777 as a means to provide a place for the poor to stay until they found work. The thing is, though, that if you were able to find work, you would've already found it. So mostly it was a huge warehouse of ill, old, unwed mothers, or unwanted kids. Sure, it provided a roof and a meager amount of bread, cheese and ale, but your freedom was limited. You became a number in the system, and your life was pretty much dictated by the whims of the guardian of the workhouse. Gressenhall was one of the better ones, but still, it was no Hilton.

As we walked around the farm, I was struck by how much alike England and Minnesota are (in the summer, of course). It was like taking a walk at home. Am I disappointed? Nope. Not at all. It will make it easier to write scenes more realistically.

Question: Do people over here not wash their faces? No, this isn't a commentary on the state of the great unwashed. I'm simply wondering where in the world all the washcloths are? I thought maybe it was an oversight on the part of all the Air BnBs we've been staying at, but this is the second hotel we've been in with nary a washcloth in sight. That's what I use to wash my face. Am I a freak or what?

I've also discovered that perhaps our great dessert debacle of a few evenings ago had to do with a miscommunication problem. Sheesh. I speak English, only English, come to think of it, but some of the words have completely different meanings over here. Apparently I should've been looking for puddings. When I think pudding, I think custardy goodness that goes into a pie filling, not as a catch-all phrase for dessert. My prize for figuring this out was a fantastic warm and gooey brownie with ice cream on top.