England #5 - A Day in Glastonbury; Ancient Isle of Avalon in The England Chronicles - September 2024

(Tuesday, September 10, 2024)

Day 3, and we are off to Glastonbury! 

I love Glastonbury  - we’ve gone there on three out of our four trips to England. We only missed the one when Baker B came with us, and that was because we were staying in Wiltshire the same week the Glastonbury Festival was happening. It’s a massive music festival that goes on for days in a muddy field outside town. I see PJ Harvey was there this summer! And Cyndi Lauper, and Coldplay, and…Squeeze? Why yes, it IS the same band who was around when I was in high school, which was quite a few years ago. And Judy Collins! Radiohead, my longtime fave, has been there many times, although not this year. There were also a whole bunch of people I’ve never heard of, but it is a really big deal that draws really big names involving pretty much every music genre apparently, along with ginormous crowds (210,000 in June 2024). All this to say that we didn’t go to Glastonbury that year because although we’d intended to go early in the week, like Monday, that was the trip when Kim lost her passport and we had to go back to London to get a replacement. By the time we could drive over to Glastonbury it was full of festival goers so sadly we skipped it. 

ANYHOW, my point is that I never tire of Glastonbury! It is a new-agey hippie town that reminds me very much of Asheville NC, where I grew up and where Kim still lives, and where we also plan to move back to at some point after I retire. Asheville is a lot bigger and has way more breweries (Beer City!) while Glastonbury is much much older and has scads of history involving King Arthur (maybe in reality, maybe not); a mysterious tower on top of the Tor that’s the remains of a church built in the 14th century and destroyed by Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries; ruins of a huge abby that was also a victim of Henry VIII; a magical Chalice Well, and all kinds of fascinating things. Both towns are full of arts and spiritual stuff and tarot readers and psychics and healers and fairies, and in many of my photos I’d be hard pressed to say whether it was Asheville or Glastonbury if I didn’t already  know which one it was. 

For example, this wizard. He was definitely in Glastonbury because he’s in front of the entrance to the Abby, but he would also be a perfectly normal sight in Asheville: 

Glastonbury was only an hour or so from our Airbnb. Naturally our GPS tried to route us down a B road instead of the A road that goes directly to Glastonbury because of course it did, but happily I did realise that was NOT RIGHT pretty quickly and we turned around and got back on the A road. But we did have gorgeous views where we turned around, which was quite exciting as we hadn’t really seen a ton of countryside yet, other than the drive from London to Bath which honestly is a bit of a blur now. 

When we arrived in lovely Glastonbury we went directly to a parking lot where we’d parked on the last trip that’s right in town and very convenient. It was full. We thought maybe we could park closer to the Tor, and headed to the other side of town. We followed public parking signs to a Tesco (I think it was Tesco)  but oddly (maybe not so odd…this IS me and Kim we’re talking about) we couldn’t figure out which of the parking spaces in their lot were for public use, ie not just for the grocery store. And it WAS clear that not all the parking was for non-grocery-shoppers. I think we did try the pay online parking there and it of course wouldn’t take a US phone number. It’s also a blur now! We ended up going to a nearby Costa to get some coffee and consider our options. That was when Kim abruptly morphed into her Problem Solving Work Persona, googled parking, found the Just Park app, and called them to find out how to sign up without a UK phone number. We were then able to reserve a great parking spot very close to the center of town, not very far away from where we were knocking back caffeine, and once we actually located it that was our parking issue sorted for the rest of the trip!

This was actually our first of two Glastonbury days. The second day- Friday -  we walked up the Tor and I went to the Abbey ruins while Kim had a really interesting session with a past life regression therapist, which I will say more about later. This first day we mostly walked around, shopped in the fun Glastonbury new agey shops, saw a little bit of a weekly market as most of the vendors were packing up, and soaked in the atmosphere. SO, lots of pictures!

This is the side road to our very convenient parking spot. It appeared to be parking for apartments but the Just Park app lets people rent out their parking spaces when they don’t need them. It was a very short walk to the high street, and also very reasonably priced. 

Some of these are different days. The first day was overcast and a little rainy, so obviously this was the second visit, which was sunnier. My pictures are SO mixed up - I used both my phone and my DLS camera, and for some reason they don’t agree timewise, so my uploads are just all over the place.  

There are so many fun little alleys in Glastonbury. This one has a tarot reader where Kim got a reading. She of course did not say a negative word about her reading, but I could tell she wasn’t really impressed. I think she found it a little lacking in depth. She’d meant to look around at some other options before picking one, but the tarot reader came out and chatted with us, and Kim ended up just booking an appointment with her because she is way too nice and is always afraid of hurting people’s feelings! I didn’t get one myself because why would I pay good money to a stranger when I can get one from Kim?? She’s an amazing reader and needs to be in business herself. (The picture below isn’t the one she went to.)

While Kim got her reading I walked around and took a zillion pictures, of course. 

 This is the George Hotel and Pilgrams’ Inn, built in the late 15th century for visitors to the Abbey. It’s ONE of the oldest inns in the southwest UK which just shows how many old inns there are in the UK! It is really gorgeous inside, with stained glass windows in the pub area looking out on the street. We tried to get dinner there but sadly they had a very limited menu- I think it was just one thing but forget what -  and no vegetarian/pescatarian option. I had a beer there on Second Glastonbury Day though, and we ate dinner there that night. 

Oddly we really couldn’t find anywhere to eat  - everywhere we tried had shortened hours or wasn’t serving food. Later on, in the Cotswolds, we discovered you had to make reservations for actual dining if you wanted more than a beer and snacks. I think maybe this started during Covid Times? That was never a thing on previous trips, and I don’t know if something changed or if we were just lucky then! But we did manage to get a tapas plate to split and a couple of beers at The Queen of Clubs, another pub/restaurant that wasn’t serving meals. It was very good, and also was enough to tide us over till we got back to Bath. 

A toast to finding sustenance and a beer!

We had dinner at the Cross Keys Pub quite close to our Airbnb. We’d gone there on our last trip, when we stayed at Peasedown St John. Delicious fish and chips!

Next stop, Cheddar - featuring Cheddar Gorge, Cheddar Man, some delicious Cheddar cheese, breathtaking cliffs, and a cavern to top it all off!