Day 3  

Thursday, July 13, we were scheduled to eat breakfast at the Hartpury cafeteria at 8:00am, so several of us were in the queue waiting to go in. The college offers a typical "English breakfast" The choices were as follows: prunes, grapefruit sections, orange juice, apple juice, milk, dry cereal, toast, fried toast, fried and scrambled eggs, bacon (what we call ham or Canadian bacon) big link sausages, beans? (what?), a tomato sauce stuff which I did not try, hash browned potatoes kind of like McDonald's, oatmeal (yuk), coffee, tea, hot chocolate, jellies and butter. Overall, it was a very nice selection to choose from.

Choir rehearsal was from 9:00 till 11:30, and it didn't seem to go quite as well as the previous night's rehearsal. I guess some were suffering from jet lag, but I felt great!

I had signed up for the visit to Gloucester, which is very near Hartpury College, for the afternoon. Gloucester is a very historic city, not only for it's cathedral, but also for it's role as an inland port. There are a couple of maritime museums there which, sadly, I did not have time to visit.

We walked over to the Gloucester Cathedral, portions of which were built sometime before 1000 A.D.. The architecture is fantastic with the huge stained glass windows. I grabbed a bite to eat with the Hunts in the Cathedral cafeteria. I had salmon and asparagus quiche. We went back to touring the Cathedral, and joined an impromptu tour conducted by James Brown, a former guest artist at FUMC and one of our three hosts/conductors for this choir tour. There are hundreds of centuries old graves in and around the Cathedral. It was once a monastery and has a cloisters area which was very interesting.

Those of you who know me, know that I have to break off on my own to sample some of the local flavor of an area. I started walking down the main street of Gloucester and bought some sun screen lotion at a discount store similar to Dollar General for about 2 pounds ($3.00). The prices don't seem to be much different from home. I walked through many shops and stores all the while noticing the manner and dress of the locals. Most locals had on some of their winter woolens because the weather was cool. Some of the people looked pretty scruffy, but the business people looked about like they do in the states, except almost all ladies wear dresses or skirts, very few pants. The tourists stuck out like sore thumbs with their jeans, shorts, white athletic shoes and cameras. But hey, just about everywhere I went was full of tourists, mostly Americans.

Oops, I looked a my watch and saw it was time to beat a path to the bus for it's 5:30 departure back to Hartpury. We ate dinner at the college cafeteria and if I remember right, we had an extra rehearsal after dinner. I got to bed at 9:30pm. What? This is unheard of for me!

End day 3