Letter excerpts from "black and white" towns, continued: Ludlow is a small city, and has a large assortment of black-and-whites. The best by far was The Feathers, which was built in the 16th century and first turned into an inn in the 17th century. We walked into the lobby, and a young lady asked if she could help us. When Ron told her that we just would like to see the inside, she suggested we go upstairs to the James I room, and the Charles II writing room. These are the oldest rooms in the Inn. Both were full of beautiful carved furniture of the period. There is a large beam going across the James I room that exhibits a decided downward sag, and a King James I crest in plaster in the ceiling. At first, we got a big charge out of the fact that we were in one of the very tilted gables that we had seen from the outside. It didn’t feel tilted! Then we realized that the tilted gable was the third floor! Incidentally, a lady we met on the street told us with pride that the Prince of Wales stays in this hotel in a suite named after him whenever he is in town
 
The first thing we did in Ludlow was ask at the library if we could use the computer. A very nice librarian told us that they had no objection to nomads like us! After we read our e-mail, we walked around the downtown area of Ludlow, saw Ludlow Castle (started by William the Conquerer) and went to the supermarket. By then, we were really tired. Three places in one day is quite a lot. We had tea and then drove back to the campground. But there’s more to the story than that.

As anyone who is reading this knows, we’ve been having a terrible time with the internet service in England. Fortunately, we can often read our mail and post letters to the blog even if we can’t post our pictures. To make it all worse, we’ve been in quite a few places that didn’t have public telephones. British Telecom maintains the most phone booths of any country in Europe, but there are still places without the ubiquitous red phone booth. Adding to our confusion, Adelle had misplaced our communications bible. She had a little address book that has everything in it, but it has disappeared. Fortunately, before we left home, she had copied all the addresses into a new book – but of course she missed some, and made a few errors. When it came to calling people, we had a problem.

We had received an e-mail message on Wednesday in the Ledbury Library where we had been reading our e-mail. It said that we needed to be available for a radio interview from the U.S. on Friday evening. We weren’t sure that the campground phone would take incoming calls, so there was a big flurry about that vs. the cell phone. Fortunately, the telephone at the campground would take incoming calls, so we were able to make arrangements to be called at that number. All of this added a fillip of tension to the last two days. But we are glad to report that we finally figured everything out and the interview went without a hitch. Of course, we had to eat dinner at 9 p.m., but that was no problem.

Our next stop was to be Worcester (as in Worcestershire Sauce). We drove into town but found it very difficult to park because all the lots had height barriers. Rather than fight the terrible traffic, we decided to go on to Lincoln, which will be the furthest point of our journey this time. That 125 miles or so that we drove was by far the longest trip we’ve made. It was considerably easier driving on that long, straight road than on some of the short hops we’ve taken. Single lane roads with lots of curves are more difficult than straight motorways where faster traffic can pass in the other lanes. Anyway, we can always go back to Worcester on our way south.
 To descriptions of towns: Gloucester, Tewkesbury, Ledbury, Hereford,  Pembridge, Ludlow, Weobley