July 7 - White Cliffs, Sandwich and Canterbury

Today we had a lovely chat over breakfast with a couple of gentlemen from The Netherlands.  One was a serious photographer (professional want-a-be).  We had a good time sharing notes of places to see.

Then we checked out and drove to St. Margaret’s at Cliff for excellent views of the White Cliffs.  

We walked along the sea wall walk to get good views of the cliff.  At one end was the Coast Guard pub, closest pub to France (for those into trivia).  The beach there is a shingle beach, which means it is all pebbles and medium size very round rocks, making it a bit difficult to walk.

Apparently it isn't a very good beach for swimming...

although we did see someone swimming "laps" up and down the beach.  He could swim it almost as fast as we could walk it (which was quite slow because we were taking pictures.)

Then it was off to the town of Sandwich, “The most complete Medieval Town in England.”  The GPS managed to get us off onto some pretty narrow back roads.

Sandwich turned out to be a gem.  We were very fortunate to arrive during their Folk and Ale Festival.  Some of the streets were blocked off for pedestrians only and there were many groups performing a street intersections and in front of an old church.  Mary struck up a conversation with one of the dancers, Juliana, and she said that they were all Morris Dance groups.  Morris Dancing is English folk dancing with origins from about the mid-15^th century.

Some groups performed with handkerchiefs...

but most performed with sticks.

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One group had flower garlands.

All of them had some sort of musical accompaniment.

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All of them danced with a belt of bells around their legs to add to the music.  However, each group had different costumes.   

Trying to get portraits of some of the very interesting individuals was a challenge but well worth the effort.  They were a very colorful group all round.

After watching for a while we wandered off through a nearby market that had all kinds of goodies.  

After lunch we came back for desserts from this vendor.  Yum! Yum!

These are actually desserts made to look like pizza.

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More photos from the Festival
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We then decided we really did need to walk around the town a bit since it is so well know for being so well preserved.  The walk was well worth it...the town is very quaint.

We thoroughly enjoyed the festival and the dancing and we had some wonderful conversations with a couple of the dancers.  This is why we travel…mostly to see the sights, local festivals, and shows; but also to meet the locals and immerse ourselves in the local culture.  It was a fantastic afternoon, thoroughly enjoyable.

We decided to take a quick drive to Margate right on the sea.   Turns out Margate has an honest to goodness sand beach, not shingle.  The weather has been hot, the day is a Saturday and the beach was filled with people enjoying the beach and the sun.  

The beach looked awesome but it also had what looked like a very large, square, shallow salt water pool right at the edge of the beach.  Looked perfect for tiny beach goers, no wave action.  Although the channel/sea was very calm today.

The street along the beach had lots of eateries and shops for buying trinkets.

Then we headed on the Canterbury.  After a GPS snafu that took us down and extremely narrow dead end street we finally found our hotel, Pilgrim's Hotel, just off the main road. 

Pilgrim's Hotel, our home in Canterbury

Dinner was at our favorite chain restaurant in the UK, Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK) with the best chocolate shakes anywhere.

After heading out to dinner we realized that we were here in Canterbury three years ago when we visited Canterbury with Jim and Phyllis in 2015 as a day trip from London.  Mary had forgotten about that when putting together the schedule for this tour.  So we have seen much of the sights in the city fairly recently…so we are assessing options.  Perhaps we'll focus on some day trips out of Cantebury.