The apex of all
my Lewis experiences came in the summer of 2000 when I had the privilege of
traveling to the Lewis/MacDonald sites in Northern Ireland, Scotland and
England with my son-in-law, Jeremy Thomas. We were privileged to travel in
Great Britain for twenty-five days, visiting first in Belfast, Crawfordsburn,
Bangor, Downpatrick and the east coast of County Down in Northern Ireland;
and then from London we traveled by train and bus to Great Malvern,
Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, Cambridge, and York; also going up to Huntly
and Aberdeen, Scotland where George Macdonald was raised, before then coming
back to London via Windermere and Grasmere in the Lake District. Our last
day in London we took the train over to Canterbury, Hastings and Battle
before returning to London for our flight home the next day. (See
itinerary) (Clicking here will open new window.)
The purpose of
this part of my website is to invite you to follow along with Jeremy and me
as you read my 25-day journal and view the many pictures that we took in
each place that we visited. Initially, I have kept the chatty, somewhat
detailed, account of each day just as I wrote it, with hopes that
later I will find time to edit it and use it as the basis of a much more
useful literary guide for others who also choose to travel in the footsteps
of C.S. Lewis. Every trip has its obvious blind spots - things that
you wish that you had thought more about before you did them. For me
it was my week-long, almost existential, struggle with my camera and
the possible pictures or lack of pictures that might develop from it
on this "momentous" trip. I apologize for the numerous
comments made about this concern. Finally, I also hope to add some comments about our
preparation and what we learned from our trip. I begin with a preface describing how we came to take this
trip and then it's on to the day-by-day trip
itself.
