For my very last trip outside of Oxford, I went with 17 other students and a few professors to Lyme Regis, a seaside town made popular by literature. Normally, it's the other way around, but Jane Austen and others wrote so fervently about Lyme that it acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy and became the place those authors imagined it could. It was incredibly windy and rainy, but truly beautiful and my only chance to see a British beach. We first drove up and I saw people in the water, and my thought was "they must have wet suits on". They did not. I saw children almost completely naked running around the rocky beach and my head spun. How they managed the cold, wind and rain, not to mention the icy water, is completely beyond me. I now have an entirely new appreciation for sea bathers in Jane Austen's lifetime. They bathed in the winter because, at the time doctors thought it was most beneficial at that time of year. Yowza!
Let me back-track some, though: our first stop was Chawton. We saw the grave sites of both Jane Austen's mother and sister Cassandra. She and Cassandra wrote letters to one another throughout Jane's life, and they were as close as can be. Austen lived at Chawton for a period of her life, and it was definitely the only home we've seen that I could even consider moving into next week. It felt safe, it's sizable enough while remaining quaint, and the property around it is gorgeous. Madison and I pet the horses as we walked down the main stretch from the road to the house. I can see how almost magical it would have been to ride your carriage through that row of trees where the church ahead stood out to you and called you home.
The bus ride was long -- several hours each way -- but I read and slept and it flew by. I'd definitely do it again, and hope to spend more time in Lyme than we were able to do today.
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