A Tale of Two Avons

Ever since I started my LEJOG challenge, my virtual journey from Land's End to John O'Groat's, I've been trying to remember the trip that DW and I took in the very early 90s^*, when we travelled around parts of England and much of Wales before heading to Paris, France, for a week.

There are lots of blanks in my memory, and even DW says that some of that trip is a bit of a blur. Perhaps it was because of our little experience with jet lag or that we travelled so much that we didn't take the time to drink it in. Of course, 30 years is a long time to remember details of specific days where what we saw was so fleeting.

But ever since I reached Salisbury on my virtual trek, I've been thinking more of that trip and have been searching for photographs that DW and I took, in an effort to retrace our steps.

The biggest challenge, so far, is to find our photos. We have so many albums that are filled with printed photographs and slides, and when we moved from 35mm film to digital cameras, we moved some of our albums to the basement, a semi-organized repository of all things that we've forsaken.

Around the same time that we moved our albums into our basement abyss, I was also digitizing old photos, scanning the slides or negatives and then putting those albums away. Unfortunately, after scanning the images, the digital files were stored in a massive folder, simply labelled as Scanned slides.

There is no order to these files. When I search this folder, I only find random images that, at the time that I scanned them, I deemed were the best of my images. Over the years since I scanned the images, I've picked some at random, cleaned them up with my photo-editing software, and stashed them in a more-organized folder. When I look at my travel folders, there are only a couple of images from England or Wales, barely enough to reflect the nearly two weeks we spent in the UK.

A couple of the photos that were in my massive scanned slides repository showed two rivers: in one of the photos, DW's and my tent, which we bought specifically for this vacation, stands out in the foreground, and I immediately recognized the River Avon and our Stratford-upon-Avon campsite, just a few minutes outside of the town. We had reached this site, set up our tent, got dressed up, and then drove into town to have dinner and then catch my favourite Shakespeare play, Henry IV, Part II, before returning to the campsite for the evening and then continuing on our trip, the next morning.

The other photo that I found (and enhanced) shows a tiered river that runs through the sizable town that is the city of Bath. The shot was taken by the famous Pulteney Bridge, the shop-lined bridge that dates back to the late 1700s.

When I tried to remember the name of the waterway, my mind went to River Avon, but I dismissed that because the Avon runs through Stratford-upon-Avon, as the town's name clearly states. So I went to Google Maps, and sure enough, the river in Bath is also the Avon.

But not the same Avon.

My first thought was that the Avon was a very long river, but a further Google search showed me that there are no fewer than five rivers in England called the Avon. In Scotland, three rivers share the name Avon. And in Wales, there is another Avon, though it's spelled Afon Afan, which apparently translates as River River.

So, two of the rivers that I captured in the 90s are named Avon, though aren't the same. I've learned something new. And in doing so, I've jogged my memory about this trip.

Stay tuned for more about this trip. Happy Thursday!

^* The more I think about this first overseas vacation with DW, the more I think that it happened in 1991, not 1990 as I've said in previous blog posts. Stay tuned.