Every time I return to England, I’m reminded of how my travels are shaped by the vagaries of history. I’ve spent over two months in the United Kingdom this year, and the bulk of that is because the United Kingdom opted out of Schengen in 1997.¹ Prior to 2022 I was spending time in Ukraine.² Prior to 2023 I was spending time in Croatia.³ Now my choices are between the UK and Ireland or going even further afield.

On a more parochial level, I’m slowly working my way through all the different regions of England, and this trip I decided to wend my way down through Somerset into Devon and Cornwall. Both counties have had an outsized influence on England.⁴ They comprise the southwestern tip of England, and accordingly they’re known for their seashore — popular holiday destinations, both. Cornwall’s got a rougher, wilder history with Celtic roots and strong connections to the Arthurian legends. Devon’s tamer and is the kind of fantasy version of England people outside of the United Kingdom seem to imagine, with charming villages and bucolic manor houses and clotted cream by the seashore.⁵

But the history of the region means most of the scenic towns you’d like to poke around are on the coast and inconvenient to visit by rail, especially if you’re hopping between them. So in a burst of yet-again unearned enthusiasm, I rented a car. I almost always rent the cheapest car I can find, and this time I found myself in a Fiat 500 painted, I assume as an anti-theft measure, in what an interior designer would describe as “seafoam green.”⁶ The Fiat turned out to be aggressively meh; it lacked features like a Bluetooth radio⁷ or parking sensors or the ability to accelerate faster than a go kart but it handled okay and I appreciated the fact that you could park it in a shoe box.

I haven’t had great luck with rental cars in England, and Cornwall especially is strewn with lots of narrow one-lane roads lined with hedgerows. And while I paced my travel reasonably well — I largely didn’t spend more than three hours a day in the car getting from one place to another — it was still about a 20 hour drive down from Birmingham Airport to Land’s End and back, once you took into account all the side trips.

Coming from the United States, if you’ve never driven on British roads the obvious challenge is driving a right-hand drive car in left-hand traffic. That’s never been the trickiest part for me. For me it’s the width of the lanes⁸ coupled with all the single lanes. But despite scraping past foliage on a few occasions and a tight squeeze past a double-decker bus,⁹ I had managed to make it to the last hotel on the trip with a single nearly unnoticeable scratch. And then I neglected to set the parking brake on the thing and it rolled backwards into a brick wall, smashing the bumper.

I wasn’t anywhere near it when it happened, of course. I just came back after 15 minutes and discovered it one row over from where I left it. There was no property damage, the property being constructed out of sensible things like brick and metal. The Fiat, constructed instead of the kind of plastic they make children’s toys out of, required the replacement of the entire bumper and side panel and left light fixture. I’m just grateful no one else was involved, the car still ran perfectly well, and I can still honestly say I haven’t had a driving accident in England. I dropped the car off at the rental counter two days later and took the loss.¹⁰

Other than that the trip was lovely. I visited two national parks, Exmoor and Dartmoor, and wanted more time in both. I visited Tintagel Castle where King Arthur was reportedly conceived,¹¹ now basically a few low walls of stone on a gloriously wind-swept cliff. And I took a specific detour to see the Eden Project, a reclaimed clay pit that’s been transformed into a lush garden space with a couple biomes. Beyond that I mostly visited a number of villages; there’s any number of them worth a ramble and many have a cathedral or an abbey worth exploring.¹² The whole of the trip was bigger than the sum of its parts.

The rest of my time was largely spent in London for my birthday, and in Birmingham for a friend’s birthday. Both were excellent, bouncing through the respective cities with a group of friends heading from restaurant to pub to cocktail lounge.¹³ I filled the remainder of my time with a few errands. I managed to refill my medications, which was expensive but successful.¹⁴

I also finally got to see The Burnt City, Punchdrunk’s latest immersive experience, and I only wish I had made the time sooner. It’s closing in September and I won’t have time to see it again. And as usual with Punchdrunk it’s the kind of thing you really want to see again.

It doesn’t stray very far from their formula; you have dancers acting out the events of the story in loops, repeated three times over the course of the performance. As an audience member you’re encouraged to wander through the space watching things unfold, trying to piece together what’s going on. You can pick a specific character and try to follow them place to place, or poke around the sets looking for clues, or just camp out in a space and see what happens.

This time the inspiration is two Greek plays, Aescylus’ Agamemnon and Euripedes’ Hecuba. The space is divided into two parts:¹⁵ Mycenae and Troy. Mycenae is a battle-scarred wasteland, with a tent city surrounding a large foreboding space with two massive tank traps in the middle.¹⁶ Troy is a glittering neon maze of alleyways¹⁷ mashing up cyberpunk with a kind of ’50s aesthetic. Troy really is a marvel; I spent most of my time on the Greek side — I was far more familiar with Agamemnon than Hecuba so had more of a grasp of what was happening there — and if I have any regrets it’s that I didn’t explore the back alleys of Ilium more.

Right now I’m waiting to fly out of the UK way too early from Edinburgh airport.¹⁸ I’d been warned of strikes at Heathrow and figured this was a safer escape route. I visited a friend in Glasgow and had enough time to catch Barbie at the movies with them last night.¹⁹ I’m glad I caught that bit of the cultural zeitgeist before I left. It’s one of the few ways I have to keep in sync with the rest of the world.

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Footnotes

¹ More or less ensuring Ireland was going to have to follow suit, whether they liked it or not.

² You can, in fact, still visit Lviv and Kyiv as a tourist. It’s not even difficult. You just need to catch the train from Poland. I’ve thought about it; I really do miss Ukraine dearly. But Kyiv, while much safer than it was a year ago, is still being targeted by missile strikes and Lviv is overcrowded by Ukrainians escaping the east. I’m not convinced the additional burden of looking after me would be offset by my slow but steady infusion of Western cash in the form of rent and take-out food.

³ Both Romania and Bulgaria are slated to join Schengen, and it feels pretty likely they’ll be in by this time next year. They’ve already completed all the steps; it’s just that Austria and the Netherlands opposed their membership over immigration concerns.

Once they join the only countries in the EU but not in the Schengen Area will be Ireland (which has a permanent carve out exempting them) and Cyprus, which is legally required to join (although the frozen conflict is likely to make that practically impossible).

⁴ Or, at least, the perception of England, both in and out of the country.

⁵ My friend insists I point out this is largely a mischaracterization and has very little to do with how the English conceive of themselves. That’s fair, although I think it overstates the case. Texans, New Yorkers, and Californians are all often mistaken by those outside the United States as exemplars of the US — a mistake no one within the United States would make — but it’s undeniable those stereotypes have all had an effect on the psychology of the country.

⁶ A particularly good interior designer would describe it as unforgivable and recommend sky blue or cherry red. It did make it very easy to pick out in a parking lot, though.

⁷ Although it did have a USB socket where you could play MP3s, so I borrowed a friend’s flash drive and just put that on. Driving through the English countryside listening to Fleetwood Mac feels very on the money, especially if Jethro Tull isn’t available, although I had the most fun driving through Exmoor listening to Babymetal.

One of the manifold joys of listening to other people’s songlists is discovering music you haven’t heard. I’d never listened to an Alanis Morissette album all the way through before, and discovered that I really thoroughly dislike most if not all of Alanis Morissette’s music. I mean, Alanis has a song where they rhyme “much” with “much.” I’m still recovering.

⁸ Not only are roads more narrow than the United States, but it’s legal to park in the street, sometimes blocking the entire lane of traffic and requiring you to fully swerve into the oncoming lane to get around. And since a lot of roads go through the center of villages, you run into it quite a lot, often places with lots of oncoming traffic as well.

⁹ I was driving near Cape Cornwall — if you want the austere Land’s End experience without hundreds of tourists marring the view, Cape Cornwall has you covered — and I was following a car through some particularly twisty one-lane roads when we nearly hit a blue double-decker bus jammed with tourists coming the other direction. I’d encountered enough farm machinery on the back roads by then to be less shocked than annoyed by the bulk of the thing, and had to reverse a good couple minutes along the hedge before the road opened up enough for the bus to get past.

¹⁰ My credit card offers rental protection, and in theory I’ll get the money back. But the form is long and the documentation requirements onerous. I give it 50/50.

¹¹ Yes, it’s a weird thing to find notable, but the circumstances of Arthur’s birth are super weird. Uther Pendragon was disguised by Merlin as Gorlois, the husband of Lady Igraine, and snuck into Tintagel in order to sleep with her, on the very night Gorlois died in battle with Uther’s forces. Uther later marries Igraine, which makes the whole thing either less creepy or more creepy, I’m not sure which.

¹² Wells has what is reputedly the prettiest cathedral in England and having seen an incredible number of them by now I think I’d agree. Glastonbury has an abbey worth visiting, although the town attracts enough New Age adherents to require a sign at the front of it asking visitors not to strip naked.

¹³ There were breaks for some approximation of culture, in my case a museum and walking tour, in my friend’s case mini-golf and a VR emporium.

¹⁴ I walked into a local clinic and 20 minutes later emerged with a prescription for three months worth of all of the chronic medications I need to take. Sure, the appointment was £70 and the medications cost £150 — even with the garbage health care in the United States I usually pay about a third of that — but my insurance company currently refuses to fill my Oracea without a prior authorization despite my having taken it for over three decades, so just getting a reasonable supply is a big deal.

¹⁵ Well, three, if you count the cabaret in the middle where you can buy drinks and hang out watching the stage show.

¹⁶ They were about twice the height of a person, and the performers would crawl up and over them as part of the show. Iphigenia is sacrificed on one of them.

¹⁷ A labyrinth, in other words

¹⁸ The flight leaves at 9:30 in the morning, which sounded plenty reasonable when I booked it, but it still meant getting up at 6 to catch the 6:45 bus and arrive at the airport by 7:45. I was through security by 8:00 and felt like I really should have slept in for an hour and caught the later bus.

¹⁹ Honestly nobody needs my opinion on it, but for the record I thought it a very good, great even, but as I am neither a seven-year old girl nor someone who used to be one I’m really not the target audience. The production design is stunning and unique, the jokes are funny, and if conservatives are going apoplectic over what is ultimately a very mild “Intro to Feminism” message I’m all for it.