June 12, Day 21

We had to be up early early early and I hated it. Especially because I slept terribly. Apparently now there are only two girls on the trip who don’t snore, them being myself and another girl who I’m not rooming with. (Don’t worry, I asked to swap rooms to be with Dani, and I’m so excited because this means no more community room for me, and I get peaceful nights, and nights of undisturbed sleep.) We headed out to the subway station at 7:45am to catch our train at 9am. Me with no food, coffee or tea = bad news bears. I was quite grumpy. Once at the train station though we had 15 minutes to find something before we boarded the train. I spotted someone with A Caffe Nero cup and went in the direction from which they came, determined to start the day right with a fabulous latte. I found it within minutes and ordered a vanilla latte and a pain au chocolat. (I was so afraid leaving France that pain au chocolat would be nonexistent everywhere else… I was wrong. For all I know it’s something you can easily find back in the states, I just never discovered it until I went to France.) After a short wait for an incredible latte the barista handed it to me, and I said ‘thank you very much,’ to which he responded ‘yeah, cheers!’ Oh, I love the friendly English people. I got on the train and sat in a different coach from the rest of my group and enjoyed a peaceful trip for an hour and a half, just sitting alone listening to music and playing solitaire on my ipod. (By the way, no one in Europe has an ipod. I think it has something to do with it being a huge American thing and the Europeans want nothing to do with it. Ha.) So we arrived at the harbour, I forget which one, then we took a ferry across the bay, I think it was the atlantic ocean, to the Isle of Wright, where the Julia Margaret Cameron museum / house is located. Once arriving on the island and walking for some time to a bus stop, we took the bus to a different stop, then took another 45 minute bus ride to our final stop. The museum was in a little town called Freshwater I think, and it reminded me a lot of when my family took a trip to Seaside, Florida one summer. Same small town, same sort of look and vibe, but just add on a bunch of pastures and sheep and cows and large hills and white cliffs, and that’s what Freshwater was like. It was a lovely town to say the least, and we ate at an even more lovely little quaint Tea Room located in the Julia Margaret Museum. It reminded me exactly of the British Home Shop that my Mom used to take me to when we lived in Colorado Springs. I had some excellent traditional English tea, an entire pot to myself, some little sandwiches cut in triangles, and then some homemade lemon sponge cake to top it all off. It was a nice way to sit and relax after having spent around 6 hours or something traveling. After lunch we were free to explore the museum / house and outside until we had to be back at the bus stop. It wasn’t that amazing, it was just full of framed re-prints, only one original, and we had actually seen two of Julia Margaret Cameron’s originals back at the National Medium Museum when we also saw originals from Talbot. They had a nice timeline all set up and what not though, plus it was cool to be in the house of the first female photographer who really established herself as an artist and was really able to make a name for herself. After going through the museum and what not and wandering around outside, not to mention playing and running around in the ocean, we got back on the bus and headed back to another bus, then got on the ferry, then the train, then the subway, and were finally back. We didn’t get back until 9:30pm or so, which sucked BIG time because it means that we missed the soccer game (USA vs. England last night by the way if you didn’t know, and also if you didn’t hear it turned out to be a 1-1 tie). We stopped by subway and got sandwiches and went back to the room to eat. Everyone hung out and watched The Italian Job on tv and ate. (Kinda made me miss the boyfriend… he likes that movie, and my parents gave it to him when we went on our annual summer trip to Aspen Colorado last summer.) I spent most of my time typing up these past few blogs in a document so it’d be easy to just transfer them once we got the internet again. After I was done everyone was still in the room, and it was past 11:30pm. I was tired, but couldn’t go to bed. Story of my life. Someone next door even came over and knocked on our door because everyone was being too loud. I’m ecstatic to get out of this room. Nothing against those I’m staying with… I just prefer not to be loud and crazy all the time 24/7. Buh. After some time people eventually began to trickle out and I went to bed, only to be woken up numerous times by those I’m in a room with talking, and both of them snoring. Again. Meh.