We’re on our way now to Ireland, for a very brief stop-over before we continue west to Denver to meet back up with the kids. Our time in Oxford has been lovely. I got up early yesterday to take some photos around town before the streets got mobbed by hordes of other tourists and the sun retreated behind clouds. Then our class went out on a field trip to visit churches and apparently abandoned (but not really?) villages dating back to the era of the Black Death. Here a few photos worth making particular note of…

First, there’s one particular door on an alley next to University Church. The spot in front of this door is where (according to legend), C.S. Lewis drew his inspiration for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. You can see echoes of Mr. Tumnus, the faun, Aslan, the lion, and even the lamppost that marked the boundary between England and Narnia. As I look at it more closely, the door carving looks more like the mythical Green Man… But inspiration doesn’t have to be literal, and it was thrilling to stand there and see images from beloved books come to life in front of us.

Next, these are some photos of Tom Tower, designed by Christopher Wren (of St. Paul’s Cathedral fame among many, many others). It is the iconic entry to Christ Church, one of the colleges under the Oxford University umbrella. Tom Tower is named after the bell inside, Great Tom, which has sounded nearly every night since the end of WWII. The bell rings to mark the curfew (no longer enforced) that marked when students had to be back within the walls of the college, which was apparently created to avoid some of the violent conflict that periodic erupted during the Middle Ages and Renaissance between students and townspeople. But…. If you look at your watch, it would read 9:05 when the bell rings, because when the world was first trying to figure out time zone and balancing Greenwich Mean Time and solar time, they briefly decided that Oxford would have it’s own time zone, 5 minutes after Greenwich Mean Time. And in a fit of stubbornness, they hung on to it when everyone else figured out that wasn’t a great way of keeping time.

I’ll wrap this up now – time has (once again) moved faster than my ability to post. Hopefully I’ll add another post soon about our nearly perfect day in Ireland (which could only have been better if the kids were with us)…. In the meantime, here are a few more pictures from my photo walk and class field trip…