Visiting Ely

Today we finally got out to explore a little bit. In other words, we finally feel comftorable enough with driving to venture...only hit a couple curbs. We decided to go to the town of Ely (pronounced ee-lee) because we heard they've got an awesome cathedral.

So we actually live in England's version of the boondocks. Like there are great towns but they separated by large amounts of farm lands so we had a nice 45 minute drive through the countryside to Ely. By the way, the roads here are made differently, in other words, they have no shoulders. That makes the roads really skinny so you really have to make sure that you are in the middle because on the sides are ditches. And I am not taking American style wimpy ditches, no, these are 15 feet deep and filled with water so a bit scary. Anyways, it makes for an interesting drive.

We finally made it to the town and headed for the Ely Cathedral which was giant. It was built in Gothic style in 1109 and took 300 years to build. Now bear with me with these photos, I am still learning my camera but I think they all turned out pretty good!

This cathedral has some of the most beautiful stained glass that I have seen. The windows were massive and they had windows from basically the entire time the place has been around. They also had a stained glass museum but no photos were allowed in there. In the museum, they had stained glass from 1100's ish to present day. Here are a few examples of the beautiful stained glass we saw.

To me, the most breathtaking part were the ceilings. They were hand painted and done with the utmost detail, honestly I could have sat all day just staring at them.

^One of my favorite pictures!

See what I mean about the ceilings? They're great! We ended up going on the "Octagon Tour" which ended up being a great choice. Back story first: I am not a fan of heights, I finally admit this...it took me a long time to say it but it doesn't stop me from doing anything I want to do, this tour being one of them. We had a great tour guide who was very knowledgeable. He took us up into one of the towers. There are 165 steps to get to the roof and they get very narrow. Walking the first few flights were fine but then the steps got to be like a foot wide so some people had to go up sideways! They curved up the tower in a spiral staircase and sometimes just had a rope for a railing. I was holding on tight for fear of a mistep. But it was totally worth it and wasn't too scary for me (although, I did make sure Lee was always around to catch me!). The views were gorgeous from the top, we could see for miles and seeing behind the scenes stuff was great.

Alright, one last picture of the Ely Cathedral for the road!

After all this time in the Cathedral, we got pretty hungry so we headed to a pub, of course. We had to ask about how to order food! Apparantly at this one, you ordered your drinks from the bar, sat yourself then ordered you food from the bar and then they brought the food to you. So a little different than what we are used to. Lee had fish and chips (he LOVED them!) and I had steak and ale pie (kind of tasted like a beef pot pie). We had to try the English food! After eating we went to see Oliver Cromwell's house. After the Civil War in England and the King was killed, Cromwell became the head of state as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England until his death. Read up on it, it's an interesting story. But his only remaining home lies in Ely so it was pretty cool to see.

It was a great day! We had a lot of fun and makes us so excited for all of our future adventures in Europe!