The ferry ride to Jersey was smooth and uneventful.
We got a taxi to our hotel and the hotel, the Eulah Country House was delightful!! We had a huge room with a massive bathroom. The parlor was massive and had a real open bar (as in, you are encouraged and not scolded)!!
Our room looked down over the bay where the water was clear and bright blue, reminiscent of Bermuda. We were home!!!
That evening, we took a taxi to the Oyster Box Restaurant, which was a bit of a trek, but on a separate lovely bay overlooking the water. We were seated next to an incredibly large and noisy table. That might have been okay, but one of the ladies appeared to laugh at everything, constantly, and she had one of those laughs that went through your brain (in one temple and out the other) like a sharp stick - not in a good way. Having been in France for awhile, I leaned over to Karen and asked, "How do you say, 'shut the f_$# up in English?'" She said, "I think that's it, but perhaps we should get a different table." We did.
The restaurant was still on the "very loud" side, so we just signed to each other and ordered food. They had a seafood platter which looked good on the menu, so I asked for it. In fairness, the waitress did say, "It is quite large." I thought to myself, "Well, I'm quite hungry" and thought that would be fine. Had she said something like "it is comically huge", or "we only put it on the menu as a joke" or "you will look like a newly arrived fishing boat with that platter", I might have paused, but she just said it was "quite large". The platter steamed in looking vaguely like the Titanic coming into port and took over the table. Karen's plate was placed in the platter's shadow. I worked my way through a solid third of the plate and surrendered.
We returned to our wonderful hotel and slept.
The next morning, our car for the island was delivered and I went down to accept it. It was a Ford Fiesta, which made our Renault look big, which the Renault was not. In getting into the car, I looked a bit like John Glenn being put into the Mercury capsule. Actually, it might have been closer to the monkey before John Glenn. It would have been easier if I was one of those Fisher Price people without the legs and just a couple of butt connections with my arms pinned to my side. Unfortunately, I had to fold my entire body into that tiny space and then unfold it once I was clear of the frame. The car was manual with the steering on the wrong side because we were back in England, where everything was on the wrong side. I went back through the gears and pumped up and down tentatively on the clutch, whispered my standard Hertz Prayer - "Thank God, It's a Rental," and was off.
The first thing on my agenda was the Jersey War tunnels. The fact that the Channel Islands were the only parts of Britain occupied by the Germans in WWII wasn't lost on me. Karen, on the other hand, had been D-Dayed out and was feeling a bit cranky towards the Germans generally for building so many bunkers, tunnels and other stuff outside of Deutschland - she thought they were "pests". Actually, that pretty well sums it up, but I needed to see some more tunnels, so I went off by myself.
The only problem with going off by myself was I was a "little" rusty at the manual transmission and driving on the wrong side of the road. Because of the rock walls and narrow avenues, there wasn't much road do deal with, and the map was abysmal. It made for an interesting trek on my own, but I made it there, toured the tunnels and made it back to the hotel.
I picked Karen up and we headed out to the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust. Gerald Durrell is the main reason that Jersey has been on my "bucket list" of places to go for years. He was a great naturalist and an incredibly funny author, who ended up establishing a zoo on the island of Jersey. That's where we were headed.
Karen hadn't yet been out on the roads of Jersey. Like me, she really didn't notice them in the back of the taxi the night before. However, she did notice them now since she was sitting on the left side of the car with all of the rock walls, trees and stone posts screaming at her. Her favorite comment was "Do you know how close you are to the wall?" or "Watch out for that [Fill in the Blank]!" In the end, she christened the Jersey Road system as "ridiculous" and "why don't they do something about this!" She had the same tone of voice that she has when she tells airline pilots that they have no reason to go faster than 400 mph or fly higher than 35,000 feet.
Of course, on country roads like you find in Jersey, you have the choice of the wall or oncoming traffic; it is not an easy decision.
The Zoo was marvelous!! Gerald Durrell was emphatic about making an environment for the animals at the zoo which was similar to the animals' original habitats, including space to roam, rather than just a viewing platform for visitors. In many areas, you may have difficulty finding the animals or you may not see them at all. In others, you will feel like you are communing with the animals.
We were amazingly close to the gorillas and the orangutans, viewed an amazing feeding of the lemurs. The whole experience was the best we have ever had in a zoo or wildlife exhibit.
We made it back to our hotel, found some bread, cheese, fruit and wine, and enjoyed a meal in our room that evening, watching "Britain's Got Talent" on the telly.
The next day we were off to Guernsey!!!!
A Separate Note on the German Occupation:
Before going to the Channel Islands, I knew about the German Occupation in WW II, but did not fully appreciate what had actually occurred or what it meant. After touring the tunnels, reading a separate book on the subject and talking to one of the locals, I have a somewhat clearer picture. As the Islands were less than 50 miles from France, Churchill and England made the decision that trying to defend the Islands from a German invasion would be too difficult and did not view them as strategic. They made the decision to demilitarize (as in, remove all the soldiers and equipment) the Islands and let the Germans take them over. They gave the locals the option of leaving the Islands and coming to England for the war, an offer that many (roughly half), but not all took up. The local talked about his grandparents who lived on Jersey when the war began. His grandfather was returning from England to collect his family at the last minute and ended up being captured by the Germans and sent to camps in Germany. He spent the entire war in camps, trying to escape (he escaped three times). On the last escape, he went into the countryside and only traveled at night. After hiding out for some time, he finally made it to a camp of American soldiers, where he discovered that the war had ended two weeks before. The grandmother stayed on Jersey throughout the war, where the situation progressively deteriorated, including deportations, torture and starvation. She had to walk through St. Helier (the main town in Jersey) to get to her work and on the way, she passed a women's prison, where she could hear screaming. The grandson said that she is still living, but since the war she has never walked on that street. When D-Day occurred, the people of the Islands assumed they would be freed from the occupation, as in France, 50 miles away, the Germans were in full retreat. However, because the Islands were still not strategic, the Allied forces avoided the Islands and concentrated on Mainland Europe. The German Occupation of the Islands started in July 1940 and the Islands were not freed until May 9, 1945, two days after the full German surrender in Reims. Churchill apparently never visited the Islands after the War. You wonder what kind of reception he would have got?
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