I'm still feeling quite miserable with a cough I simply cannot shake; it has been there at various levels of nasty for the whole trip. I got a pharmacist on Elba to sell me some cough medicine which only vaguely helped. I've tried again here in Canterbury so we'll have to see how it goes. The worst thing is that it's worse when I'm in air conditioning, so for example on the flight yesterday I had a horrible attack of coughing, and same last night here in the hotel (and unlike many hotels in England, this is a new building with windows that don't open). I really hope that this latest lot of medicine helps. Part of the problem of course is that I'm now taking blood pressure medication which means I can't take any of the pseudo-ephedrine based medication. Well, I could, but I shouldn't.
Anyway, today was our day for seeing the nearby sights of Canterbury.
First we went to the Cathedral, which is simply amazing.
Then, we went to the Roman Museum- a really interesting place set up around an old Roman mosaic that they found buried well below the current street level. However, as well as the mosaic there are lots of other finds and some really interesting explanations. We were part way through the museum when we saw a man talking to some people about the artifacts, and we both recognised him instantly - Mark Corney who has appeared on Time Team on quite a few occasions. Turns out he does a lot of tour guide work and it's somewhat disappointing that I didn't know this; the short tour he is currently running co-incides exactly with our stay in Canterbury and would have been really, really interesting. And, once I started looking further into the tour web site I realised that there are a number of future ones that we would really really like to do. So much for retirement!
Anyway, back to Canterbury today.
We had also hoped to see the Canterbury Heritage Centre, but it opens 'seasonally' and this isn't the season :-(
Then we wandered off to find the Norman Castle but became side-tracked by the Westgate. This is the only remaining old gate into the city, all the others have been destroyed over time. The view of Canterbury from the tower is quite interesting, and there is also a small display of militaria. The tower was also used as a prison for a long time, and some of the old areas of the prison are set up with information about that part of its history. For the admission price this was quite an interesting place and I was really sorry to hear from the guy looking after the museum that we were the first visitors there for the day. I'm going to put a positive note on Tripadvisor, hopefully it might encourage other people to visit!
So, after a break for lunch we went and found the Norman Castle - mostly ruins of course but still interesting - and the city walls.
Then, back to the hotel for recovery, then catching up on blogs etc. Paul is also researching where we might go tomorrow - maybe Margate and Sandwich.
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