On this day.....1997

I often look up our old journals from 1997 to see where Donald & I were on our travels.  We spent 3 months (from May to August) backpacking through the Middle east and Europe before landing in Canada where we lived for 3 years.  In Donald's journal he made a little calendar that detailed where we were each day.  

On this day, August 2 in 1997 we were staying with my friend Christine, who lived in Taunton, Somerset in the UK at the time.  We went on a day trip to Devon to seek out some of Donald's ancestors graves.  It was a cold and rainy day (in summer), the kind of day to stop at lots of little Devonshire tea houses for hot chocolate, scones and clotted cream......... 

......or to a lovely Exmoor pub for lunch.  

We spent the day searching various church grave yards for headstones of Donald's ancestors.  This was all done with much prior research by Joan, Donald's mum.  She had names of towns and churches and we literally drove around until we found them and scoured the church yards.  We managed to find all of the graves to match the names that we had.  A pretty exciting time for Donald. 

I think we visited about 3 or 4 different churches in the areas of Weare Giffard, St Giles in the Wood and Torrington, lovely little towns with stone churches and manor houses, rows of workers cottages and patchwork fields.

I do love the English country side.......although at the time I remember I was a bit tired and cranky with the cold, wet weather.  Not a happy girl!