Liverpool

If you ask most baby boomers about Liverpool, they'll know it as the Beatles' home town.

Asked her favorite Beatles song on our morning drive from Grasmere, our granddaughter Emma said she didn't know any, though she did recognize the song "Yellow Submarine" when Gina, Julie and I sang it.

I would attribute this to 9-year-old Emma being too young for names of music groups to register, but when she stayed with Julie and me in California later in the summer, she identified a song performed by a TV show contestant as having been originally released by Imagine Dragons, adding that their biggest song was "Radioactive."

"Oh, I know that song," I replied confidently, only it turns out I really didn't.

Is this what we used to call the Generation Gap?



We found a parking spot on the outskirts of Liverpool a half hour late for lunch.

Liverpool turned out to be a clean, modern metropolis rather than the longshoreman's rough-and-tumble, grimy port I expected.  We later learned on our Beatles to the Blitz Walking Tour that the city had been cleaned up considerably to celebrate its 800th Anniversary in 2007.  Liverpool was awarded as a European Capital of Culture in 2008.

I felt a discernible '60's rock vibe among the pedestrians walking its sidewalks as we looked for a restaurant.  Many young ladies sporting "mod" mini-skirts and men in leather jackets were interspersed among the tourists and suited office workers.

We selected Rocket & Ruby, a chic urban bistro with a menu of diverse Small Plates including somewhat exotic offerings for the Lovasis and Chicken Kofta sandwiches for Julie and me.

It turned out to be a great choice, with a lively but subdued atmosphere perfect for us.

After lunch, I was anxious to get to someplace Beatles related, and the Cavern Club, the underground tavern where every Beatles fan knows they played so many shows, seemed a likely destination.

On the way there, Gina's eyes lit up upon spotting a nail salon.  When we reached the landmark bar where a short line had formed of people paying 2.5 British Pounds for admission, she asked Emma if she would like to get her nails done instead.  Soon they backtracked, planning to meet again where we stood in an hour, which would still give us a half hour to find the tour starting spot at the Prince Albert Statue by St. George's Hall.

Laszlo, who in Jeopardy would choose "Space Travel" or "Famous Scientists" over "Sixties Music" or "Beatles Trivia," opted to go find a sidewalk cafe for a quiet cup of coffee.

Julie went down the stairway to the Cavern with me, but after a minute in the dark, crowded bar where a Beatles cover band played loudly, she said, "I can't handle this."

Left alone, I did the only thing I could.  I bellied up as close as I could get to the bar and ordered a pint of Guinness.

The front room was a lot like its clone aboard Norwegian Joy, and the band was great.

When they went on break, a talented solo performer took the stage in a second venue deeper inside the club.  None of the performers stuck exclusively to Beatles covers, but they pretty well stayed in that genre.  One act played a great Monkees' cover, which I found interesting because Gina had said in the car that while she liked the Beatles, she sometimes got them confused with the Monkees, something that a dyed-in-the-wool Beatles fan could never do.  I'm even more sixties-music nerdy by knowing that particular Monkees song, "Daydream Believer," was written by folk singer John Stewart.

I enjoyed looking at the different plaques and photos of acts who'd played there, even if this wasn't the original Cavern Club.  That had been destroyed long ago, with the front of the house lovingly built to replicate the original.

At the appointed time, we all met up and rushed toward the Prince Albert Statue, which in a downtown with lots of large monuments wasn't as obvious as we'd imagined it would be.

We eventually found the statue of Queen Victoria and then that of her husband, Prince Albert, both on horseback, where we met up with an actor/playwright in a tie-dye shirt and shorts who would lead us around Liverpool.

Unfortunately, St. George's Hall was out of bounds for what turned out to be a rather large group lured by the promise of a free tour (for which it turns out there is a somewhat obligatory tip of 10 pounds, not unlike the service fees for "free drinks" on NCL) because of a wedding in process.  Our guide tried to make the best of the situation by sharing a story of a groom who phoned in a bomb scare so his fiancée wouldn't know he'd failed to book the space for his wedding as promised, but hearing about what we would see inside if the wedding wasn't in progress was a big flaw that possibly happens regularly for this tour, hence the voluntary payment at the end rather than what had been an upfront payment on some days.

John said among the monuments to famous politicians in their finery inside was a statue of Kitty Wilkinson, an Irish woman wearing cleaning gloves who saved thousands of lives during a cholera epidemic by washing their clothes.  She had the only boiler in their neighborhood.  This "Saint of the Slums" was of particular interest to Gina, who is an epidemiologist.

For Beatles fans, he told the story of Ringo coming back home to play on the roof of St. George's Hall during the opening celebration of the European Capital of Culture year.  Ringo "outraged parts of Liverpool in January when, days after opening the city's European Capital of Culture celebrations, he said he missed nothing about the city."  A local vandal took revenge by decapitating Ringo's effigy in a topiary sculpture of the Beatles.  After having the same act of vandalism repeated a few times, the city finally gave up on maintaining the display.

Our guide also described the nearby library and a few other spots as worth seeing but which we couldn't get into that day.

But we did see others, including a statue of Eleanor Rigby on a park bench.  He said that a gravestone for Eleanor Rigby had been found, but Paul McCartney denied he'd ever seen it before writing the song.  Our guide surmised that was because he didn't want fans to chip away pieces of the grave for souvenirs as had happened other places like Jim Morrison's grave in Paris.

John kept up constant patter about places we went, revealing much of the history of Liverpool.  While the Beatles may have grown up in an impoverished post-World War II city where many fathers and grandfathers had not returned from the war, during the Victorian Era, Liverpool had been one of the wealthiest cities in England.  In 1715, the world's first wet dock was built in Liverpool.  A wet dock allows for the loading and unloading many ships simultaneously.  This modern infrastructure allowed Liverpool to easily surpass nearby Chester up the silted River Dee as the dominant port in the area.  Liverpool become the busiest sea port in the world by the 1800's, when cotton from the American south fed England's textile industry.

We went to the original site of the Cavern Club, but by late afternoon, the street was so jammed with tourists that we didn't continue all the way to the underground pub.  I was glad we'd seen it earlier.  That also explained why Beatles tours inevitably had scheduled starting times before 1:30 PM.

By the way, lots of bars have sprung up with Beatles' themes and music blaring out the doors to capitalize on tourism demands, but that wasn't always the case.  Apparently, the greatest interest occurred over the last twenty years, once baby boomers found themselves with the disposable income and free time to see places they'd heard about over their lives.

Overall, it was a tour worth doing, although I think it would be more logical as a first day tour for people who intended to see the interiors of some of the buildings he described.  Gina said she enjoyed it, and Emma stayed engaged throughout, often making comments despite being the only child on the tour.  Laszlo didn't comment, which is par for the course.  I definitely want to return to Liverpool on a Princess UK Cruise and do a full-blown Beatles tour.  Julie, on the other hand, said she liked Liverpool more than she expected, but once would be enough for her.

We had hotel reservations in Manchester, from which Gina, Laszlo and Emma would fly home in the morning and where Julie and I would catch a series of trains to the ancient Roman settlement in Bath.

The parking lot of Gina's Crown Plaza Hotel used technology I have never heard of.  A sign said that our license plate had been scanned and that if we didn't pay the correct amount for parking, we would be ticketed.  As to whether or not that was true, we checked in with the front desk as having parked so they could charge us for two hours.

We had a nice dinner at the Crown Plaza's main restaurant, but the service was slow and uneven, not even bringing Emma's meal until the rest of us had almost finished.  I gave a standard tip, and I have to say I felt foolish afterward.  Not that the food wasn't delicious or the company delightful, but on top of the poor service they wouldn't validate parking or even take the charge for Emma's meal off the tab.

I guess I wasn't actually as upset by the shoddy service as the fact that our time together with family in England was over when we left the un-gated high-tech parking lot to go to our own hotel, the Holiday Inn Express.  It turned out the entrance and lobby were somewhat torn up for remodeling, but our room was attractive and comfortable.

The next day, as we raced between platforms dragging luggage in unfamiliar train stations to make tight connections on four trains, Julie and I weren't in the best of moods.  The crowning moment came when we arrived a minute before the train left and were told we couldn't get on a particular car and were directed the wrong way.  Somehow, we made it aboard and went from car to car, only to realize that first car probably had been the right one.

We found a sweaty man sprawled out across our reserved seats.  He refused to move, saying there were no reserved seats on that train.  We found some other seats in the muggy car.  When I went between cars while throwing away some trash, I realized that car had much better air conditioning, so we decided to accept Jabba's proclamation as truth, snagging two "unreserved" seats in the cool car.  Further proof that we should never waste our life force fighting for something specific that isn't that important, because God probably has a higher good for us somewhere down the road, or in this case, the train.

The full day of travel was rewarded with an early evening arrival in the charming city of Bath.