The breakfast part of our B&B stay this morning was quite overwhelming. A mountainous bowl of fruit followed by all the trimmings (I declined the black pudding and baked beans, but forgot to say no tomato) and we decided while still eating that we wouldn't need lunch today.
We headed off from Broadstairs, and entered White Cliffs of Dover into the GPS. It took us out of town quite happily, but suddenly in the middle of the next town it told us to turn right, so we found ourselves driving through nice middle-class suburbs, and in another turn of the road, we were in the countryside, and driving down one of those hedge-edged country lanes, only just wider than the car itself. It should have been an Aston-Martin we were driving, but that was okay. At least we didn't meet a tractor coming the other way. We did come across a railway crossing, with gates on both sides that we had to stop and open.
We made it to the lookout for the cliffs, but we didn't walk too far along for the best view - just a few hundred metres.
I hadn't known there was a Dover Castle until last week: there is a documentary series on TV here at the moment about great castles of Britain, and that was on it last week. We spent a couple of hours there -again, a history dating back to Roman times, with rebuilds and extensions every few hundred years. It's interesting that successive generations haven't been too precious about building on and renovating older parts of these edifices. From Romans to Medieval, then Tudor, Georgian, Victorian and WWII, they're all adopting and adapting the facilities they have to what they need.
We left Dover at about 2, still not hungry, and found a cafe in Folkestone (eventually) for a coffee and a tea cake. And thence to Rye, hailed by Lonely Planet as "the prettiest town in England." Our B&B tonight is medieval, and delightful. It used to be 3 separate houses, and our room is the attic of the house on the end, so we have to go up and down and up stairs and steps on all sorts of different levels to get here. Good fun, especially with bags. The street outside is cobblestones, and other houses on the street are labelled "XXX House, rebuilt 1490"! RE-built!