Dover: Our vacation-within-a-vacation

My sister and I are not really city-slickers. In fact, we hate cities: the noise, the crowds, the smog. So, while we were willing to brave London for a few days to see the famous sites like Buckingham Palace, we were pretty excited to leave London behind when the time came. We hopped a train and headed for Dover, a small coastal city in the far southeast of England. From there, we took a bus to our real destination: St. Margaret’s-at-Cliffs, a tiny town clustered on the top of the famous Cliffs of Dover. The town probably had a population of about 10,000 people, and, once you got out of town, you were surrounded as far as the eye could see by fields and forests. You could walk for miles without passing anyone or hearing any cars, and Faeth and I loved it.

We came to Dover to see those famous white cliffs, and it just so happened that you could easily walk to the cliffs from the cheap hotel where we were staying. The receptionist told us Dover Castle was only about two miles away, which is nothing for two farm girls, so we headed out. It turned out that the castle was closer to five miles away, but the walk over the cliff tops was worth it.

We walked on top of that!

 

The white Cliffs of Dover are indescribably majestic. We walked right along the edge of them and could see the Atlantic Ocean stretch out into the horizon. There were no barriers, so we could peer over the edges (pretty nerve-wracking!) and look all the way down to the beaches below. The cliffs are 350 feet tall, giant slabs of pristine white rock that made me feel like a tiny speck of sand. They reminded me of just how awesome and grand their Creator is. The Bible sums it up better than I could in Nehemiah 9:6, “You alone are the Lord. You made the heavens, even the highest heavens, and all their starry host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them. You give life to everything and the multitudes of heaven worship You.”

After walking several hours, we finally crested the last hill and saw Dover Castle in the distance. The castle was constructed in the early 1200s by Henry II, better known as the father of King Richard the Lion Hearted. It’s been used as a fortress ever since until as late as the 1940s, when the British army buried themselves in the medieval tunnels and set up secret hospitals underground for their wounded. We got to walk through these tunnels and see where the soldiers lived, worked and recovered, which was fascinating. Human beings can be darned resourceful when the need arises.

 

The castle has defended England for nearly a thousand years.

 

After exploring the castle until it closed for the night, we caught a bus home, since we really didn’t feel like hiking another five miles back to the hotel. The hotel, by the way, was absolutely wonderful. It cost only a few euro more than a hostel, and we got our own room, our own bathroom, free tea and internet and access to a very refreshing pool. After four weeks sharing hostel rooms with eight other noisy young people, sleeping on squeaky, thin mattresses and hearing people come and go all night every night, the hotel was a real refuge. We even extended our time a day so we could relax longer.

The next day, we had considered catching a bus to Canterbury to see the famous cathedral (you know, the one from Canterbury Tales), but we decided not to. Honestly, we haven’t had much luck with England’s famous churches, and we thought it would be a lot more fun to have a laid-back day wandering the beach. So we hiked down to the foot of the cliffs to get a different vantage point. They were just as breathtaking from below, maybe more so, since we could clearly see how huge they are. We walked the beach and enjoyed the sound of the waves breaking against the sand until we felt like it was time to move on, and then we did.

They are just as lovely from below

There was a little museum in the town, and it was free, so we decided to pop in. I’m glad we did—there’s a lot about Dover I’d never heard of before. Apparently, Ian Fleming (the author of the James Bond series) lived here a while, as did other famous English composers and playwrights. But what really interested me was the WW2 history Dover had to offer. The people living in Dover throughout World War II were an extremely hardy, resourceful lot. Dover was shelled mercilessly by the Germans, and it was actually picked by Hitler as the ideal landing place for an invasion of Great Britain. Yet the British refused to give up. They ignored the shelling to go about their business. Women joined farming crews to boost crop production while almost every man either joined the military or found another way to help the war effort. And it was from Dunkirk, near Dover, that one of the greatest POW rescues in WW2 occurred. Called the Miracle at Dunkirk, this brilliant and gutsy operation involved both the military and area civilians rowing into captured territory to rescue nearly 240,000 Allied soldiers trapped by the enemy over the course of a week. These rescued soldiers were then taken to Dover. Reading these tales of heroism, patriotism and self-sacrifice stirred my heart and made me proud that England was our ally, but more than that—it made me proud of mankind and what it can accomplish.

If you looked hard, you could see France across the English Channel

That evening, we walked to the docks to try those famous fish-n-chips—which were truly delicious. It was a very good end to our two-day vacation-within-our-vacation. We left for Newcastle the next morning. Even though we only spent a little bit of time in Margaret-at-Cliffs, so far it is my favorite place we’ve visited in all of Europe, and I know that someday I will come back to this charming, beautiful little town.