Homeschool High School English: Gothic Literature, The Haunting of Hill House, and Why Teenagers Should Watch Rocky Horror Picture Show

Our 2023 pumpkin army is a vision of Gothic decrepitude!

If you know me AT ALL, you will be so surprised to learn that I think that you should watch The Haunting of Hill House Netflix series with your teenagers before you read the book!

It's really good, first of all, and it stars one of the guys from Leverage, which is another teenager favorite around here, and it's so genuinely scary that my one chicken teenager actually noped out of the experience, and it's a terrific set-up to the Gothic literature genre, especially the idea of the decrepit old house as a representation of the darkness inside ourselves... AND it's completely different from The Haunting of Hill House book in every important way, BUT has enough nods to the book that when you read it with the teenagers afterwards, they can discover all the little connections for themselves as an aid to interest and an encouragement for close reading.

The only thing to be wary of is that my teenager loved the Netflix series so much that she was Big Mad that the book was completely different, and therefore decided that she Did Not Like the Book, which is a shame because it is so good, just... different. So if your teenager, like mine, is spiteful and loves herself a grudge, maybe rethink this order.

For all the other teenagers, it's 1) the TV series, then 2) the book!

https://www.tumblr.com/brutaliakhoa/722303965399859200/what-if-the-house-was-haunted-what-if-the-house

Genre studies are very good for high schoolers, because a genre study gives them a lot of practice picking out themes from different artifacts and doing a lot of comparison/contrast, all supported with lots of evidence and that good flow of logic that connects evidence to conclusion. 

Gothic literature makes an excellent high school genre study for a few reasons:

1. It's not exactly horror, so it shouldn't actually scare off the scaredy-cats, but it IS horror-adjacent, and has a kind of aesthetic that really appeals to a lot of teens. Even kids who aren't super emo tend to appreciate Gothic vibes!

2. It's a genre that's covered a lot of ground, historically, so it gives teenagers more practice reading and analyzing older works than they're often used to. A lot of the teenagers that I've worked with get so fussy when asked to read anything with challenging language/syntax, including just about anything that's not completely contemporary. But they'll work harder for something that they find genuinely interesting, and I have a lot more luck making Frankenstein interesting than I do Romeo and Juliet!

3. Speaking of Frankenstein... there are so many excellent female authors within the Gothic literature genre, and this study is a great chance to focus on Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Anne Rice, and other important female authors within the canon. Gothic literature is, as far as I know, entirely Eurocentric, but there are plenty of Black voices to add, especially if you delve into one of my favorite sub-genres, Southern Gothic. Researching to find works by other POC or authors across the sex/gender spectrum or other continents (now I'm thinking that some Japanese horror could also work?) would make an excellent final project for a teenager!

https://www.tumblr.com/angrylittleburd/730460890258980864/spatial-horror-isnt-i-am-in-a-scary-place-so

For our The Haunting of Hill House study, I got my teenager's buy-in because that Netflix series was so good. After we finished, I asked if she would want to read and study the book version next.

Reader, she did!

After that, I'd planned to go on a whole Shirley Jackson deep-dive with her, doing some short stories (including "The Lottery" of course!) and then my own personal favorite Jackson book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Alas that she didn't love the book version, because it caused me to scrap those plans, but to be honest, broadening the study out to cover other authors over a larger time period was more academically sound, anyway. 

For a semester-long, in-depth study that you could put on your kid's transcript as its own English course, I suggest reading several entire novels together. A lot of very early Gothic is super messed up, though (*cough, cough* The Monk *cough*), sooo... pre-read! But even without the most messed-up stuff, though, you've got Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc. I don't usually like to get too invested in authorial intentionalism, but author studies of Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde would make good rabbit trails if your teenager seems especially interested in their works. Or utilize those author studies in their history course to add more inter-disciplinary work. 

More modern Gothic choices could include Shirley Jackson, Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby is the more obvious choice, but The Stepford Wives plays with the theme of place in the Gothic genre in some interesting ways that your high schooler can use for their compare/contrast paper), Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison. If you do Interview with the Vampire, consider contrasting it with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is just as schlocky as it sounds, but actually has some interesting things to say about enslavement. 

Here's a New York Public Library list with even more Gothic literature books.

If you don't have an entire high school semester-long course to dedicate to Gothic literature, I also like the idea of covering the same ground via short stories. This list of Gothic short stories has Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner on it, and also includes "The Yellow Wallpaper," mandatory reading, in my opinion, for any Liberal Arts major in the making.

Here's a list of Black authors of Gothic fiction that I've put on my own must-read list. I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl back in undergrad as a slave narrative only and I've only read Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Parable of the Sower, so I'm very interested in reading/re-reading the works from this list through a Gothic lit lens! 

https://www.tumblr.com/string-star-lights/691764710603980800/rocky-horror-picture-show-asks-what-would-happen

I'm trying very hard not to raise a bunch of hopelessly unemployable Lit majors like myself, so even with high school English, and EVEN with high school AP English Literature and Composition, which is the teenager's current study, I like to extend the analyses beyond just written text to a wide variety of other cultural artifacts, and the work beyond just reading and writing to a wide variety of other intellectual explorations. 

Fortunately, movies, music, and theatre are all very easy to incorporate into a literature study, because you can use many of the same analytical processes with them. They tend, especially movies and theatre performances, to hit the same plot and thematic beats in much the same way as literature does, so it doesn't feel like a big stretch for a teenager to write about them while writing about literature. But you can then help your student notice the parts that ARE different, like costume and setting and acting choices and audience, and adding those analyses helps them deepen their thinking on their topic. 

As part of this study, we watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show, both at a family-friendly live show and (because the teenager fell asleep during it, lol) at home. Especially if your student has already studied Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is semiotically rich with its overtly mad scientist and self-aware Frankenstein's monster and heroine who is required to choose between man and monster. If you watch a live show, you also get to add in the audience as further cultural artifact; the concept of a self-aware, non-consensually modified character has a lot of appeal to a lot of people, and witnessing an audience seeing the experience as a celebration instead of a taboo is enriching. 

I also recommend The Hunger and Pan's Labyrinth as semiotically rich Gothic horror films, although Pan's Labyrinth scares the snot out of me! 

For a more in-person folklore/social history/anthropology element, and depending on how scaredy your own teenagers may be, it can be very fun and intellectually rewarding to visit a haunted house (in October), or attend one of those paranormal/ghost hunting excursions that a lot of cities have. Even my own corn-fed Indiana locale hosts several such events. Place semiotics is easy to see during these activities, and although analysis of a first-person event can be extremely challenging for this age range, it's a useful skill that teenagers should start developing.

Other hands-on activities for this study include creating one's own Gothic art (take a rabbit trail down the path of Gothic art for a day or two first, because that's another whole entire fascinating exploration!); DIYing a model haunted house that fits into some of the themes you've explored (if you do this, add in some extra STEM skills by incorporating this Pepper's Ghost element); or, of course, writing one's own Gothic short story or poem. If you've got a bit of a reluctant writer, or just one who gets writer's block, it's fun and low-stress to first have them write themes, elements, characters, etc. on notecards to pick at random to be included in the work, or even to write a circular story, in which every five minutes you pass your stories back and forth and collaborate on all of them.

And in my family, we end essentially every study with a themed family dinner and movie night. Is the most Gothic dinner food bloody finger breadsticks, or is it mummy head meatloaf? 

You're all wrong. It's mashed potatoes carefully unmolded from my skull pan, with pats of butter melting in the eye sockets.

P.S. Want even more high school lit studies? My kids really love the Gothic vibe, and we've done full studies on both Frankenstein and Dracula!

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

A Snarky Frankenstein Unit Study Appropriate for Snarky High Schoolers

Listening to audiobooks with my teenager is just about my current favorite thing about homeschooling. So far this semester, we've listened to History of the Kings of Britain, The Haunting of Hill House, and The Hound of the Baskervilles, and we're currently one hour and 40 minutes into 12 Years a Slave, and we're VERY into it.

Frankenstein is a book study that we did last year, but somehow I never got around to writing about it even though it was AWESOME! I don't know if you know this, but a teenager is the best companion to have when reading a book. We speculate on every character's sexuality (*cough, cough* Walton was IN LOVE with Victor *cough, cough*), mercilessly roast every character (but mostly Victor), gasp in shock and horror at the kinds of behavior that was apparently normal at the time but is 100% taboo now (I'm sorry, but Victor and Elizabeth were raised as siblings!), and cheer at all the murders...

... and we sneak in some literary and cultural analyses, maybe a bit of creative writing, definitely some comparative analysis with other books and films. Book studies somehow always manages to feel low-stakes while being quite rigorous academically. It's some of the best schoolwork that we do together, and whatever we're studying, I tend to always have a book unit going.

Here's some of what we did for Frankenstein, and some other stuff that we could have done but didn't.

Pre-Reading

I wouldn't want to do anything that would give away any spoilers for a book, even a book as iconic as Frankenstein. I work with teenagers pretty often, and I am equally as often surprised at the background knowledge that they can lack--I would never assume that a kid who hadn't read Frankenstein knows ANYTHING, no matter how basic, about the plot!

That being said, a good video can often be a good, evocative setup for a book, especially a book with as interesting an origin as Frankenstein! This TED-Ed video sets the scene without giving away too much:

We've spoken about Lord Byron before back when we were studying Ada Lovelace, so mentioning that he was there did quite a lot to explain the setting of the creation of Shelley's novel to my teenager, ahem. Other good pieces of background info could include brief bios of Mary Shelley and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, alchemy, the Gothic and Romantic movements, etc.

While Reading

Whatever you do, don't incorporate ALL of this into your literature study. I like to see what's intriguing my kids and expand on that, or encourage projects that build up skills I want them to learn, that follow their interests, or that could add a cross-curricular component that I could also count for a different subject.

• discussion questions/essay topics: A nice thing about homeschooling is that we can talk day and night about the books we're reading. We roast main characters over dinner, gossip about who's into who in the car, rewrite minor plot points via late-night texts across the house, and revisit our favorite bits years later--we're still cackling about our recurring joke involving Gandalf's favorite horse, and we finished that book five years ago! I don't usually use discussion questions or talking points to inspire our conversations, but I can see how they'd be useful, especially to set an essay topic.
• family tree/cast of characters. There's not a giant cast of characters in Frankenstein, but enough that it's easy to forget who someone is by the time they wander back into the picture. We do NOT want to forget how Victor and Elizabeth know each other, for instance (barf!), nor who our delightful little William is. There are tons of ways to create family trees and graphic character lists, and I do like to have kids create their own from scratch, illustrations and all... but here's a cheat sheet. 
• food. We usually enjoy cooking recipes themed on what we're reading or watching, but Frankenstein doesn't give one a lot to work with, ahem. Ah, well... perhaps a picnic while we read out loud to each other!
• geography. I LOVE using maps in my homeschool. I think it's so important to be able to visualize places from history and literature, and to build geographic context. Here's a Google Earth tour of the many geographic settings in Frankenstein, but I feel like my own kids don't always look hard enough at already-created maps to absorb the information; I'd rather show them a Google Earth tour of a different book, then have them create one for Frankenstein from scratch, or go completely old-school and create it with a printed map. This Smithsonian article about places that inspired Mary Shelley is another good resource. 
• practice using quotes as evidence: The year that my teenager went to public school, her English teacher had a terrific technique to teach the kids how to respond to a text. She'd give them a text, then ask them to 1) highlight claims, and 2) for each claim, respond with a sentence that agreed and gave a reason, or disagreed and gave a reason, or expanded on/qualified the claim. It was a great way to remind the kids that they did need to have their own opinions about texts, and to model for them how it works. This worksheet encourages the same strategy; when responding, encourage the student to find textual evidence for their response, and then you have a natural entry point for teaching them how to incorporate quotes into their writing. 
• supplemental texts. We do a lot of cross-curricular work in our homeschool, and one of my favorite ways to incorporate that kind of work is a supplementary reading that also applies to a separate study. For a novel like Frankenstein, supplemental texts in the fields of science, history, and mythology would all be easy to source. Or go in a different direction and offer supplemental pieces of artwork!
• travel. I really like to incorporate field trips, day trips, and other types of travel into our homeschool studies. Alas, for my final homeschooling teen haaaates to travel, but I still insist more often than she'd like... but a lot less often than I'd like! Travel to Bath, England, to visit the Frankenstein museum isn't exactly feasible, but I'm always on the lookout for traveling museum exhibitions, festivals, academic presentations at our local university, or high-quality live theater experiences.

After Reading

After finishing a book is when I like to incorporate comparative analysis. With Frankenstein, there are a lot of different directions you could go with this!

• Frankenstein films. With these, you can illustrate the growth and development of the Frankenstein trope, and critique its various manifestations. In our homeschool, we usually do at least one of these as an official Family Movie Night, with everyone contributing cheezy novelty recipes to a themed meal that we can eat while we watch. Here are a few of my favorite Frankenstein films that go quite well with Frankenstein meatloaf and Frankenstein broccoli florets and Frankenstein pudding cups and a Frankenstein cocktail/mocktail:

• children's books. Usually, the Frankenstein in a picture book is just a goofy-looking Halloween character that doesn't make any particular literary references. For an artistic kid, though, it's interesting to compare and analyze the various kid-friendly depictions of the monster, then create their own in response. Kids who are interested in folklore, anthropology, the organization of information, or books in general can enjoy logging the characteristics of each kid-friendly character and seeing if they can figure out the stereotypes or analyze what the representations are meant to imply. Here are a few of my favorite kid books that feature Frankenstein:

• other Frankenstein retellings. You can make thoughtful comparisons with versions of the story told in different times and places; they highlight different values and fears in our changing cultures, and often speak to the original version in important ways. Here are a few of my favorite Frankenstein retellings:

• secondary sources. I don't always incorporate these, but if a book has really struck a kid's fancy (as with the huge hit that Le Morte d'Arthur turned out to be!), I'll keep those good vibes going, perhaps with a bit of long-form non-fiction! Histories, biographies, and cultural analyses are always a good bet with books. Here are a few good ones for Frankenstein:

While supplementary activities can add a lot of content and rigor to a book study, keep in mind that it's also perfectly okay, and perfectly at-level, to simply read the book, talk about it, and move on with your lives! Discussion is a great way to address the content and themes of a book, so that even if you don't write an essay, if you've have lots of conversations about it you HAVE formed opinions, made claims, supported them with evidence, responded to another's claim with your own thoughts, and essentially performed quite a lot of analytical work. 

You should definitely make thematically-appropriate novelty foods and eat them while watching a related movie, though. that's a very important part of the process! 

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A Snarky Dracula Literature Study Appropriate for Snarky High Schoolers

Out of all of the hundreds of audiobooks that my kids and I have listened to together, I think Dracula might be our favorite. It's got so much to offer, from its status as a classic of literature to its Gothic horror vibes to its vampire creation mythology to its depiction of some of the best characters ever to grace the pages of a novel, particularly my personal badass heroine, Mina Harker, a woman who can write shorthand, has memorized London's entire train schedule, is a loyal friend and wife, and is the only one of Dracula's victims who lived to tell the tale.

Here are some of the things that my teenagers and I did during our brief Dracula unit study. This was part of their high school English credits, although the cross-curricular art activities were also recorded as part of their Studio Art credits.

Audiobook Narrated by Gildart Jackson

The kids and I loved Gildart Jackson's narration, so much so that we've specifically looked for him when picking other audiobooks (he also does an awesome Frankenstein!). 

We also loved Dracula!

The trick when you read Dracula with kids, or really probably any iconic work of literature, is to remind them that once upon a time, Dracula wasn't iconic--it was just Stoker's newly-published book! There weren't a ton of vampire tropes or cliches to tap into, because he'd mostly just invented them. You literally start the novel thinking that you're going along on one of Jonathan Harker's boring work trips. Probably, you're just going to be reading an epistolary travel novel about the wonders of verdant Transylvania. I love imagining it, how the Victorian reader must have grown ever more suspicious of the mysterious Dracula, how they'd gasp in shock at the big reveal: Dracula is a VAMPYRE!!!

Other semiotically rich elements worth much discussion include everyone's shitty, misogynistic treatment of Mina, how even with her misogynistic depiction Mina is still the most badass of all the Dracula characters (how/why did Stoker write her to be completely disregarded but also the most efficient, practical, and intelligent?!? Did he do it on purpose or by accident?), and the absolutely hilariously bonkers depiction of Quincy, the "American." Like, he literally carries a Bowie knife--had Stoker ever seen one of those to know how impractical that is? The kids and I howled with laughter every time he had a line of dialogue.

To make some comparative literature analyses, pair with any other vampire novel ever written. Excerpts from the Twilight novels are fun because they're just so corny, or you could do something well-written like Interview with the Vampire or 'Salem's Lot. I'm currently reading The Historian, and I am VERY into it! For a quicker project, go for a Goosebumps book or even a picture book, or do a sub-genre like paranormal romance with Dead Until Dark. So many semiotically rich vampires!

1931 Dracula Film

This first (and best!) Dracula film has a lot to add to the study, and everything about it is ICONIC. 

I mean, come on: Bela Lugosi? Iconic!

This 1931 movie introduced conceits that you don't even realize are conceits, they're so ingrained. The "Transylvanian" dialect that Dracula speaks in? That's from here! Turning into a bat that talks in squeaks, and the vampire's subjects can understand those squeaks? Yep, that's from here, too. It's super funny to watch this film, then turn on just, like, the first ten minutes of Hotel Transylvania. 

For a deeper analysis, pair with any vampire movie that came afterwards. We watched The Hunger for a recent Family Movie Night, because David Bowie, and it had some interesting things to say about age, sexuality, and the power dynamics of romantic love. Funnily enough, Dracula ALSO has interesting things to say about age, sexuality, and the power dynamics of romantic love!

Art Experiences

I used to get the Dover Publications free samples weekly, and the kids LOVED them! These Dracula paper dolls from Dover are a good inspiration for artistic response, because kids can then create the costumes for them. They can go old-school vampire tropes, or Victorian fashions, or make modern reimaginings of the novel's characters. I want to see Mina Harker as a steampunk heroine!

My younger teenager is very into the art of the book, so I've been encouraging her to create book cover images and design book jackets for the books we read together. You can actually get those printed to fit your favorite books, you know!

Artistic kids who want to use the book for more cross-curricular explorations can also illustrate memorable scenes or quotations. If they need some inspiration, check out my favorite edition of Dracula, this one illustrated by Edward Gorey (there's also an Edward Gorey Dracula toy theater that I covet). Even kids who don't see themselves as super artistic can create memes; memes are one of my favorite student creations, because kids love them, they get to show off how witty and sarcastic they are, and the most successful memes show natural evidence of a sophisticated understanding of the book.

Place-based Studies

I'm not very excited about Romania or Bran Castle when it comes to a Dracula study, because I'm not convinced that Bram Stoker even knew of those places, or of Vlad the Impaler. He liked the name "Dracula" when he read it somewhere, and his inspiration for the novel was Whitby, England. We didn't visit there when we went to England this summer, but we DID make a point of collecting ourselves some Gothic vibes. Next time I visit England, which I hope will be soon, I want to go north and see Whitby!

But I mean, you know, if I was IN Romania I'd definitely go to all the Vlad the Impaler sites.

To add rigor and more composition practice to any of these activities, just tack on a writing assignment! Write an opinion piece about Stoker's depiction of one of these now-iconic characters. Write a compare/contrast essay with another vampire book or film. Write Dracula fanfiction that changes the ending or the setting or a key plot detail. Write a research paper on the history of the vampire myth, or Gothic horror, or Whitby Abbey. Write an essay explaining your artistic process and decision-making when creating the book cover or illustrations. Create a travel brochure for Dracula's Transylvania. There are so many ways to make high schoolers suffer!

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I Read The Chalice of the Gods, Because the Scariest Adventure in a Teenager's Life is Applying to College

The Chalice of the Gods by Rick Riordan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When my kid and I read The Lightning Thief, she was ten, and Percy was twelve.

Last week, we each read this latest book in the series. Now, my kid is seventeen, and so is Percy.

Reading this latest adventure of my kid’s all-time favorite book character, the character she’s stayed loyal to even as she’s grown up, is bittersweet as hell, just like everything else about this last year at home before college. What happened to that little girl who wore an orange Camp Half-Blood hoodie (with "Daughter of Apollo" printed on the back) and wielded a wooden sword and a cardboard Spartan shield that she'd painted a Pegasus on? Where is the kid who made endless batches of slime one summer while listening to The Demigod Files on repeat on my old CD player? Could I please have another day with that small daughter who traipsed around Greece with her American Girl doll, petting feral cats and lighting Olympic flames?

Just like Percy, my own little demigod is almost all grown up.

I am not mad, then, that this particular Percy adventure is lighter fare than the usual magical mayhem he gets himself into. In this book, Percy's big adventure is obtaining one of the three godly college recommendations that he needs to be accepted to his dream school of New Rome University. In order to obtain a recommendation, he has to go on a quest. It's demanding and complicated, there are snakes, but it's no Battle of the Labyrinth, thank goodness. My gods, can you even imagine if my kid’s favorite book character who happens to be her exact same age in this book and is also going through college application bureaucratic nonsense just like her had DIED (RIP Jason)?!? Or was betrayed by a loved one or ended the book on the verge of an apocalyptic war or got turned into a tree or was the subject of an awful prophecy, etc.?

Ugh, just parenting/being a kid in their Senior year of high school is hard enough, thank you.

So, the plotline of this Percy Jackson book, and the next two, may feel trivial to many readers, but I, for one, find it comforting and validating that the mythology is barely metaphorical here, and instead, Percy’s difficult adventures are quite like the difficult Senior year adventures of many American kids. Asking for recommendations IS hard! Coming to terms with growing old(er) is hard! Preparing to leave your best friend is hard! Realizing that you’re going to miss a lot of big moments with your family in the coming years is hard! Moving away from young siblings is hard!

But to tangentially speak about the actual book for a moment, instead of just my own personal feelings ABOUT the book, I am thrilled to report that, unlike the hot mess that was The Sun and the Star: A Nico di Angelo Adventure, The Chalice of the Gods is, happily, good! It felt like a way quicker read than what I remember from my other Percy Jackson adventures, but maybe that’s just because it was fast-paced throughout. I learned a couple of new gods, which is always fun, and enjoyed the deep cuts and callbacks to other Percy adventures.

The only bummer to the book is that I feel like we’re all just meant to ignore the fact that Ganymede is an honest-to-Zeus human trafficking victim. It’s very disturbing, and I didn’t really know what to make of the tone there. Lighthearted-esque, but clearly Ganymede is being held against his will. Zeus has one line of dialogue about Ganymede that’s not sexually explicit but you know what he means, and what he means is gross. Also, Ganymede is canonically a CHILD! He’s Percy’s age, if he’s even that old! Which means that he’s my kid’s age! I’m glad he got his cup back, but he’s still enslaved to his abuser, sooo...

Deeply troubling Zeus sex crimes aside, The Chalice of the Gods is beautiful and sweet, and I loved it. I’d have no idea what was happening or why if I came in cold, but if you read and loved the previous Percy Jackson books, surely you’ll love this one, too.

As for the rest of Senior year… well, my own kid is planning a completely unironic Percy Jackson-themed set of Senior photos, complete with her Camp Half-Blood hoodie, her sister’s Ren Faire sword, and a post-production chimera or two created by her graphic designer father. Over Christmas, she and I plan to buy ourselves a month of Disney+ so we can unironically watch the Lightning Thief reboot. And she has GOT to get her own set of college recommendations completed, even though at the moment she’s acting like this is a feat much more challenging than wrestling the god of old age.

When she and I read the next book in the series, she will, for the first time, be older than Percy. Stay tuned for my whole other set of tears on that day!  

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Day 12 in England: It All Begins at Tintagel

 

It was definitely a Bank Holiday weekend! Breakfast was packed, and the hostess was freaking out. People kept trying to change up the combinations of their full English breakfast even though she admitted she had no way to keep their orders straight, and the Australian couple behind us kept making her go back and put more scoops of coffee in their coffee press, because "British coffee is weak."

Here's my dutifully complete full English breakfast, black pudding and all!

See my delicious orange juice? We kept sneaking back up to the community carafe for refills every time the hostess went into the kitchen to cry, so that she wouldn't be additionally distressed at how much we were hydrating. Everyone else in the restaurant barely touched the juice!

Here's the rest of our day:

• Tintagel Castle
• Dartmoor National Park
• Lyme Regis

Thanks to Matt attempting to ask for only ham, sausage and eggs for breakfast and therefore working the hostess into a dither, we didn't arrive at Tintagel right when it opened, and OMG it was crowded. We learned that not only was it the Bank Holiday Weekend we'd been hearing about, but also the next week was a nation-wide school holiday... we had lots of company everywhere we went for the rest of our trip! 

Much of the Tintagel site is on a headland whose access point to the mainland has mostly collapsed, so you walk across a beautiful pedestrian bridge towards the ruins of a 13th century castle built by the Earl of Cornwall:

There's the bridge connecting us to the mainland.

The tide was high during our visit, but during low tide you can explore the beach and walk into many of those caves: 

Some of us had a wonderful time exploring this headland, taking in the views and the vista and enjoying the height:

Others did not enjoy this, and huddled as far away from the views and the vista and the height as they could:

I'd been inspired to check out the logistics of this drive all the way to Cornwall solely because of its connection to Arthurian legend, which is one of the teenager's current Special Interests. In Le Morte d'Arthur, which we read together last semester (and in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, which we're going to start this week!), Arthur is conceived inside Tintagel Castle, where Igraine is hiding after Uther Pendragon takes a rapey liking to her. Igraine's husband Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, got his wife the hell out of that party where Uther first noticed her, which pissed Uther off, so he used their departure without his permission as his excuse to wage war against Gorlois. 

While Gorlois was off fighting and Igraine was hiding, Merlin figured out a plan to get Uther inside Tintagel Castle so he could rape Igraine. His price: why, only their firstborn child, of course!

Uther had NO problem promising their firstborn child to a magician whose father was an incubus, so he was completely on board with Merlin's plan to magically disguise him as Gorlois. Wearing his Gorlois skin, Uther rode right up to the gates of Tintagel. His servants were shocked to see him, since he was supposed to be literally fighting a battle really far away at the moment. His wife was equally shocked, but Uther got his booty call.

He would have gotten away with it, too, except that the real Gorlois was actually right that second dying in battle...

Anyway, Igraine actually did come around to marrying Uther after her husband (and therefore all means of support and defense against a predatory, powerful king) died, and she, too, had no problem giving baby Arthur up to Merlin. Merlin sent Arthur to live with Muggles, and The Once and Future King is my favorite continuation of that story. 

This is the perfect spot, then, to pay our respects to the birth of the legend that's brought so much magic and beauty into my life:

Matt was so embarrassed to take this photo, lol, but the teenager and I were VERY into it! We're being real knights!

Also, cheese!

Also on the headland are the remains of a beautiful Medieval garden that the Earl of Cornwall may have had constructed to mimic the garden from the story of Tristan and Iseult. 

As you walk around the perimeter of the garden, stepping stones tell you the story:

After exploring the headland, we walked down the path--

--under the bridge--

--past the beach and Merlin's Cave, and then up the long, steep road back into Tintagel... and Cornish pasties!!!

This was our best meal of the entire trip. These Cornish pasties were DELICIOUS!!!

I wanted to be in Lyme Regis in time for the late afternoon low tide, but fortunately we had just enough wiggle room in our schedule for a quick drive and a short hike in Dartmoor National Park. 

The parking lot was teeny-tiny and tight, so the college student and I, the two who were the most revved up about hiking in Dartmoor, bailed and started our hike while Matt waited in the car in case anyone left the lot and he could squeeze in. The disinterested teen stayed with him, and to be honest, we didn't expect to see them at ALL. Imagine our surprise, then, when we saw these two figures on the horizon!

We were technically hiking towards Scorhill Stone Circle, but there wasn't any signage or really any paths, so what we actually did was wander up towards Hound Tor and simply admire the endless moor all around us. Here's a nice rock, though!

People live in Dartmoor National Park, as well, and our walk back abutted someone's sheep field and this very old wall to demarcate it:

Driving through Dartmoor National Park was some of our most terrifying driving yet. And it wasn't even the sheep that were often snoozing in the middle of the road, because we were only going about 5mph so we had plenty of time to stop for them.

Instead, it was THIS!

This is not a road. This is a HEDGE MAZE!

It is a single car-width hedge maze, complete with all the twists and turns that make it impossible to see what's coming from the other direction.

Fortunately, the one time we did encounter a car, we were near enough to someone's gate that Matt could back up, squeeze over against it, and the opposing car could squeeze up against the hedges on their side and creep past. I have NO idea what you're supposed to do if a car wants to pass you here:

At least it made the highways after Dartmoor National Park seem less terrifying by comparison!

We made it to our hotel in Beer with just enough time for us to throw our bags in our rooms and for some of us to head right back out again (others of us took that time to catch up on their socials and pretend like we don't exist). We were going to be in this area for two low tides, and I didn't want to miss a single second of either of them!

We weren't exactly fossil hunting at a Mary Anning level, ahem, but we did find plenty of pretties to weigh down our luggage and distress airport security:

And here are some huge pieces that we admired on our walk:

We got back to Beer around 7:00 to discover that although the town was HOPPING with vacationers, there was absolutely no food to be found. The pubs were overflowing and were all serving drinks only at that point, no food whatsoever. Matt walked around and checked a couple out while the teenager and I hung out on a bench and did some people-watching. The best thing we saw was a group of about four drunk guys, walking down the middle of the road with their arms around each other, singing "We are the cheeky lads!" When we travel, we're always on the lookout for local color, lol!

And that's how we all ended up back in our hotel, bingeing a reality show about people who vacation in caravan parks and supping on only slightly smushed crisps and chocolate bars from our bag of road snacks. 

• Day 1: We made it to England!
• Day 2: Westminster Abbey, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, and Six
• Day 3: British Museum and Buckingham Palace
• Day 4: Mudlarks and Southwark
• Day 5: Natural History Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum
• Day 6: Pax Lodge, the Tower of London, and Afternoon Tea
• Day 7: Back and Forth by Boat to Greenwich
• Day 8: We Careen Our Way to Canterbury Cathedral and Dover Beach
• Day 9: Dover, Hastings, and a Holloway
• Day 10, Part 1: All the Giant Rocks
• Day 10, Part 2: Stonehenge, At Last!
• Day 11: To Avalon with King Arthur
• Day 12: Tintagel
• Day 13: In the Footsteps of Mary Anning
• Day 14: Homewards!