Walking, More Tea Drinking, and Dancing

I was originally planning to catch the train back to Hook today, but when I mentioned so yesterday, there was a collective gasp and I was invited to stay longer. Since I really don't have any responsibilities calling me back to Hook, and I'm having a fabulous time here, I accepted the offer to stay a little longer.

After a quiet morning, Richard, Margaret, Henry, James, Becky, and I headed out to a park called Hind Over with a beautiful valley view. We also went to a village called Alfriston for some wandering, window shopping, and a cup of tea.

Part of the view at Hind Over.

A fabulous twisted door handle in Alfriston.

Cathedral of the South Downs in Alfriston.

In the evening, the six of us went to Esther and Ian's home for a cheese fondue and a dancing lesson taught by Henry and his dancing partner, Jenny. Henry has been taking ballroom dance lessons for a year and Jenny has been dancing for three years. The furniture was cleared out of the long living room and we learned the basic steps for jive, quick-step, waltz, and fox-trot, with a barn dance at the end (circular dance with changing partners). It was so fun watching Jenny and Henry demonstrate each dance before we gave it a try! It was quite hysterical to compare them to our clumsy attempts, but they cheerfully helped us out and guided everyone through the steps.

I've always envied people who can do ballroom dance but I also wasn't willing to sign up for lessons and seriously try it out. I've often described my aversion to dancing as, "I don't want random guys pawing me"... I think it's mostly due to dancing movies and the heavy doses of body contact on Dancing with the Stars. I was surprised to feel so comfortable tonight... probably helped that I was with friends and for the most part we were stumbling and laughing instead of actually dancing!

It was a fun introduction and kind of makes me wish I had dragged my brothers to lessons years ago. Having only played around with dancing with girlfriends in high school, I felt pretty inept, but it was a blast trying out the steps. There's definitely a huge sense of accomplishment when you can finally more or less move through a sequence in time and without stepping on each others' feet. As different people took breaks, partners were swapped around and we laughed throughout the evening.