Strawberry Fields

What famous Beatles landmark was I standing on?

Answer: The exact spot where the Beatles played their first concert (minus Ringo, who did not join the Beatles until they were already established)…. The place where it all began… The Casbah Coffee Bar in the basement of ex-Beatle Pete Best’s home.

Alright… so now let’s rewind…. We’ll start from the very beginning… a very nice place to start…

Day 1- Friday morning we all packed up into the coach and drove off for Liverpool with our cheerful, punk, and spunky tour guide for the weekend, Jackie. I wrote postcards basically the whole bus-ride. Andrew and I had packed our lunch and ate it in the highway rest-stop that was just like any at home, only instead of McDonalds and Starbucks there was Wimpy and Costa Coffee. Wimpy?! Who names a burger joint that? It’s like advertising “Hey! Want to be a big muscular man? Well… eat at WIMPY and you will get fat and become a wimp.”

As soon as we arrived in Liverpool we deposited our bags at our hotel along the dock of the River Mersey, and took a walk down to The Beatles’ Story Part II. There are two Beatles museums in Liverpool, and this second one was quite small with just one exhibit that focused on Julian Lennon’s life and his thoughts on his father. It was an interesting display in how history repeats itself. John Lennon lost his mother once at a very young age (five or six) when he was sent to live with his Aunt Mimi, and then when she died when he was 17. At five, Julian lost his father to Yoko Ono when Cynthia and Julian came home from vacation to find Yoko living in their house with John. Julian was 17 when John was murdered. It’s a little uncanny really.

A short walking tour around central Liverpool after the museum took us around to the Cavern Club, where the Beatles played almost 300 times while they were based in Liverpool. We broke for dinner and Andrew, and a large group of silly girls went to… get this folks… the HOGS HEAD for dinner! I was looking around for witches and wizards, and well, to be honest the two randos behind us in this photo may have been just that.



The Hog’s Head was CHEAPPPP (6.95 for a GIANT plateful of food) and the ambience was fun, and of course the dessert was AMAAZING and we ended up going back the next day for dessert as well.

We tucked in early as we were getting up at 7 the next morning for a full day of Beatles touring.

Day 2- Kathryn and I were the first to arrive at breakfast the next morning. We were actually slightly early, as the door was still locked when we walked up. We were approached by the server and asked if we wanted the buffet for 6 pounds or the hot English breakfast including the buffet for 8.50. “Well that would not do!” I thought. We were told our breakfast was included with our tour. So we informed the server of this, and he told us that we could have whatever we wanted. So of course we ordered it all. I have to say it was the best meal I have had since I’ve been here. The croissants were so fresh that they were still warm. There was yogurt and fresh fruit, fresh, warm, baguettes, chocolate and regular croissants, an array of cereals, juices, and then the hot English came with eggs and hash browns, mushrooms, tomatoes and meat (for the carnivores.) I ate so much that I skipped lunch.

We took a coach tour around in the morning and saw the childhood homes of George and Ringo. This nice little old lady that lives in Ringo’s home invites people in to her private home to see it FREE OF CHARGE. All she asks is if you would donate any spare change to the cancer society in town. Since she has started doing it she has raised 5000 pounds just from spare change donations. She was so cute. She told us that she was Ringo’s neighbor when he was a boy, and she had memorabilia all over the walls. She had lots of letters and gifts from people who had visited. She particularly loved this squirrel, and was tickled when I told her both of my parents went to Indiana University!



We also drove by the studio where the first Beatles’ demo was recorded, we drove down Penny Lane and listened to the song along the route, we stopped at Strawberry Fields (which was actually an orphanage that no longer exists), we stopped at the church where John and Paul first met, and we saw the grave of Eleanor Rigby (Paul did not know there was an Eleanor Rigby when he wrote the song… weird, right?)

In the afternoon we went and toured the childhood homes of John and Paul. Both John and Paul’s homes are owned by the National Trust, so they are very much in the condition they would have been in the 1940s and 50s. John was the most middle class of the bunch, and so his house was named…. Mendips.

Both homes had live-in custodians, and when the custodian of Paul’s house came out to greet us I turned to Kathryn and said, “Oh, my gosh, it is Paul McCartney himself coming to meet us.” Well, obviously he wasn’t, but I’m not convinced that it wasn’t Paul posing as a custodian so that he could lead a double life. What do you think?



It was cool seeing these places and imagining the Beatles as young boys, with Paul climbing up the drainpipe to the bathroom when his dad would lock them out of the house during the day to keep them from wreaking havoc in the house and John drawing with his sketchpad and ignoring everything his aunt would say to him. Really, they were children just like the rest of us. While Paul and John had such a volatile relationship, they were more alike than they would have liked to admit. Both were deeply affected by the deaths of their mothers at young ages and both of them wrote much of their music to their moms. “Let it Be” is a tribute to Paul’s mother, Mary McCartney who would always tell Paul to “let it be” when he came to her with problems.

With our free time in the afternoon a group of us went to the Tate Art Museum branch in Liverpool and looked at the Seagram Murals by Rothko, the last paintings he did before he committed suicide. They were really beautiful, but dark, full of the mood that reflected his life. It’s tragic when geniuses lose themselves and find no escape.

A group of us went to dinner with our professor and his son, Dante, and the Philharmonic Pub, that has super-fancy men’s restrooms. Andrew took a picture. It was a lot of fun there, we laughed a lot, and the food was delicious. I had a bowl of fresh tomato soup and it was FREE because Elon paid for it since we were with our Prof!

On our walk home we went down to the piers and took photos in front of the Ferris wheel. We were having loads of fun.



Day 3- Another coach tour took us to Brian Epstein (manager of the Beatles) gravesite. He died of a drug overdose, and with his death began the breakup of the Beatles. We also went to the club where Paul and John first played together. At the end we went to the Casbah Coffee Bar and we were given a private tour by Pete Best’s sister-in-law. It’s WILD to think of how close of connection we had, we were getting first-hand accounts of things! The family has kept everything the way it was, and has not tried to preserve or treat anything. The ceilings were painted by the Beatles and she told us that the National Trust is mad at them for not taking more measures to protect them, but what she said was “well, it seems to be doing just fine, so I don’t think we need to fix what isn’t there.” As we were leaving the quiet residential neighborhood, the police pulled up because our lovely tour guide’s car had been robbed while we were in there. Her window wwas shattered and the GPS stolen. We all felt so bad for her, but her attitude was one of “well, these things happen.”

In the afternoon we toured the Beatles Story Part I and I felt pretty cool because I knew the basic gist of everything in the museum already. We had just been overloaded with every Beatles landmark in Liverpool and have been taking the class for a month, so there was a lot of repetition. Good way to study for the midterm.

Right before we left Kathryn, Andrew and I walked up to the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral and the Liverpool Cathedral, both so cool in such different ways. The Metropolitan was built in the 1960s and is very futuristic with brilliant colors on the interior and twisted metal.




The gothic style Liverpool Cathedral is the largest in England and 5th in the world. There was a service going on while we were in there, and it was truly awesome to hear the gorgeous choir singing as we looked at the colors of the stained glass windows reflecting on the wall.

We left refreshed and totally overwhelmed with Beatles trivia. It was a great weekend, and I truly love Liverpool.

It was sad seeing Andrew go this morning, but it is nice to be home in Foggy London town.