Take the time to travel 'outside the box'

My husband and I worked as volunteers at the annual Festival Letteratura in Mantua, Italy, in 2017, a five-day multi-stage event featuring international writers, artists and musicians. We were the first volunteers from outside Italy. It was a fabulous experience.

When overseas travel opened somewhat in recent weeks, I remembered the Minack Theatre, an outdoor venue we visited in 2002 in Cornwall, the westernmost peninsula in England.

Minack friends referred us to “Ordinalia,” a three-part outdoor theatre-in-the-round pageant held every four years in St. Just, a small town near Penzance. We were accepted immediately, as the first non-local volunteers among hundreds of locals who play the roles, sing and dance. We ushered and took tickets.

Cornwall features spectacular high cliffs above a crashing sea and a language all its own.

“Ordinalia” is based on medieval manuscripts written by monks in the 1400s. The theme is basically biblical: Christ’s life and death. But other biblical themes include Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel and Noah and the ark. The sets, made by locals, are massive with many fanciful special effects like a smoke-breathing dragon. The production is said to have cost more than 250,000 British pounds, which is the equivalent of more than $335,000.

Because all local hotel rooms were booked, an “Ordinalia” volunteer offered to host us for a day until we could find a hotel. The stay with her family turned out to be one of the highlights of a trip with many highlights.

Her grandmother was one of the children evacuated from London during World War II. As the Nazis nightly rained bombs on London and other cities, the children were, for their own safety, temporarily taken away from their parents to a safer location in smaller towns. Her telling of her memories during that time were fascinating.

Our hosts were retired owners of a British pub, which is material for many amusing stories. They drove us around to sites where the smash hit “Poldark” PBS series was filmed. We attended a seminar with the production staff, writers and composers and also spent afternoons at a local shop with homemade ice cream. On nights we worked, we got to chat with fellow volunteers and locals.

We were surprised to see our tribute listing in the formal program as “to Texas volunteers who flew in to lend a helping hand.”

Like our Italian Leterattura friends, we miss them already as “family.”