This is the view from my hotel room, looking down Mermaid Street.  The buildings across the street have bizzare names, things like "The House Opposite", "The House with Two Doors", and some others I can't remember.  At the top of the hill is Lamb House, where the writer Henry James live for many years.  Joseph Conrad (!) and a bunch of other writers have also spent time in Rye.

Here I am eating dinner in a 650 year-old restaurant.  Oh My!!!

Here's Rye Castle, a Monty Python-sized affair on the corner of town facing the English Channel.  It's now a museum.

Rye was a walled city at one time, but most of the walls are gone now.  One of the original gates remains.

Here is one of the tea rooms at the Mermaid Inn.  The architecture of the Mermaid is wild--to get to my room I had to go up a narrow staircase, then down a hallway that had a humped floor and some bizzare steps with a ceiling height of maybe 5 feet.  The pub in back was probably the coolest room, it was dominated by a huge fireplace that covered the entire wall, an affair with a timber mantel and enough room to park a car in it.  Sorry, I never got around to photographing the pub.

The best part of Rye was walking down cobblestone streets at nighttime.  When it is foggy and no other people on the streets, well, it is easy to become disconnected from the present and really experience the history.