Yeah we were sad to leave our digs. No one was there this morning to say goodbye to, not even the dogs. Robin and Bel seemed to have gone out very early. Their car was gone. Good thing we did all that last night. If any of you guys ever find yourselves in the Cotswolds, you couldn't do much better than stay at Boyd Farm.
Returning the car was noneventful but since we had to leave the cottage by 1030, we had time enough for lunch before catching the train. A hotel dining room just across from the station served a nice Sunday roast chicken meal with all the trimmings. Perfect.
The train got us to Paddington with 10 minutes to catch the Heathrow Express followed by a very short taxi ride to our hotel. All very smooth. The hotel room is basic but newly refurbished. Good value for $100 and it includes breakfast.
Just think, our two weeks is up already. All we got left is the flight home. When we get to the airport we'll see if there are any upgrades possible. If not, our seats seem ok as is. We leave here at 5:20 pm and arrive home at 6:50 pm. See you all soon!
Sunday, 24 September 2017
Saturday, 23 September 2017
Mermaids and Fishes
This morning everyone was running back and forth between the big barn and the big house carrying all manner of stuff, preparing for a little ones' fifth birthday party at Boyd Farm. This went on for almost an hour and then car after car arrived carrying little boy fishes and little girl mermaids, the theme having been chosen by the birthday girl herself. The dogs and the chickens were scampering all around trying not to be run over. It was spectacular fun to watch and so typical of the wonderful stay we have had here.
Reluctantly, we had to pry our eyes away from the bedlam and concentrate on what we wanted to do on our last proper day here. The decision was to go to Castle Combe which many people consider the prettiest village in England and which was only about 12 miles from home. Who knew? All week we had prepared each day's outing, always on the lookout for pretty villages nearby but had not seen a single printed word written about CC, not even in Rick Steves' book, until this morning when we stumbled upon it on an obscure website.
What an inspired choice. CC was the most wonderful, unforgettable parting gift we could have given ourselves. A small village of Cotswold stone houses nestled along a rambling river at the bottom of a beautiful valley accessible by a very narrow country lane dropping from the ridge above. All right Kari, contain yourself!
The village has been there in some form or another since the 500's but came into its' own at the time of the wool trade in the 1700's and now thrives on tourism. It is still very rural as the horses (and the horse poop) clopping down High Street will attest and it is jaw droppingly beautiful. I lost count of the number of times Carol stopped in her tracks and uttered "OH MY GOD!" It didn't hurt either that the weathergods had given us a perfect, sunny, fall day.
We had lunch in the local inn on the Market Square in their rooftop courtyard overlooking the parish church. They served us the biggest hamburger we had seen in a long time. the meat patty had to be
1 1/2" thick and tasted delicious. (We shared). And of course, we had to finish with scones and clotted cream, one last time!
Reluctantly, we had to pry our eyes away from the bedlam and concentrate on what we wanted to do on our last proper day here. The decision was to go to Castle Combe which many people consider the prettiest village in England and which was only about 12 miles from home. Who knew? All week we had prepared each day's outing, always on the lookout for pretty villages nearby but had not seen a single printed word written about CC, not even in Rick Steves' book, until this morning when we stumbled upon it on an obscure website.
What an inspired choice. CC was the most wonderful, unforgettable parting gift we could have given ourselves. A small village of Cotswold stone houses nestled along a rambling river at the bottom of a beautiful valley accessible by a very narrow country lane dropping from the ridge above. All right Kari, contain yourself!
The village has been there in some form or another since the 500's but came into its' own at the time of the wool trade in the 1700's and now thrives on tourism. It is still very rural as the horses (and the horse poop) clopping down High Street will attest and it is jaw droppingly beautiful. I lost count of the number of times Carol stopped in her tracks and uttered "OH MY GOD!" It didn't hurt either that the weathergods had given us a perfect, sunny, fall day.
We had lunch in the local inn on the Market Square in their rooftop courtyard overlooking the parish church. They served us the biggest hamburger we had seen in a long time. the meat patty had to be
1 1/2" thick and tasted delicious. (We shared). And of course, we had to finish with scones and clotted cream, one last time!
Friday, 22 September 2017
Anyone for Non-Scones?
What a fantastic day we had today. Slept well enough, got up early enough and the weather was perfect enough. Enough enoughs already? With the start we got, we were in Bibury already at about the time we were getting out of bed yesterday. The reason we went to Bibury again was to get a good book on the Cotswolds that we had seen on our last visit there and to properly see the village. We also had locally grown trout for lunch which I found yummy but Carol not so much.
Then on to Bourton-on-the-Water which is considered to be the Venice of the Cotswolds because of its' canals. The first stop was at the tea rooms right in front of where we parked. Lesson for travellers: don't always take the easiest way. Although these tea rooms looked cute, their coffee was almost as bad as the White Spot and their scones were more like poor small copies of Sally Lunn buns. Just a few steps further along High Street were many cafes that looked much better AND overlooked the canals. Oh well.
Bourton is a very pretty village. High Street follows the main canal as it winds through the village. Beautiful trees and grand houses with lovely gardens line the canal and there is a generous pedestrian walk through it all. So picturesque.
On the way home we experimented with fooling the old TomTom and succeeded except for one roundabout which drove me (literally) crazy. More on that later. The way we did it probably took us a bit out of our way but it was a much calmer drive. We told it first to take us to Cirencester and then as we approached Cirencester, we reprogrammed it on the fly to take us to Tetbury and again as we approached Tetbury, we reprogrammed it to take us home. It kept us on roads we knew except for that one roundabout. It was like one of those British comedy sketches where a car goes around and around the roundabout because it can't find the correct exit. I just could've see it no matter how slow I went. The display on poor TomTom looked like a Gordian knot. Eventually, after trying all of the exits, TomTom gave us a pass and sent us along the correct road. I swear I heard applause from other motorists back at the roundabout.
We're home now, happy with our day but in need of a good glass of wine with half a Cornish pastie.
TTFN.
Then on to Bourton-on-the-Water which is considered to be the Venice of the Cotswolds because of its' canals. The first stop was at the tea rooms right in front of where we parked. Lesson for travellers: don't always take the easiest way. Although these tea rooms looked cute, their coffee was almost as bad as the White Spot and their scones were more like poor small copies of Sally Lunn buns. Just a few steps further along High Street were many cafes that looked much better AND overlooked the canals. Oh well.
Bourton is a very pretty village. High Street follows the main canal as it winds through the village. Beautiful trees and grand houses with lovely gardens line the canal and there is a generous pedestrian walk through it all. So picturesque.
On the way home we experimented with fooling the old TomTom and succeeded except for one roundabout which drove me (literally) crazy. More on that later. The way we did it probably took us a bit out of our way but it was a much calmer drive. We told it first to take us to Cirencester and then as we approached Cirencester, we reprogrammed it on the fly to take us to Tetbury and again as we approached Tetbury, we reprogrammed it to take us home. It kept us on roads we knew except for that one roundabout. It was like one of those British comedy sketches where a car goes around and around the roundabout because it can't find the correct exit. I just could've see it no matter how slow I went. The display on poor TomTom looked like a Gordian knot. Eventually, after trying all of the exits, TomTom gave us a pass and sent us along the correct road. I swear I heard applause from other motorists back at the roundabout.
We're home now, happy with our day but in need of a good glass of wine with half a Cornish pastie.
TTFN.
Thursday, 21 September 2017
A day to Recharge
Maybe, finally, we can report that Carol has turned the corner and is feeling somewhat better. Yea! It might have had something to do with sleeping in until 11 this morning but whatever, it's good news. Just to be careful though we decided to only go back to Tetbury for another visit cause it's dead easy to get to and only 30 minutes away. Besides, it's a lovely town and HRH Prince Charles needs all the help he can get supporting his charities through sales at his Highgrove shop there. You'll be glad to hear we REALLY helped.
We had bangers and mash finishing with scones and clotted cream at The Snooty Fox, a pub that has been in town there since 1571. Yum. I think we're putting on weight with all this good eating!
On the way home we detoured via a couple of hidden gem villages and even walked thoroughly through a real beaut, meeting Katie, a lovely lady who lives there and chatting for quite a while. We promised her that we would become her neighbours as soon as we won the lottery.
At home we had a chance to get to know our hostess a bit better. Bel Mooney is a writer as we mentioned earlier. Apparently a well known one, having written and published many fiction novels, non-fiction books and is a regular (Saturday) advice columnist for the Daily Mail. She says she has a large web presence so check her out!
We also talked to her son, the ice cream man and film producer who gave us a tub of his organic ice cream to try. It's SOOOO good.
Well that's all for today. A short blog for a short but beautiful day. TTFN.
We had bangers and mash finishing with scones and clotted cream at The Snooty Fox, a pub that has been in town there since 1571. Yum. I think we're putting on weight with all this good eating!
On the way home we detoured via a couple of hidden gem villages and even walked thoroughly through a real beaut, meeting Katie, a lovely lady who lives there and chatting for quite a while. We promised her that we would become her neighbours as soon as we won the lottery.
At home we had a chance to get to know our hostess a bit better. Bel Mooney is a writer as we mentioned earlier. Apparently a well known one, having written and published many fiction novels, non-fiction books and is a regular (Saturday) advice columnist for the Daily Mail. She says she has a large web presence so check her out!
We also talked to her son, the ice cream man and film producer who gave us a tub of his organic ice cream to try. It's SOOOO good.
Well that's all for today. A short blog for a short but beautiful day. TTFN.
Wednesday, 20 September 2017
How Do You Define Insanity?
It's about 7 pm and Carol is sound asleep in our bed. Now that you all know we are safe, I can tell you about our day without having you jump ahead to see whether we made it out of our time warp alive.
I can now fully understand a scifi story I read many years ago. In it, a self driving car was being programmed to drive around a race course as fast as possible. It did a couple of laps to set its' program. Towards the end of the second lap it skidded and hit the wall but kept going. In its' wisdom it decided that a skid and bump should be part of its' routine and as it speeded up it kept hitting the wall the same way each lap, faster and faster until it destroyed itself.
We didn't hit anything but we had the same sort of failure of logic today as our TomTom tried to guide us to Chipping Campden, which is not too much farther in the same direction we went yesterday. We don't understand why but it decided to send us along the motorway to London first. Motorways in Britain have the same overpasses as we do but they also have roundabouts mixed in, sometimes separately but disturbingly often, as part of a combination overpass/roundabout/exit, with traffic lights. So imagine an instruction like this: "stay right. In two hundred yards turn right, take the fourth exit and veer left." At every major interchange a typical motorway will have three to four lanes approaching exits, overpasses and roundabouts with up to five exits of their own and everyone is going 80 miles per hour. Oh, I forgot to add traffic lights into the mix. So we obviously can't count to 5 fast enough you say. You try it. Anyway, we made the same mistake over and over again and TomTom kept sending us back on the same stretch of motorway over and over again until we really felt we were in a weird kind of time warp. Eventually we managed to get off the motorway and find a place to stop to regroup. At that point we felt the best way to stay off the motorway was to tell TomTom to take us home which it did with flying colours and it chose the most beautiful scenic roads to do it on. Go figure. As we got close to home, we reprogrammed it to take us to Bath which it did and along the way we stopped at this lovely Inn for fish and chips. They had a two for one day! /we each got an entire cod fish, not a fillet but the entire goddamn fish and home made chips and mushy peas. It was incredibly delicious but we won't need to eat now for a week. In Bath we just walked around a bit and got our train tickets back to Heathrow for Sunday and then came home just as the rain started. Tomorrow we might try Chipping Campden again but we will fool TomTom by asking it to send us to Tetbury first and when we get there, quickly reprogram it to carry on to CC. Wish us luck! Insanity? That's when you do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome each time. TTFN.
I can now fully understand a scifi story I read many years ago. In it, a self driving car was being programmed to drive around a race course as fast as possible. It did a couple of laps to set its' program. Towards the end of the second lap it skidded and hit the wall but kept going. In its' wisdom it decided that a skid and bump should be part of its' routine and as it speeded up it kept hitting the wall the same way each lap, faster and faster until it destroyed itself.
We didn't hit anything but we had the same sort of failure of logic today as our TomTom tried to guide us to Chipping Campden, which is not too much farther in the same direction we went yesterday. We don't understand why but it decided to send us along the motorway to London first. Motorways in Britain have the same overpasses as we do but they also have roundabouts mixed in, sometimes separately but disturbingly often, as part of a combination overpass/roundabout/exit, with traffic lights. So imagine an instruction like this: "stay right. In two hundred yards turn right, take the fourth exit and veer left." At every major interchange a typical motorway will have three to four lanes approaching exits, overpasses and roundabouts with up to five exits of their own and everyone is going 80 miles per hour. Oh, I forgot to add traffic lights into the mix. So we obviously can't count to 5 fast enough you say. You try it. Anyway, we made the same mistake over and over again and TomTom kept sending us back on the same stretch of motorway over and over again until we really felt we were in a weird kind of time warp. Eventually we managed to get off the motorway and find a place to stop to regroup. At that point we felt the best way to stay off the motorway was to tell TomTom to take us home which it did with flying colours and it chose the most beautiful scenic roads to do it on. Go figure. As we got close to home, we reprogrammed it to take us to Bath which it did and along the way we stopped at this lovely Inn for fish and chips. They had a two for one day! /we each got an entire cod fish, not a fillet but the entire goddamn fish and home made chips and mushy peas. It was incredibly delicious but we won't need to eat now for a week. In Bath we just walked around a bit and got our train tickets back to Heathrow for Sunday and then came home just as the rain started. Tomorrow we might try Chipping Campden again but we will fool TomTom by asking it to send us to Tetbury first and when we get there, quickly reprogram it to carry on to CC. Wish us luck! Insanity? That's when you do the same thing over and over again, expecting a different outcome each time. TTFN.
Tuesday, 19 September 2017
How Do You Spell Freedom? = NAV
Carol got some much needed help for her cold from Lloyd's Chemists today so we were able to get a good start with exploring the Cotswolds. I caught up with our landlord, Robin, before we left and he was able to loan us his TomTom as promised and off we went. OMG what a difference tech can make! Rather than worry about getting lost, we were able to relax and enjoy the scenery, knowing, no matter how narrow the country lanes, that we would get to our destination as long as we paid attention to the directions given by a rather lovely Irish sounding lass. Roundabouts became a piece of cake as long as we were able to count to 3, max, as in "in 300 yards go through the roundabout and take the third exit". Roads were a joy to drive along with glorious views of rolling, manicured Cotswold fields in every direction. God this is beautiful country. Small villages along the way were so beautiful that we could live in any of them in a heartbeat.
First stop Tetbury. A larger town than I expected but lovely just the same. Unfortunately I had left my phone home, charging, so no pictures were taken today but we will retain the memories of our stops forever. We had lunch in a beautiful garden at the back of a small cafe and then popped into the Highgrove shop across the street to see all of the products produced at Prince Charles' place somewhere nearby. Bought a calendar.
Next to Bibury which was a stunningly quintessential Cotswold village set in a pretty valley with a salmon bearing river running through it. While there we had scones with jam and clotted cream at the Swan, the swankiest hotel in town. Yummy.
We headed home just in time to arrive at our gate before it got dark. All in all, a perfect day.
And, to top it off, our cottage was toasty warm when we got in. (Last night we had frozen our buns off cause we couldn't figure out how to get all of the heaters working properly so tonight is a treat).
First stop Tetbury. A larger town than I expected but lovely just the same. Unfortunately I had left my phone home, charging, so no pictures were taken today but we will retain the memories of our stops forever. We had lunch in a beautiful garden at the back of a small cafe and then popped into the Highgrove shop across the street to see all of the products produced at Prince Charles' place somewhere nearby. Bought a calendar.
Next to Bibury which was a stunningly quintessential Cotswold village set in a pretty valley with a salmon bearing river running through it. While there we had scones with jam and clotted cream at the Swan, the swankiest hotel in town. Yummy.
We headed home just in time to arrive at our gate before it got dark. All in all, a perfect day.
And, to top it off, our cottage was toasty warm when we got in. (Last night we had frozen our buns off cause we couldn't figure out how to get all of the heaters working properly so tonight is a treat).
Monday, 18 September 2017
Carol has a Code
It's been building for a few days now but this morning Carol exhibited all the signs of a full blown cold. My gawd can her nose run when it wants to! So it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone when I have to report that we got a late start again and that we had to cancel our meet with J&J or as they like to be called JX2.
As we were loading up the car we met the son-in-law of the owners who lives with his wife (the owners' daughter) and their own daughter in one of the other cottages on the property. A real nice family who sell organic ice cream at festivals out of a vintage VW ice cream truck from March to October and then produce "rubbish" TV shows through the winter. What with the father being a photographer, the wife being a writer and the kids being TV producers, this farm is a hotbed of creativity.
When we finally got underway, we decided to just go into Bath for a second day and see some of the sights we got a glimpse of on the bus yesterday. Needless to say, we got lost going in again but miraculously, after some dead ends, we found the same parking lot and set off on foot. First Carol wanted to see some dress/shoe shops that aren't in Canada and once that was out of the way we stopped at the oldest pub in Bath (1713) for a lunch of fish and chips and Guinness. Fish was ok but the chips tasted like they were made in 1713. Oh well. After that we toured the Roman Baths which were actually quite interesting because it really showed how clever the Romans were so long ago. Since we had time remaining on our parking ticket after that, we walked up to the Circus and then on to the Royal Crescent both of which are really spectacular townhouse developments. What we didn't know was that these developments were all about the beautiful facade, like Hollywood stage sets and in behind, the rooms of each townhouse were built in any higgledy piggledy fashion, depending on what the owner or developer wanted. If you go around the back and take a look, you see a gigantic huge mess of boxy rooms with no design sense or common rules at all.
As we were driving home a big thundercloud pounced and pelted us with rain. Wow we haven't seen anything like that for at least 6 months, since before our spring holiday. It stopped as quickly as it started so the saying seems to be true: "if you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes"....
No idea what;s up for tomorrow. We'll wait til we see how Carol is feeling
As we were loading up the car we met the son-in-law of the owners who lives with his wife (the owners' daughter) and their own daughter in one of the other cottages on the property. A real nice family who sell organic ice cream at festivals out of a vintage VW ice cream truck from March to October and then produce "rubbish" TV shows through the winter. What with the father being a photographer, the wife being a writer and the kids being TV producers, this farm is a hotbed of creativity.
When we finally got underway, we decided to just go into Bath for a second day and see some of the sights we got a glimpse of on the bus yesterday. Needless to say, we got lost going in again but miraculously, after some dead ends, we found the same parking lot and set off on foot. First Carol wanted to see some dress/shoe shops that aren't in Canada and once that was out of the way we stopped at the oldest pub in Bath (1713) for a lunch of fish and chips and Guinness. Fish was ok but the chips tasted like they were made in 1713. Oh well. After that we toured the Roman Baths which were actually quite interesting because it really showed how clever the Romans were so long ago. Since we had time remaining on our parking ticket after that, we walked up to the Circus and then on to the Royal Crescent both of which are really spectacular townhouse developments. What we didn't know was that these developments were all about the beautiful facade, like Hollywood stage sets and in behind, the rooms of each townhouse were built in any higgledy piggledy fashion, depending on what the owner or developer wanted. If you go around the back and take a look, you see a gigantic huge mess of boxy rooms with no design sense or common rules at all.
As we were driving home a big thundercloud pounced and pelted us with rain. Wow we haven't seen anything like that for at least 6 months, since before our spring holiday. It stopped as quickly as it started so the saying seems to be true: "if you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes"....
No idea what;s up for tomorrow. We'll wait til we see how Carol is feeling
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