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Cotswolds and more

Posted by: on Aug 1, 2008 | No Comments

We left Leeds with a day of driving ahead. We loop-de-looped through Sheffield only stopping to give way at the many roundabouts, and there was no time to stop and sit down in Chesterfield despite the enticing name. We were bounding down the M1 for a lunchtime stop in Nottingham, aiming to make it to the village of Nailsworth by evening.

But this was England and this was the M1. Two miles from Nottingham we all came to a standstill and soon traffic stopped flowing from the other direction as well. Turns out there was a major accident further down the road closing off both directions of England’s main motorway. That means everyone was going to Nottingham for lunch! Two hours later and our two mile crawl into Nottingham was over.

On the road again we were on the road south. Somewhere along the way we (I) decided we needed to go via Bicester, just outside of Oxford, for its factory outlet shops which included a Camper shop (yes, yes, the Camper shop tour of the world, I know). The delay meant I only had an hour to choose between pretty shoes, gorgeous leather and soft angora from Pringle before they closed.

It was now around 8pm (and still light, of course) so the original plan to cook at the Cotswold cottage went out the door. We stocked up on food at the supermarket next door but decided to go to Oxford, just down the road, for dinner.

By the time we finished dinner it was getting close to 10pm and we still had about an hour long drive to the Cotswolds and this is where things started to go wrong. Well not so much wrong, as things were’s going as I planned so I started to worry. To summarise: we were low on petrol and there are no open petrol stations at that hour in country England; we were vaguely lost the whole way there, thanks to the confusing numbers and signs of England’s roads; and we realised we didn’t have the street address for the cottage.

It’s just a cottage in Nailsworth. Turns out Nailsworth is full of cottages and we had no way of knowing which was the right one, except for Peter’s memory when he’d been here a good ten years earlier. I couldn’t believe we were in a town where everyone had gone to sleep, in a car with no petrol, looking for a house we didn’t know the address of!

Peter worked out the street quickly enough, and luckily it was daytime in Australia so we could’ve called the relos who know the place more intimately than us. Once we’d found the street we had to work out which of the 6 or so houses matched the description of where the owner said the keys would be left. Acting like cat burglars we felt around the front garden of one house looking for a table and a pot plant. No luck. A couple of houses later we found a gate and a table and a pot plant that had to be the one. The sound of the front door unlocking was the best thing I’d heard all day.

The next day the sunlight showed us just how beautiful the little cottage was. We were in the top storey attic room, three floors up winding stairs from the street. Even the carpeted bathroom with a bath and no shower was cute.

Just down the road from the cottage was the amazing Hobbs House Bakery, which was so good it makes we weep not being near it now. Oh how I love solid English/Irish bread with it’s wheaty flavour that, with a good slab of butter, can’t be matched by any bread around the world. There was also a gourmet grocer, a flower shop and everything else you’d hope for in a stereotypical (but fashionably upmarket) English village.

Over the next couple of days we drove to Bath and Bristol, we contemplated driving to Wales because it was there, and we met up with fellow Aussies who were temporarily working and living nearby Mike, Jackie and Brendan in the quaint town of Broadway for a pub lunch.

On the way back to London we spent a day in Oxford with Peter’s friend Oz who is doing a PhD there in something scarily academic and physics-like. Highlights: burritos for lunch, cookies and milk stall in the market, an insider’s tour of the insides of an Oxford college, long walks through parks, watching people (badly) punting and eating French for dinner.

And that was is for the green rolling hills of England because the next and last stop on the European voyage was London.

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