Stratford upon Avon and the Cotswolds

This month we went into English countryside overdrive.

Friday after work we were wondering what we should do for the weekend.
 We bantered back and forth about taking a train to York or going to
Canterbury, none of it seemed right.  Then we thought about hiring a
car and driving to Stratford!  Now that would be exciting!  I have
only driven once in the last six months, and I've *never* driven on
the left side of the road.  But I figured that I've got the feel of
this whole left side of the road thing from all the busses, so it
shouldn't be a big deal.

On Saturday morning we called a little Bed and Breakfast in Oxhill,
which is a village 6 miles outside of Stratford and booked a room. 
Then we headed down to one of the million and a half car rental
agencies around our flat.   We rented a little Vauxhall
Corsa which is a 1.0 Litre hatchback.  Very small outside, but
pretty big inside, and it's engine was about as powerful as my old
Honda Civic (which was pretty peppy).



I soon got the hang of the left side of the road thing.  What really
got me was doing so many complicated things with my left hand. 
Shifting and working the turn signals kept throwing me for a loop.  A
couple of times, I signaled left instead of shifting into third.

In London, some of the round-a-bouts were a little hair raising.  We
took the M40 to get out of the city, and to get onto it, we had to go
around a 4 lane round-a-bout where two motor-ways met up.  Whom ever
thought it would be a good idea to join two highways with a roundabout
 was smoking crack.  We had to go around it a couple of times before
we figured out the right exit, and I had to push my way through
several lanes of traffic several times to do so.  It's all about being
in the right lane at the right time, and if you don't know which lane
you need to be in, then you're pretty much hosed.  But besides that it
was fine, and it was all good fun.


On the way up, we stopped in the best little inn.  It was 17th century
and had a nice fire going.  I had a yummy breakfast.  I couldn't get
over how yummy it was.  It was so good I took a picture.

Yes, the toast *is* deep fried.

We saw Shakespeare's birth place and his tomb.  For several hundred
years, this city has really made quite the industry out of him.

I didn't want to pay the nice old lady any money to go see his tomb so
I took a fuzzy picture from 10 meters away.

Strangely enough, Stratford upon Avon has nearly the same population
as Stratford Ontario.

Our Bed and Breakfast was quite nice.  They had horses, and our room
was quite nice

Always with the single beds!

The b'n'b was great except for the crazed guy who ran the place.  He
has very strong political views, and seems to be right out of the
50's.  Oddly enough he also nailed a frog to a beam out front of the
house.  We didn't read too much into this, and certainly made no
mention of it to him, lest we should unleash, what we imagined would
be, his unbridled wrath.


We went and saw "A Comedy of Errors" at the Royal Shakespeare
Theature.  It was amazingly done.  Who would have thought that 500
year old dialogue could be made funny.  They did a great job of using
physical and non-verbal humour to keep things entertaining.
Apparently fart jokes were popular back in Shakespeare's time too!

During intermission, or "the interval" as the Brits call it, they
lowered the curtain.  But written in large block letters on it was
"Safety Curtain".  This baffled me.  So I did what only seemed
reasonable.  I took a picture.


While window shopping, we came across a discount book store.  As one
might expect from a discount book store, they had a really good deal
on, for a nylon string classical guitar.  So I bought it!  Then I
tuned it up and played for a little bit.  Of course I got off of the
major roads, so as to avoid the inevitable throngs of groupies and
money throwers.

On the way back to London, we drove through the Cotswolds.  This is a
unique part of English countryside.  It's all very narrow country
roads (which isn't unique) but they snake through very old picturesque
towns.  It's a "must do" travel destination in this part of the
country, and is one of the entries in our "25 day trip from London"
book, so we figured it would be worth the drive.

It rained most of that day, but it didn't matter because *we had a car*!

I don't know how many times we came into another little village and I
said, "Welcome to Hobbiton!"  or "There's the Brandywine River".  This
area could very well have been were J.R.R. Tolkein got his motivation
for the Shire, because he lived in Oxford.

On the way back, we stopped in Oxford again.  We also got lost driving
around in the city.  That was fun, except that all the streets are big
enough for only one car.  So we played chicken with oncoming traffic
fairly frequently.

Here are all of the pictures