Last night we had dinner at the only restaurant in Stanton, a very small community. How small was it? You could walk the length of the main street before reading this sentence out loud. But every single house was Cotswolds honey-toned, cozy, picturesque, flowery. I am almost tired of taking pictures of cute houses and beautiful flowers. Nah.
Hidden away in this small town is a high-falutin' restaurant. I had their meat and cheese plate. All the meats and cheeses were locally sourced. As in Portlandia, I'm sure they could tell me the name and favorite colors of the cow and pig who provided my dinner. It was delish.
As a bonus, the restaurant was perched on a hill with a view of the setting sun.
(Jessica, we had sticky toffee pudding for dessert. It was gooooood.)
Yesterday's blog post was brought to you courtesy of the only place guests could get an internet connection: on top of the counter next to the washing machine. I typed in rhythm to the dry cycle.
It was cloudy this morning. Yay, I said, because it got hot and humid towards the end yesterday. Throughout most of today's walk, it continued to be slightly humid, but the cloud cover, which lasted for the morning and some of the afternoon, was refreshing. There was also a cooling breeze that blew at random times
There were several points during the walk when there was a 180-degree panorama of the charming countryside. Rolling hills, meandering streams, fluffy sheep (as long as you weren't standing in their shit), stone walls, long hedgerows, tiny towns with church steeples the highest point in their universe -- this was the world for as far as we could see. It is the world of those BBC productions (except the scary ones or the political ones).
Never mind the military jets screaming as they broke the sound barrier or the lorries changing gears on the hidden highways.
We reached Winchcombe too early to check into the bed-and-breakfast, so we stopped for afternoon tea. Load me up with cream, butter, mayo, and jam. Bring it on.
The B&B was supposedly a mile out of Winchcombe, down a pastoral footpath. After tromping through an overgrown field, down a footpath junglified with vines and weeds, and dodging traffic on a main thoroughfare, closer to two miles later we looked longingly at the neighborhood pub but trudged on instead a few hundred feet to the B&B.
Our hosts are grand, the bed is huge, the internet is fast ... and they do laundry. The quadfecta!
Incongruously, the aforementioned pub in this small town of Greet (small as in small like Stanton) has a fantastic Thai restaurant. The very young, hip-looking bartender bemoaned the lack of beer, its delivery truck having broken down, but poured us an adequate cider and a half-pint of the only beer left. While we were waiting for our food, we watched him joke with the regulars, take phone orders for Thai food, flirt with the young women, wrestle with orders for cold wine ("I said cold wine; this wine isn't cold!"), and grab crisp packets and shrimp chips (one for the bar side and the other for the Thai restaurant). Between his work day and our 7-mile walk into town, he wins the hardship award.
We're staying put in this history-heavy town for another day.
My best friend, Monique, from Chipping Campden
The B&B we left this morning.
On of those honey-stoned cottages with lots of flowers.
What is this? As with so many things along the pathside, it said look, don't touch.
No bull, thank goodness. Or he was full already.
Today's lovely selection of lovely flowers. Poppies, scabiosa, and clover grow wild. Almost everyone has hydrangea. I liked this pink lace-capped variety.
This is for Frank. On our walk across England, he took pictures of unusual looking trees. Not all of them were dead. But all of these were.
Boy, once Wimbledon ends and the media pack up, they sure let the courts go to seed, don't they?
Something out of the "Blair Witch Project"? No, just a wayside curiosity. See the witch on the weathervane and the chair tacked above the door to the spooky-looking hut? Bum knee and all, I double-timed it through this area.
Frank asked us to keep a lookout for Coleridge's ghost. So this picture, too, is for Frank. One ghost, as ordered.
One of our favorite books to read to the boys when they were little was "Hank the Cowdog." The horses in that book would say, "Bite 'em, bite 'em." So that's what Tom mumbled all the way up this horse hill. Bite 'em.
The dreaded two-arrow climb. Although we did three-arrow climbs on the Coast-to-Coast walk, the dreaded two-arrow ascents were plenty breath-taking (actually). This bench was at the top of one of the two-arrow ascents. It was in memory of "Pinky." Here Tom has his arm around Pinky to thank him/her for a place to rest weary bones.
I do not grow tired of looking at the stone fences.
In the middle of nowhere, there is a monument. To what? We don't know because all the writing has been scoured by wind and rain, and the statue has been taken. I think Tom is looking for the missing statue.
I also never get tired of the different plants that inhabit the tightly woven hedgerows.
Okay, one more picture of a quaint structure + pretty flowers.
There were millions of sheep, but two of them were in this shed. Was this the reward for the employees of the month? Or, because of the temperature, were they being slowly roasted.
At the pleasant tea room with the pleasant and revivifying tea and the more-than-pleasant scones.
