Another WOW day! Drove with Allan and Dot down to Cheltenham (about a two-hour drive), where Dot’s daughter Julie and her daughter Chantelle live. We also met Mark, Julie’s friend, who works in Oman but who was on leave for a few days.
After all the introductions, we drove to Bourton-on-the-Water. This is a really pretty village, with a river running through, and all the buildings are made of beautiful Cotswold stone. The village is also the home of Brum, the little yellow car of the TV series. Before exploring the many shops, we decided to have lunch at the Duke of Wellington pub where we sat in the garden, next to the river.
There were hundreds of people around – we counted 15 coaches! Seemingly Tuesday is the usual “old people’s” day out (not that we’re including ourselves, of course!). Nevertheless, we had no problem with space nor with parking, which was a nice surprise.
As in the other Cotswold villages we’ve visited, it was so peaceful just ambling around, taking photographs and drinking in the colourful gardens and quaint houses.
After a couple of hours, we drove on to Bibury, reputedly one of the oldest villages in the area. Once again , there is a river flowing through the village and we had a leisurely stroll along the river bank to a series of heritage cottages with very low doors and tiny windows. All along the river were ducks, either paddling furiously with the fairly swift current, or asleep on the top of the walls.
We had a cup of tea in a quiet courtyard and then headed back to Julie’s, where we had a curry before driving back to Allan and Dot’s.
After we had been driving for about an hour, Dot realised she had left her handbag at Julie’s, at the same time as Julie rang to say she had found it! We had to turn around and go back the other way, after arranging with Julie to meet her halfway. As we were on a motorway, this was not all that easy but we finally managed to do it.
There are still many more places in the Cotswolds we would like to visit over the next couple of months – they are so quintessentially English and so many English movies/TV series are filmed there that some of them seem quite familiar (it was easy to imagine Miss Marple bustling around solving crimes).
