Off To “Jolly Old England”
When I turned 65 Terry wanted to give me a ‘big’ present so we decided that we would treat ourselves to a trip to Europe. We also spent the big bucks to have business class seats and we’re SO thankful we did because the flight was through the night. For once (we’ve been to England a few times over the years) we got a fair amount of rest so that we could spend less time with ‘jet lag’ once we landed.
Because of our backs we travel with a feather mattress (thank God we did as the beds are pretty hard there) but that means we had three suitcases. Getting to our rental car place was a bit of a difficult adventure because we had to drag those bags onto trains and busses and stairs and ….phew. And then, when we did finally arrive it was like we were in the ‘Twilight Zone’ as we were to look for our car at spot “F 20” and the lot indicated the spots ended at F 18…ha ha.
It was extremely upsetting and filled me with anxiety when my bag didn’t arrive. Apparently it went to Toronto. Ugh.
But we finally got our car and it was a nice midsize with plenty of room for the cases and small enough for those crazy, tiny lanes. Terry did a fantastic job driving on the other side of the road , the other side of the car, and a standard transmission to boot! We headed out in the rain to find our Ascot refurbished school house VRBO. We picked the location because it was fairly close but also got us out of the busyness of London.
We were very happy with our VRBO’s all across southern England and this was no exception. It was the cutest refurbished schoolhouse, tiny but perfect to rest our heads at night after a day out. Funny thing : Terry went to plug in our extension cord into their electric adapter when we first arrived and we immediately shut down the breaker for all the lights and heat in the place! It took a few tries with our host and his electrician friend but we finally got the problem figured out (breaker turned back on then we used a different cord.)
Our host told us that for dinner we could just walk 5 minutes down the road to the ‘Thatched Restaurant”. We did! But man, it was raining SO hard and we were certainly soaked by the time we arrived. (I also thought it was funny that there was no thatch on the roof of the Thatched Restaurant…ha ha. Oh! And my fish and chips and our carmel, apple tart for dessert were very good.)
Funny : I straightened my hair for the trip and it lasted….just through the night. The rain curled it right back up!
After a wee breakfast of things our hosts left for us in the kitchen, we sort of bookended our trip with a visit to Windsor.
We enjoyed walking down the busy streets and found a lovely pub for lunch. We actually met these two nice women who couldn’t eat their ‘chips’ and gave them to us while we all chatted. I met ‘The King’ . I found him very cardboard…ha ha. It was at this pub that Terry had to come in and lift me off of the toilet. Yup. Unless there’s an accessible toilet…I’m stuck.
Then it was off to Windsor Castle where we just make it in time for prayers in the chapel. It was so strange to see armed policemen outside. Then home to the chickens. ……. and my SUITCASE !
Love the rainy image through our VRBO and the quaint street names. One of my few disappointments on our trip is that I was super excited to see Highclere Castle which you would know as the house in “Downton Abbey”. It was closed to the public but we tried twice to get there. The closest we got was the pheasant above and the shed outside the gate. Ha ha.
While we were in the town of Highclere we pulled over to explore the church of St. Michael and All Angels. The gravestones and fence had so much character as well as the church itself of course.
We had lunch at The Carpenter’s Arms and the BLT sandwich I ordered was hilariously huge. Check out that bread!
The rainbow that led us to our next VRBO seemed to be the sign that the rains would stop ….and they did! It mostly rained through the nights and was lovely with blue skies for our explorations around western and southern England.
TO BE CONTINUED……