The cottage was on the property behind this beautiful house which is called "The Kiln House" which is where the owners live.
The cottage wasn't all that glamorous but it served us quite well. It had it's charm and it also had a bit of a quirk about it. Our cottage was called "The Drake" and it was attached to another cottage called "The Duck" and there were statues of ducks throughout it.
This was the room that Roy and I slept in. A tad squishy and when we pushed the beds together we had levels... Roy's bed was higher than mine. Lucky he didn't roll over and squash me.
Around Oxfordshire there are great little public footpaths that cut through farmland to take the quickest route to the nearest village. They were usually signed but sometimes the paths were a little ambiguous but a fun to explore. Roy and I decided to take a walk into Chippy and before we realised that the footpaths were signed, we walked down what we thought was the "footpath" but thought that it was a little too rugged to be a public place. We persevered thinking that people just liked to walk in rugged areas but once we reached an abandoned machinery shed we realised that we'd taken the wrong path.
We did discover some beautiful flowers along the way though.
Eventually we found the correct path and carried on with our journey to Chippy.
As I said before, the footpaths cut through farmland (right through the middle of crops).
Being in Oxfordshire felt like being in a nursery rhyme or story book because we came across things that you would only read about in Australia. We saw bunny rabbits, squirrels, dandelions and beautiful big fields with moo cows. On our walk to Chippy, I discovered a GIANT dandelion and couldn't resist blowing it.
We hired a car for the first week so we could drive around Oxfordshire. We had some crazy adventures with five giant adults in one tiny car. It would have been a sight to see all five of us pile in and then extricate our large bodies when we hopped out. We couldn't stay in the car for too long at one time because it got rather uncomfortable, but lucky for us there were pubs in every village so we took advantage of our rest stops and had a beer or a Pimms with all the bits.
We had a rest stop in a pub in Chippy, deciding to sit out in the beer garden and have a few quiet beverages. Halfway through a sip of Pimms, I noticed that Roy's Mum was sitting on a chair with one of its legs stuck halfway down a drain hole - and that just a small movement could un-stick it, sending the leg down the drain and herself onto the ground! When I pointed it out to her, her face was priceless as she realised her predicament. She promptly said "Help Mummy!!!", putting her arms out for us to help her up and off the precarious chair. "Help Mummy" became a bit of a catch phrase for the rest of the week.
Most places we went in Oxfordshire had hanging baskets with beautiful flowers. Walking through these villages was a slow task because Roy's Mum stopped and looked at, smelt and sometimes picked flowers from each flower arrangement. It was nice to see such an array of different, vibrant flowers.
The Drake provided us with a great rest and recuperation place where we would retire at night after gallivanting around the countryside, exploring all the nooks and crannies of Oxfordshire. Some nights we just wanted to get home, get into our PJs, crack open the beer and play a bit of UNO or trivial pursuit (us youngin's sucked big time at trivial pursuit as the questions were aimed at older generations - it was still fun trying! Even better after a few beers). We didn't have enough cans of beer to have one each one night so we had to pour it into a glass (or in our case, tea cups). Why would you want to use a glass when you have a perfectly good tea set? I thought it appropriate given we were in the land of tea.
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