Excursions

During our stay in Chippy, we gallivanted around the countryside in our tiny little hire car. We got some advice from a local about good places to visit and one of these places was called Stow-on-the-Wold in Gloucestershire, just west of Oxfordshire. We parked the tiny car and went for a leisurely walk around the little village. The nice thing about the UK is the great old buildings and pubs, so even just looking at the houses and streets was interesting enough for us Aussies who have so little history to look at back home.

Stow-on-the-Wold has a square in the town centre. Markets and fairs were held there, where people would come to sell and trade livestock. Now the square is just a carpark. It was interesting to discover little alleys where they would have run sheep through to get to the main square for sale.

We discovered a great old church near the centre with a graveyard. It was amazing to see the old headstones and to think how old they must have been. It was hard to tell what year they were from because they were covered in lichen and the letters were so worn.

It was getting around dinner time so we decided to start the search to find a nice little pub to have a meal. We must have looked like tourists (all five large adults craning our necks in search for a sign that resembled a pub or establishment that served food) because a local called from her car and said "If you're looking for a good pub that does good grub then go to the Queens Head! It's just up that road". That was enough to send us on a hunt for the "good grub" (us tourists with rumbling tummy's). We walked up "that road" but didn't come across the Queens Head so we decided to ask another local (a nice gentlemen who was outside his front door watering one of his many hanging flowerpots). He pointed us in the right direction and gently warned us that the Queens Head was "very much a local's pub", but that's exactly what we wanted. So we continued on our hunt for the pub and discovered it in the main square. It was a nice quaint little pub that did have good grub! We ordered our usual beverages to accompany our meals - a pint of local beer for Roy and Pimms with all the Bits for the ladies.

It's always fun to have an adventure with advice from the locals.

Another nice little town we visited in the Cotswalds is Burford. It was a lot like Maleny, Monteville or Tamborine Mountain, with nice little streets full of boutique shops, cafes, pubs and antique stores. Most little villages or towns in England have limited street parking so you need to find a public parking place which is usually a little walk from the main street. It's so nice to just walk up and down the little streets doing a bit of window shopping or drooling at the boutique bakeries and cafes. We had heard stories about a place called Huffkins from Clare and Sadie, so when we discovered one in Burford we couldn't resist stopping in for a cream tea. Cream teas usually come with clotted cream which is quite different to whipped cream, so it took a little getting used to because it had a much stronger taste (kind of like butter).

We also couldn't resist a visit to the sweet shop which had jars and jars of all different kinds of tasty little morsels that you could buy by the 100g. I had to stop myself from going crazy in there for fear of not having enough money to spend on food and other important items. I didn't think I could survive the rest of the trip on just sweets. We learnt a few things whilst in England. What we call "lollies", they call "sweets". What we call "ice blocks", they call "lollies". We call "trousers", "pants" and they call "underwear", "pants". So we had to stop ourselves from calling our trousers "pants" otherwise people would think we were talking about our undies. Oh, and they call "thongs", "flip flops" and they call "g-strings", "thongs". So you can imagine why we had to stop calling our summer footwear "thongs". It was especially funny when Roy's Mum forgot this and was talking rather loudly about her "thongs" breaking, and her delight at finally wearing a fresh pair of "pants" after a trip to the laundrette...

So, back to the sweets....

These tasty little things were called "Millions" which you could get in a multitude of flavours but we opted for the mixed ones so we could get a taste of them all. They were too good to eat a handful of all the flavours at a time so we ate them one at a time to taste each flavour individually, whilst making them last longer too. They were kind of like skittles but less artificial tasting.

We would have gone to a lot more places in Oxfordshire and the surrounding county's if we had more time. We've got lots more to look forward to when we come back.