Distance walked: 16km, Alcohol consumed: 1 1/2 pints of beer
We took a taxi from the centre of Oxford to the car hire depot on the outskirts just after 9am this morning. It was pleasant watching people rushing to work when you are sauntering off to the next stop on your holiday. Our hire car is a hybrid, which is a bit startling when the engine just stops when you expect to be idling at the lights.
Mary had programmed her GPS to find the shortest route, which meant highways and motorways. I reprogrammed it for scenic routes which took not much longer but were much prettier. I'm trying to convince Mary that the journey is as much a part of the holiday as the destination. She is not entirely sure.
Our first stop on our drive through the Cotswolds was Stow-on-the-Wold. It was a bit of a disappointment because, while it is very pretty, it is also very twee. Every second shop was a tea shop and the ones in-between were antique shops. We stopped at one of the tea shops for some decent coffee, lowering the average age of the customers considerably.
We then went on to Lower Slaughter. It's main claim to fame is the pretty, but short walk, to the village of Upper Slaughter. Lower Slaughter is tiny. Besides houses it has a pub, the old manor house which has been converted into a restaurant and the old mill which has been converted into a gift shop. Mary wasn't convinced we had arrived. She kept looking around for the main street with the shops. It took some work to convince her we were standing on the main street - all 100m of it.
We then set off on the walk to Upper Slaughter which is part of a waymarked trail know as the Warden's Way. We first went pass many paddocks with horses, but then across a main road and through a housing estate. This didn't seem to be the pretty walk we had been promised so we headed back to Lower Slaughter and went in the opposite direction (once we found the cunningly hidden sign). This was the right way and it was pretty. It was also supposed to take around 30 minutes to walk. However, we measured the distance and it is only 1km between the two villages and along the river bank so dead level. Perhaps if you crawled it would take 30 minutes.
Upper Slaughter was even tinier than Lower Slaughter, finally convincing Mary that some things are about the journey, not the destination. We then headed back to Lower Slaughter and the pub for lunch. This was a strange experience. The pub was very old, with many odd shaped rooms with low beams. We went in, helped ourselves to some menus and found ourselves a table. After making up our minds I went to the bar to order. However, it is trying to be a gastro pub with table service so we had confused the system. I had also confused the barman. The staff seems to consist of two Eastern Europeans - one man and one woman, which was not nearly enough for the size (and shape) of the place. The woman seemed terrified of doing anything with a customer - taking an order or taking their payments. She just wanted to clear tables. The man, the barman, was happy serving customers drinks but didn't want to take orders. Eventually an Englishman showed up to take our order.
I had wild garlic arancini with grilled zucchini, roasted tomatoes and peas with feta. The arancini were crispy but otherwise dull. The accompaniments were tasty. I think I had a 1/2 pint of a local beer, but I couldn't tell you what it was. That was stretching the barman's abilities too far.
After lunch we headed off for Chipping Campden. Our timing was perfect as it began to rain just as we were leaving. We were lucky all day, as while it was cool, it was generally sunny. The only times it rained where when we were in the car driving somewhere. Chipping Campden was everything Mary was hoping for in a Cotswold village. It is very pretty but has real shops for real locals too. It also has a few things to look at - an amazing church, Market hall and tiny museum dedicated to the local arts & crafts movement.
After this successful stop we headed off to Broadway to climb their tower and get a view of the countryside - which is picture postcard beautiful. Unfortunately we had programmed the GPS for the village of Broadway and it turns out the tower is a few kilometres away. By this stage it was 5pm and we couldn't be bothered searching for it so we headed for our destination for the night - Painswick.
I had high hopes for our B&B here, St Anne's. I had booked the blue room - to be converted from a twin into a double - for Mary and the red room - with its four poster bed for me. When we arrived we were told by a slightly sheepish landlady, Iris, that she had set the blue room up as a twin for us as she had noted the booking was for two people. It was only when she double-checked our booking the day before that she saw we had asked for two rooms. Sadly she had rented out the (my!) red room already to someone else. I'm staying here - in the blue, twin bedded room, while Mary is staying next door with some friends of the landlady who used to run a B&B and still have some spare rooms. All very awkward for Mary. Apparently, this is not the first time Iris has stuffed up and overbooked, requiring her friends to come to the rescue. In fact, I walked the Costwold Way around 10 years ago and I remember when I got to Painswick, my sheepish, ditzy landlady bumped me to a neighbouring property. I wonder if it was Iris?
After settling in at our respective B&Bs we headed out for dinner. Mary initially said she refused to eat at anywhere Iris recommended. We then discovered that the 5 places Iris told us about are the only places to eat in Painswick of an evening. We ended up at the Royal Oak which was a good, local pub with decent local pub grub. I had a chicken & leek pie with mashed potatoes and some fried cabbage. The first leafy greens I've eaten all holiday.
Then back to our respective B&Bs for the night. My room here is quaint with oddly sloping floors. The bed is OK, but I have the choice of opening a window and being cold or keeping it closed and having the room be very stuffy. All the houses here are so well insulated it is really rather inconvenient.
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