UK Trip Day 32 Farewell dinner at Susan's

Farewell dinner with friends

It's our last full day at Susan's place before returning home to Maleny and Susan has invited her long standing friends Christine and Thomas and Jane and Eddy over for lunch so we can say farewell.
John and Susan spent the morning preparing food for our guests, while Barb helped by vacuuming and tidying.

The dogs did their part by playing in the garden. Bella is recovering well from her recent surgery to remove some lumps from her neck and shoulders. She has been wearing an old T-shirt for a few days and has been scratching a bit, but the wounds appear to be healing well. She comforts herself with her favourite toys, including the vampire bat toy she got at Whitby.

Jane, Eddie, Thomas, Christine, Susan, John

Same gang, with Barb taking Eddie's place and Eddie taking the photo

Bella hogged the new bat toy - mum Daisy didn't get a look in

Daisy enjoys her walks in the wheat fields

 

Bella is so proud of her new toy

 

Will miss walking the dogs in these fields

Daisy seems to be enjoying the hydrotherapy she has been having a couple of times a week to help with her arthritis. And she still likes going out for walks although she does tire easily, so that the return walk is a lot slower than the outward one. We'll really miss these beautiful dogs when we leave. They both have really loving natures and enjoy lots of cuddles and petting and are forever presenting toys such as their pheasants, and latterly the bat, for admiration. It's hard to love a toy pheasant made gooey with dog dribble, but how can you say no?

We dined inside in Susan's formal dining room, as outside was too hot and there was a threat of rain (Heat and rain? C'mon, this is an English summer!). It was lovely to see Susan's friends and there were a lot of laughs along with the champers. We always enjoy seeing these guys each time we visit the UK and it's good to know Susan has the support of such lovely friends, with family being so far away.

We spent the rest of the evening packing. It's amazing how much extra stuff you accumulate on holidays. Luckily we had packed an extra soft bag (luckily my foot, it was in anticipation of buying Stuff) and were a long way under our baggage limit on the way here, so hopefully even with the extra stuff we won't exceed the allowance. Geoffrey arrived back later that night after a week long trip to Budapest to attend a series of Wagner Ring cycle and kindly regaled us with tales of his experience.

We tried to book a coach from Stansted airport round to Gatwick and were horrified at the cost - £60 or more.  Still worse was the schedule length of the trip, 4 hours or more, and the need to change coach en route. Susan has very kindly offered to drive us to Gatwick on Friday, where we'll spend the night at an airport hotel before flying out the next morning. (Late Extra - traffic on the M25 on Friday afternoon is always appalling, but the FOUR hours it took her to get home was much worse than I recall.  What a martyr to our cause). Susan has been so kind and generous to us this whole visit and it's been great to have the use of her Mini Cooper too so we could get around and see so much.

Neither of us much look forward to the long haul flight home, but needs must. Bye Bye UK!

UK Trip Day 31 Blenheim Palace

Blenheim Palace .... birthplace of Winston Churchill

Today we left Pat's home in Cirencester and travelled back to Susan's place in Great Chesterford. It was a very hot night last night (make no mistake - very, very hot and sticky - even Darwin might have whimpered a little)  and as the sun doesn't set until 10 and rises again at 4 it stays hot for longer. I will never mock the Brits again when they complain of the heat when it gets over 30 degrees. Their houses are not built to deal with the heat the same as our houses in Queensland are not built to deal with the cold.
We came down to Cirencester using the highways. We are going back today using the cross country back roads. Who wouldn't take the opportunity to drive through the very picturesque Cotswold villages if they had time? Barb's new favourite is a place called Bibury. We couldn't stop unfortunately as they're doing roadworks there and because a lot of tourists were crowded in already there was no place to park. There is a stream running through the village and all the gardens have well kept cottage gardens with rambling roses climbing the stone walls the whole effect is picture postcard breathtaking.

Our mission for the day was to see Blenheim Palace, which is just to one side of Oxford. It is a stately home not to be missed and its big claim to fame is as the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill. We were very lucky that Carmel had given us a two for one voucher for this place. It's neither English Heritage nor National Trust so would've cost us 50 pounds without the voucher. Ouch!

The house and gardens are spectacular though and on a huge scale like Castle Howard. The huge entry gates are ornate like Buckingham Palace Gates .... it's all very grand and impressive. There were tourist coaches lined up and loads of visitors everywhere. As we walked in a group of riders were just coming over the bridge across the ornamental lake. They clip clopped over the cobbled path maybe on their way to polo? Who knows?
The entry courtyard - the stable yard perhaps? - is very large, verging on enormous - and awesomely impressive. Then you pass through an arched passageway into the main courtyard of the house and it just takes your breath away all over again. It's so big! So ornate. When we went inside the palace there was a large tour group also entering. They were going towards the right to see the state rooms, so we went left.

Oh dear and oops. This turned out to be a big mistake. We found ourselves trapped on a tour where the doors automatically open and close behind you trapping you in the room for a designated number of minutes while you are forced to watch an animated audio visual display. Although interesting and worthy it was drawn out and quite claustrophobic. We were glad to get out into the open air again and have a look at the garden courtyard.

The garden is another one of Capabilty Brown's efforts. That man sure did get around. He seems to have designed a huge number of the stately homes gardens we've seen. These ones were unbelievably grand and ran all the way down to the man made lake (enormous, of course). There were numerous fountains and statues everywhere. Groups of schoolkids were sitting on the grass in the shade sketching the house and statues. We never had school outings like that!

We entered the house again and this time turned right towards the State rooms. This is the stuff! Huge rooms with loads of precious art and elaborate chandeliers. This is more like it. There were also several rooms dedicated to Sir Winston Churchill and his war exploits as Prime Minister. It was most enjoyable to see these rooms and not at all claustrophobic even though there were big crowds.

It was quite tiring looking at all this marvellous house and gardens. We decided to save Woburn Abbey for another day and go straight on to Susan's instead. We arrived mid afternoon after succeeding in missing the worst of the peak hour traffic.

UK Trip Day 30 Avebury

Avebury Rings with Carmel & Nick

It was exciting to catch up with Nick and Carmel Hall, friends from Australia who are now living in the UK in nearby Swindon. They'd invited us to lunch with them at their unit, then suggested that we visit Avebury Rings together.

On our way to Swindon we found the signpost to Cricklade and turned off for a quick look as we had time in hand. Cricklade is a very pretty little town and we could see the tower of a church in the distance, so we walked towards that. Cricklade is an old Saxon town so that things date pretty far back. The origins of the church go back to the 9th century (the present structure is 12th century)

 

St Sampson church at Cricklade

 

Cricklade is also the source of the River Thames - it's just a bubbling stream at source. We found out after our visit that this source is actually located in a meadow some way out of town so we didn't actually see it! We were more inclined at the time to find a teashop but didn't find that either, so on to Nick and Carmel's (well there were one or two places, but they were not all that enticing).

We found them easily enough thanks to the GPS on Susan's car. They were both looking exceedingly well and their unit is rather nice and very well situated being a stone's throw from a large shopping centre. It only takes them just over an hour to get to London and it's also well-placed to visit both their daughter Jocelyn and son Brendon who both have gorgeous little one year old girls. The grandparents are delighted to be so close.
After a delicious home made lunch, which was initially going to be a picnic but given the heat of the day was eaten instead inside under the fan, we went off with Nick and Carmel to Avebury. But not, however, before Nick had put his new open-topped sports car VW EOS through its paces .... automatically opening the hard roof to turn it into a convertible at the touch of a button. Seeing it you can see why he's named it the Batmobile - all it's missing are a few guns and rockets.
And the fan! This was the first fan we'd come across since leaving home - it's been sweltering overnight without one - how do my fellow Brits cope?

When we got to Avebury it was heaving with people. Duh! It's the day before summer solstice and great hordes of people were already camped out in a bivouac of tents to celebrate the occasion tomorrow. There seemed to also be a posse of police and bouncers to keep the crowds under control, but we saw no signs of trouble. (Peace, man).

Dovecote at Avebury Manor

Inside the dovecote

We parked in the car park using our new National Trust car sticker for the first time and were also able to access the interactive learning centre housed in an old converted barn on the site. It was really interesting, giving info on how the Avebury stones were moved into position so long ago. To this day no-one fully knows why.

Then we all went out for a walk around the large fields where the stones are open to the public and the grazing sheep who find them very useful as scratching posts. It was a very pleasant walk and John climbed up on one of the man-made hills to take photos from this vantage point. These barrows held bones beneath them, but the largest of all, nearby Silbury Hill appears to have nothing buried beneath it. At least not that they've discovered yet.

At the Avebury Rings

The Avebury stones make a great scratching post for sheep

Carmel, Barb and Nick

John atop a barrow

There were some modern day druids spruiking to busloads of tourists, who showed varying degrees of interest ranging from boredom to mild. We on the other hand were on a mission to find the excellent ice-cream that Nick had told us was marvellous. It was pretty good. Loyally I prefer Colin James ice-cream back in Maleny.

Modern day druid

Ice cream shop!

We drove on to the nearby town of Devizes where Nick wanted to show us the canal lock system. Apparently there are nineteen in a row in this particular section of the canal. We watched a canal  long boat come through a couple of them. The driver was lucky enough to have several teenagers on board whom he could send ahead to open and close the locks for him. The boys were hot and sweaty having repeated this procedure numerous times in the preceding several hours. It's quite hard physical work and there are no lock keepers to do it for you as there are in some parts of the Continent's canal system.

I don't know how Susan and Geoffrey ever managed it when they had their canal boat several years ago. I suspect that they couldn't do it now. Barb certainly wouldn't be able to manage the lock gates single handed .... or possibly manoeuvre the boat into the lock without bashing the sides.

We had a brief look around the town of Devizes too. It has an old and very large brewery right near the canal. John found a store selling spray on wax for Barb's coat purchased in Yorkshire. He is happy. As will Barb be when the wax wears thin and it starts raining!