European Trip Day 31 Suffolk in the heat

Suffolk in the heat

Records were broken all over the continent for extreme temperatures today. It reached 38.1 C in Cambridge! Paris was even worse at 42.5 C and Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands suffered also.

Luckily we did our train trip to London yesterday. There was chaos on the rails in London today with trains being cancelled and fires sparking on the tracks. We decided to head North- East to Suffolk and steer clear of major cities.

Susan took John to Stanstead to pick up our hire car, so John and Barb have their own wheels again now to get ourselves out and about. Susan suggested visiting a small town in Suffolk called Lavenham which has lots of pretty Tudor buildings and nice English Tea rooms.

We drove to Saffron Walden and headed North. It was pretty driving through the Suffolk countryside. These were the views that inspired the English painter Constable. We happened upon a lovely little town of Cavendish. We needed to pull up here to recover from the shock of almost being backed into in the town of Clare a mile or so before.

Cavendish was delightful and we were directed to a lovely tearoom for a pot of reviving tea by one of the local ladies who also kindly took our photo for us.. Of course we sampled the homemade cake and sausage roll too.

Then we drove on to Lavernham. It is indeed a pretty town. The first thing you see when you approach the town is the church spire. It is a rather lovely old church, especially for a smallish town. We found a car park and walked into town. There was a dounble decker bus with people gathered around outside the door and when we got closer we realised an old man was on the ground having fallen out of the bus. Don't know if he fainted in the heat or tripped, but it looked like he'd broken his hip. An ambulance was on its way and it looked like he was being fussed over by a lot of people already so we walked on.

The old Tudor houses in town must've been very old indeed. Many were leaning at odd angles, but all were well cared for. We stopped at another tea room for some Elderflower presse and Ginger beer (and more cake. English cake is better than Hungary/Austria we decided).

 We wanded up a side street that was labelled "Guildhall" and found a large market square with yet more lovely buildings. English villages like this are just so quaint.

Instead of driving back through the winding Suffolk lanes as we had done to get there we came back on the motorway. It halved the time, but not nearly so pretty.