We had a little sleep in until 8 this morning then had a slow start with a coffee and the news before heading out to find some breakfast. The place we’d initially found on google was closed, so we rerouted to a place I’d been to when I was in Cambridge last year (see entry 28 from 24^th March 2019, goodness I’ve written a lot since then!), a little coffee shop.  It was a good spot, but god the service was slow. It didn’t help that a family with a very loud baby sat down right behind us as well. While we were waiting a slightly ridiculous amount of time for our breakfast we also did an Amazon order for tomorrow so we’ll have food for the week – this ordering online business is very, very convenient for avoiding supermarket crowds! We both had a bacon sandwich for breakfast (when it eventually came) and then headed into town, hoping to beat the crowds. My first request for a stop was a quirky little shop that I’d visited last year called Ark.  It had great books and funny gifts last year, but this year was a lot of children’s stuff alongside quirky earrings, socks and gifts. This worked for me though and I ended up getting a cute pair of raincloud earrings. We went for a brief wander through the marketplace but it was quite busy so we dodged the people and made our way to the Holy Trinity Church, where Peter’s grandparents got married! It had been partially modernised, but didn’t appear to be open – or we couldn’t find the entrance anyway, so we just admired it from the outside.

From Holy Trinity we wiggled through some cute alleyways and streets, stopping in at the Cambridge Gin Distillery Shop and then finding our way to the Heffers Bookshop. Peter had wanted to come here because he remembered coming here as a child – his grandparents lived here but his parents also met at Cambridge when they both studied there. However, when we arrived, I remembered I’d also visited this bookshop when I was in Cambridge last year! We spent quite a long time in the bookshop as it was beautiful and had such an amazing selection of all varieties of books, and we ended up coming away with a new ‘Rivers of London’ book for Peter and an escape game. From there we’d wanted to stop in at St John’s College, where Peter’s dad and grandfather both went, but unfortunately it was totally closed to the public. We kept walking up the same road as we figured we could find somewhere to eat, and we ended up stumbling across the Cambridge Wine Merchants. This was a really fun wine store with an amazing collection of specialty wines – they even had some decent Australian wines, which is always a surprise over here. We ended up caving and sitting down for a glass of wine and some nibbles. Peter had a delightful South African chardonnay and I had an English Bacchus before we got up to walk along the river for a bit.

There were lots of punting boats on the river but we dodged the salespeople and just walked along the path. ‘Jesus Green’ was the park along the river and it was lovely to walk under the trees by the side of the water, then down across the ‘Midsummer Common’ and past ‘Christ’s Pieces’ park (who named these places??). There was a cute pub called the ‘Tram Depot’ around the corner from where we were staying so we aimed to get there for lunch, but when we arrived and were seated, the girl came back to tell us the chef was going on break for an hour, but if we hung around he’d cook our food ‘really quickly’. We were fairly annoyed, considering they were only serving food 12-5 – why did he need a break? We were already keen to get going on the drive back to London, so we turned down this offer and went to a Japanese takeaway place around the corner instead. I got a delicious salmon donburi (salmon sashimi on rice) and Peter got some duck rolls before we headed back to the car and got on the road.

It was actually only about an hour and ten minutes drive to London – very good to know for future roadtrips, given car hire has become such an accessible option! It was full highway almost all the way to our door, and we got a park right out the front when we got back, which was a massive bonus! We unpacked the car and ordered a final UberEats as we had no food and didn’t want to go to the supermarket, then had a quiet evening of catching up on budgets/writing/reading. This was a really different holiday to the Wales ones, but it was so nice to see bits of England and we’ve been constantly reflecting on how good a decision it was to sign up for English Heritage membership – it’s already well and truly paid off and will definitely encourage us to do more day-/weekend-trips to English sites throughout the year. Back to reality for Peter tomorrow, and one week of summer left for me, so I’ll have a week of planning and last minute bits and pieces.