Village Hopping in the Cotswolds

Monday, July 07, 2014
Stow-on-the-Wold, England, United Kingdom
The Cotswolds brings to mind picturesque mill towns, hill towns, magnificent 17th century manor houses, and market towns; but our fondest memories of the Cotswold would be our B&B in Stow-on-the-Wold.  Owners, "Jimmy" and Carol Brown, provided daily entertainment at breakfast, and would leave us roaring with laughter. Jimmy is a trivia pursuit kind of guy and loved to be stumped by our "foreign" factoids. The other guests tried to keep up with Jimmy and Andrew's bantering; while I enjoyed it all.

Jimmy and Carol have renovated a 250-year-old house that features a massive wood-burning fireplace, 3 spacious guest rooms each with bathroom en suite (unlike our Sidney House B&B where we found someone sleeping in the closet next door) .  Higgledy-piggledy floors throughout, and wood-beamed ceilings most (!) people could reach up and touch gave the house tremendous character.

For dinner we walked 3 doors down to the "Prince of India" where the meal was so good the first night that we ended up having dinner there 3 times in a row! It was packed solid every night--and they ran a take out service simultaneously!   

During our short visit to the Cotswolds we had time to visit and explore Stow-on-the-Wold (aka SOTW) and 3 other villages via local bus lines. Transfer points were available at Morten-in-Marsh and we were fortunate to be there on market day. The market hall is situated in the middle of the main street. Vendors and hawkers called out the specials for the day, each trying to out-shout the other--it was great fun listening to strong accents from different regions. I could scarcely understand what they were trying sell. Later I realized that they thought I had a pretty strange accent as well: "Oh ....you speak American English, not Japanese!" Good thing the British-Brazilian was with me. I made him do all the talking! 

Bourton-on-the-Water was so picturesque it didn't seem real. Apart from its outstanding beauty, the treasure of the little village was the Motoring Museum. Not only did it display nicely preserved cars, but each era was represented with hundreds of paraphernalia of the period (music, sounds, smells of garage oil, posters, celebrity figures, and toys). It covered the period from the early days of "personal transport" to roughly the 1960's, including bicycles, tricycles, motorcycles, scooters, and pogo sticks! The museum was packed with memorabilia from tiny toys to full-sized gasoline pumps from years gone by.  

A young woman we met on the train highly recommended visiting Broadway, her home town. It's a very small village, but packed with photo opportunities. The afternoon skies darkened and we escaped some rain showers by hiding in a high-end deli-café; a pleasant way to enjoy cappuccinos and browse through exotic specialty items offered on two floors .  We finished our Cotswold experience at Chipping Campden, another market town that owes its wealth of beautiful old buildings to the wool trade. Here we found the Almshouses which Sir Baptist Hicks built in 1612 at a total cost of £1,000, to house 6 poor men and 6 poor women. To this day they are still used by 12 pensioners from Campden. 

Unfortunately we weren't able to take long walks into the countryside for which the Cotswolds are famous....Otro año!

We're provisioning for a canal trip in Wales and will be out of communication from July 12 to 19...no WiFi on the canal boat! More anon after the canal trip from Whitchurch to Llangollen.

Please click the link for more photos:
https://picasaweb.google.com/104590044281989964656/20140707CotswoldAlbum?authkey=Gv1sRgCIL8stDAmPCVLQ#

Be back in one week with MORE! See you then.

Naomi & Andrew
 


   

 








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