Bath, England

The day trip today was to Bath today, that lovely Georgian town. The perils of owning a car were found today with us being 8 minutes late in renewing our parking ticket leading to a 30 quid fine! Less enamoured of Bristol as a result.
Romany and Susie unenthusiastic about seeing the Roman baths (Susie having seen them twice before) so the history enthusiasts went on without them. Ciaran loves the audio tours in particular.

But the guest houses here are well named.

The Cotswolds, England

And another day outing to the Cotswolds and the ambitions to become a Romantic poet have definitely firmed up. Took a 5 hour walk along rambling tracks through the countryside which was so picture postcard that we failed to photograph it at all.
Our first stop offs were the delightfully named villages of Slaughter (sadly after some family rather than some massacre). Stone cottages with perfect streams and flowers everywhere. Even a fox in an adjacent field (probably just a model for tourists)
The beautiful church graveyard in Upper Slaughter with plaques in the church going back to the 1500s and the impression of little having changed (except the roads being sealed) for more than 150 years. I suspect a baguette probably didn't cost $20 back then though so they have learnt something about modern times.
And on the way home passed through this village which to our disappointment lacked a souvenir shop and had only 5 buildings from one of which an old local eyed us suspiciously as we photographed their town sign. But surely someone has been here and done it before! They clearly have not been taking lessons from the Cotswalds inhabitants.

Wales for the day

For a complete change of pace we have hired a car and are whizzing around the south-west of England using Bristol as a base. So for a day trip we went off to Wales. This was mostly to visit the second hand book shop town of Hay-on-Wye but managed some other interesting stop-overs (the joys of having your own car)
First stop Chepstow Castle - always good to take young lads to an old castle to give them an idea of scale and allow Ciaran to imagine exactly how and where he would drop boiling oil on the enemy.
Then the lovely ruined site of Tintern Abbey - a place for whimsical musings and swanning around in the manner of a romantic poet (it looked pretty good even to those of us without a poetic bone in our bodies).
And after visitng the book town we went to the south coast of Wales to visit Mhairi's cousin (Mhairi in hat, cousin Helen at left) to go to what apparently passes for a swimming beach in this part of the world. The cold breeze rolling off the Bristol channel while dipping your toes into icy water almost made us feel homesick for Otago beaches (but it's only like that in mid-winter back home of course)