Day 25 – Wednesday 15 June 2016

A lazy & late start for us today, our bags didn’t need to be ready until 7.45am in our room & departure at 8.30am, so plenty of time to catch up on some banking & bills. Breakfast is not quite as varied nor as good as the European version, although the chef did make a nice omelette for me as I chatted with her, she is Romanian. We have 32 in this group, mostly Australian except 2 from USA. A Canadian Tour Director & a Scottish driver. Our group consists of some older than us & a few younger. This group is just about evenly divided, not like the last tour 20 women & 8 men. Our journey out of London is slow, morning traffic & roadworks holding everyone up & clearing as we reached the motorway north.

Our first stop is Oxford, upstream from London on the River Thames, after only 2 hours. This is an interesting old university city with loads of history & around 50 churches. Our guide showed us the spot, prominently marked in the middle of a road, where 3 bishops from the Church of England were burned at the stake by the reigning Monarch, Queen Mary, because they would not renounce their faith & convert to Catholicism. The university colleges are old & interesting buildings, walled in & a large rectangular shape with a church in one side. There are interesting spires along the rooflines of some of them. In the High Street there is an interesting mix of very old buildings mixed with new. We walked around the town a lot after our guide finished & enjoyed the architecture then we stopped & ate our lunch outside the walls of St Johns College. We dared to walk the grounds & still here to tell the story where Inspector Morse & Sergeant Lewis solved all those murders. We even saw the building where Harry Potter’s Hogwarts dining room was filmed.

After Oxford we drove north again through the countryside, lots of very green fields & wheat crops, with sheep being the main livestock. The sheep are very thick on the ground in some paddocks & seem to be losing the battle of keeping the grass down. We pass through some quaint little villages, most of the houses are made of stone & some have thatched roofs. We are passing through the Cotswold area of England, famous for its beauty. After only an hour we were in Stratford, that Stratford – upon the Avon River, the birthplace of William Shakespeare.

We walk straight to the old house that Shakespeare was born in, no queues, no crowds. It is a delightful old house set up with period furniture, trimmings & people dressed in period costume explaining the various aspects of life in Shakespeare’s day, interesting & thought provoking. There are large exposed beams throughout the house, painted wallpaper hangings & lead-light glass windows throughout. The doorways are very low in parts of the house. Afterwards we walked through the streets of Stratford, firstly along High Street & then down Sheep Street, (most of the people made their living from the back of the sheep) admiring all of the very old buildings still in use today. We are all walking admiring these rickety old buildings, at home they would be condemned as neglected & dangerous & demolished, but here we see them as quaint. We walked to the Avon River, not really that far & admired some of the canal boats moored near the lock, as well as the white swans, ducks & geese on the river. We wandered back to our coach on different streets admiring the buildings, it is something different again.

Our hotel tonight is Alveston Manor, a building with a history dating from before the Norman conquest of England in 1066 when a small monastery was on the site. Today’s Manor has an interesting mix of architecture, dating from the 16th century, with some Elizabethan & Queen Anne styles. A beautiful old building. Dinner tonight is across the road at the Swan’s Nest, another very old building, on the banks of the Avon River. We get a chance to meet & have a good chat with some of our fellow travellers over a nice meal. After dinner we venture back out over the Clopton Bridge, with its very own ancient Toll House on one end of it, down to the canal boat docks then back over the Tramway Bridge to our hotel. In the hotel gardens a bride & groom are having their photos taken.