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Week 4, part 3 – a prize for the most boring blog update so far

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On Tuesday (6/7), I drove up to Cleeve Hill, the highest ground in the Cotswolds. Less a single hill and more of an enormous plateau, most of it is actually a common. This is the view south to Cheltenham, with the famous horse racing ground visible to the right of the city, in the foreground: Cleeve Hill Common is also home to a public golf course that was surprisingly affordable (£25), though I didn't look to see if they did club rentals. The walking paths go right through/past many of the holes.   My circular walk around and over the common was only about 5 miles, but the scenery was—yet again—spectacular. Ordinarily, a walk like this would only take about 2 hours, but I stretched it to nearly 4 hours because the weather was good and it was such a nice place to be. No crowds of walkers to navigate, but just enough activity (walkers, a few cyclists, golfers) to make the place interesting.  The next day I had my only truly lazy day in almost 4 weeks. I never even left the hou...
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Week 4, part 2 – ridiculous, sublime, etc.

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At some point on Saturday I discovered that the world famous "cheese rolling" competition was happening only 5 miles from where I'm staying. I'd heard about this event and seen some brief video years ago, but I never had any intention to try to go to it. Since it was so close by, it seemed crazy not to go, so I began to make a plan. Why a plan? Because the way I learned about the event was through local news stories announcing road closures and reminding people that there was no parking available anywhere near Cooper's Hill, where it takes place.  A quick word about the competition: Twenty or so people gather at the top of an absurdly steep hill, where a master of ceremonies releases an 8-pound round of double Gloucester cheese. The runners then chase it to the bottom, and the first one to it gets to keep the cheese. It's been suggested that this tradition dates back 600 years or more, but it appears to be documented only from the 1700s. In any case, it's...
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Week 4, part 1 – Cotswolds + OS maps

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Early Friday morning (6/3), I left East Sussex. I was on the road at about 6:30 because I'd read that traffic could be very bad, particularly near London, due to the various Jubilee celebrations and the fact that it was a bank holiday (basically a national holiday). It turned out to be a very easy drive, though maybe it wouldn't have been a few hours later.  It took about 2.5 hours to get to the Cotswolds, and I decided to stop first in Cirencester, a town Betsy and I visited a few years earlier and really liked. It was pretty quiet at 9 a.m., but that was fine with me. Here's a little video of a guy selling strawberries, enthusiastically. I had a coffee and croissant, wandered around the central streets, then decided to drive north to Chedworth , the largest Roman villa site (partially excavated) in Britain—and a National Trust property, so free for me. Fascinating to see those well preserved tile floors from 1800 years ago.  The rest of the day wasn't particularly ev...
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Week 3 – South Heighton (near Brighton on the south coast), East Sussex

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I'm less motivated to keep up with this blog since Betsy went home, but I'll add a quick recap of my last week now. I really liked the place where I stayed, especially the hosts: Rhoda and her husband Christian, a sculptor with works throughout the area. They're about my age and were very interesting to talk to, mostly about travel and different parts of England they'd visited or lived in. They really love East Sussex (I do too), and we were trying to figure out why it might be more appealing than Dorset. We agreed that Dorset might feel a bit more like a vacation or retirement destination, whereas East Sussex seems to have more ordinary working people. Plenty of wealth in East Sussex too (parts of it are within commuting range of London), but also plenty of real towns and villages with a wide range of ages and occupations. I'm not saying that that doesn't exist in Dorset, only that we didn't see as much of it. Or, when we did see it in Bridport, it had the ...
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Days 10 - 14 – Lyme Regis, travel day

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On Tuesday, we met our friend (and former neighbor from Clark Street) Susan Halls and her new man, Julian, in Lyme Regis. Susan and Julian live a bit farther to the west, in Cornwall. Julian is an architectural historian, and one of his areas of expertise is the architecture of pubs in the UK. I could have talked to him all day. We had a nice (though overpriced!) lunch at the Cobb Arms. Here's a view of a different, more central, part of the city: From the next day, here's a picture of Betsy in her new rain jacket in front of the cottage in Cattistock: A few pictures from a rainy walk just outside of Cattistock: Betsy had to do her video covid test Thursday, and that went fine (after a bit of confusion about the app vs. the test website), so she was cleared to fly. On Friday, we drove to Winchester (about 2 hours from where we were) and looked for a place to have a quick pub lunch, but it's a good-sized city and parking was in short supply, so we headed down to the bus sta...
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