Chipping Norton

We stopped in a Premier Inn off all things. 3 nights here. We came armed with cool box full of breakfast and lunch items so we didn’t spend a fortune on food. We wanted a few days away. We have been busy closing up mum’s flat, including re-decorating it, Christmas and Covid have all taken there toll in the last few months, not that we can complain at all, we have a very good life. Anyway Premier Inn where offering cheap rooms and this seemed worth the money. The Friday we made our way here after doing golf lesson, Spanish lesson and a training session on website use. We arrived early tea-time, and after a rest went and found somewhere to eat. This was a local Italian, it had good reviews but if I was to bother it would get a bad review from me. Badly cooked, tablespoon of pasta for a stupidly large amount of money. Chipping Norton looked a nice little town on a cold damp January day. The Saturday was dry so we did our first decent walk in months. Across the fields to a pub, we got the last table which was in the corridor but the food was good, then onto Kings stones and the Rollright stones, a very impressive stone circle and burial mounds. Very enjoyable walk but almost constant mud, 6 inches deep in places, well over my boots and, at one point, I was saved by John from going flat in the mud when he caught my hood and held me up while I hovered inches from disaster, although my gloves failed to stay mud free.

The second full day we went to Oxford. Alas it rained the whole day so we did the free museums, England is good at it’s free museums! Oxford, dare I say, was very nice. I like the way the main colleges are all centred around Radcliffe camera. Lots of the streets seem wide and traffic free. It didn’t have the green spaces of Cambridge (that might be because we didn’t look for them) but first thought was it was nicer and I really like Cambridge as a city.

The third day we stopped at Stowe Gardens for a walk. After all at our age you have to break up a 2 hour car journey. Nice gardens and we managed to see them between the rain showers