Blogs from Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom, Europe

Staying positive and enjoying every second of your trip can become extremely difficult when you’re driving around the English countryside minus a GPS, with smudgy, black and white photocopied map, some vague Google directions and no frikkin street signs. We arrived in London early on Thursday. The flight from Bangkok was great – we both slept at least 8 hours and were bursting with energy when we landed. Given we arrived so early at the hotel I’d expected us to be wandering around in old plane clothes waiting for a room to be free, but we were able to check in straight away and shower – it was the best thing on the planet. Things were going perfectly. Once we freshened up we decided to head out. The weather was surprisingly warm and not a cloud ... read more

How do you get to Oxford? "Study! Study! Study!" I suppose someone who knows the famous joke about Carnegie Hall would say. (If you don't know, the answer to that one is "Practice! Practice! Practice!") Anyway, it is a challenge to find a good cycle route between Bath and Oxford, as we learned by experience over the past three days. But we did it, spending one night in Avebury so we could get up early Tuesday morning to experience the ancient standing stones that surround the town, trying to make our way on via numbered cycle routes that turned out to be rough trails better suited for walking and then making a wrong turn because we had run off of our map. But we rectified that after getting the right map in the small town of ... read more

I think it's a give-away that Nick wrote this blog with the mention of the 'brickwork' in Oxford!.. =) Considering we have now spent much more on our car George getting him fixed than what we actually paid for him, a trip out of London town was definitely what was needed. And what better place to drive than Oxford! With it being only one and a half hours north east of London, it was very easy to get too. There wasn’t too much traffic and the sun actually popped its head out of the clouds on more than one occasion, which was great (it still rained though for most of the day of course). We arrived just after noon and headed straight to a pub to warm up. It was a good thing that we did ... read more

Catherine's aunt Berenice has a lovely home in the inner suburbs of Oxford, and we gathered there for the days leading up to, and following Christmas Day. Berenice cooked a wonderful traditional dinner, including an eight kilogram turkey cooked on an AGA stove, and we shared the day with Charlotte, Imogen, Tarrant, and James Hoyle. Duncan Anderson, Christine and boys, Theo and Toby coming over in the evening. We had two brief sojourns from the house over the two days, despite the rain. Firstly a brief walk past the stately homes of Banbury and Woodstock Roads. On boxing day we wandered for a few hours past the collages of the university and had a few beers at the Victoria Pub on Walton Street. Hexhamshire beer and a Guiness! Wonderful...in the right weather. Tarrant has recently enjoyed ... read more