Pictures:

May 18

May 19

We do not yet know where we will be staying in the Cotswolds.

We ended up staying 2 nights in Oxford at the Newton House. I haven't looked to see if they have a web page yet.

Plan: We will take the train to Oxford and do some sightseeing there. Hopefully we will see some Harry Potter filming sites and the Eagle and the Child Pub, where Tolkien first read "The Hobbit." Then we will pick up our rental car and Mike can learn how to drive with a left-handed stick shift! We will go tour Blenheim Palace and then check out the Cotswold countryside.

What actually happened (per Christine): We got up early, and while breakfast at Marlborough House was awesome, it took a long time, so we didn't get to the train station until after 9am. We found out that the next train to London didn't stop at our connecting station, so we had to wait for the next train (Thank goodness for a local guy who helped us out with this or we would have had a very long train ride!) We finally got to Oxford about 12:30pm. We called a cab to take us to Enterprise rent-a-car.

We finally got our rental car about 1pm. A word of advice: driving in Britain is very difficult. You won't do much else the first day when you are trying to learn to drive there.Our car was a little 2-door black Vauxhall Corsa; it was really cute. It had the stick shift in the middle (Mike's left hand side), so he wanted to drive around a bit to get used to driving a left-handed stick on the left side of the road. So first we drove towards the edge of Oxford, thinking there would be less traffic. There was, but there was also no place to turn around. We finally got turned around and turned right on the road that would take us back to town , but Mike made a US right turn into oncoming traffic. Luckily, no cars were nearby, so we just swerved back into our correct lane. From then on, every time we would have to make a turn (of either direction), we would start chanting "stay on the left, stay on the left." Driving in Oxford is a special challenge. If you stay on their main road through the center of town, the road curves multiple times and each time it curves, it changes names. The main road through town changed names 8 times in about a mile. Also, just like in Bath, street signs were not posted, or posted erratically, so navigating with a map was exceptionally difficult. After an hour or so of looking for a parking spot, driving too far out of town, learning to negotiate roundabouts, accidentally exiting a roundabout onto the highway, getting off the highway, finding out how to get back on the highway the other direction, negotiating a couple of more roundabouts, and taking another wrong turn onto a back street, we finally found parking for the city center of Oxford (which is closed to car traffic). Parking is interesting, because you can park in either direction on either side of the street, but you have to pay close attention to parking laws. Don't park on a double yellow line, don't park on a single yellow line during business hours and make sure you "pay and display" (British version of parking meters - a few machines on each block that you put money in to get time and it prints out a sticker you attach to the inside of your window). We were warned that British police are very strict with parking and speed laws. If you violate a parking law, they don't just ticket you, they put a boot on your car or tow it, too and they use cameras to check for speeding and mail you the ticket. So we were pretty paranoid about all that and breathed a sigh of relief when we got our parking space. We walked down to the tourist information center, looking for Harry Potter or Tolkien tour info, but we had gotten there too late and missed the last walking tour of the city for the day. So we decided to go to Christ Church college (where they did most of the filming in Oxford for Harry Potter) and see if they were open. To our surprise, they were, so we toured the college. We saw the Hall (used as the stairs and Great Hall in Harry Potter), and we also saw the grounds and the Cathedral; very impressive.

It was starting to get late, so we thought we'd better see about getting a room, since we still didn't have one, so we went back to the TI and they got us a room at a bed-and-breakfast called Newton House, south of the city center. We decided to eat dinner before heading back to the car, so we ate at the pub "The Eagle and the Child", which was where JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and their circle of friends used to hang out, discuss and read from their prospective books. The pub actually had a letter displayed on the wall that was signed by all of them and saying that they had drunk to the pub owner's health. It was pretty cool. I got a mushroom and cheese sandwich with vegetables and Mike got BBQ chicken sandwich with garlic cheese bread.

We headed back to evil car and managed to find our way to Newton House. It wasn't as nice as Marlborough House in Bath, but was a lot less expensive. The room was okay; we had a bed and our own bathroom and there was a small car lot on the back. The shower was a bit bigger this time, so we were able to actually take a shower without having to turn the water off to have room to soap and shampoo. We were so stressed about driving, we just decided to spend the rest of the evening at the B&B, so that is when I did all the updates for Bath and Mike did his laundry in the sink. (I'd been doing mine a little bit each night all along).

Plan: More time touring the small towns of the Cotswolds. We hope to tour Warwick Castle and maybe see Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon. We may see a play at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, or we might head back to Oxford to see Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith with all the college students.

What actually happened (per Christine): We had decided to go to Blenheim Palace in the morning. Blenheim is only 8 miles north of Oxford, so we figured that would be a good start and we could go from there. We filled up with gasoline (which in retrospect was a big mistake because the car was extremely fuel-efficient and we hardly used any and gas was 85pence a liter (with about 4 litres to the gallon, that would be about $6.80/gallon...and we thought the price of gas was high in the US!) Owell, we live and learn. We drove to Blenheim, with Mike expertly navigating about 6 roundabouts on the way there.

Blenheim Palace was......WOW! It was amazingly huge. It was rather cold and drizzly, so we figured we would take one of the three garden walks (we figured it would be secluded and restful, not because we are gluttons for punishment).. Each garden walk was an hour long, none of them crossed each other and they only covered a very small part of the whole estate. You could probably have spend a week hiking the place. And the building was massive and amazing. We had a lot of fun exploring the grounds and the state apartments of the house until about(The Duke of Marlborough and his family lives in part of the house,, so you can't tour it all)

After leaving Blenheim, we headed north for Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's hometown, about 50miles away. We passed through lots of small Cotswold towns and they seemed pretty cute, but none as cute as the ones we had seen on the Mad Max tour. We got to Stratford in the late afternoon and went by Shakespeare's birthplace. It was very touristy and it was too late to do a tour, but we took a picture and then went down to the river by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and watched all the people boating amongst the ducks, geese and swans. It was quite restful.

We then drove back to Oxford city center, almost killed ourselves when we made a left into what we thought was a left lane (with a big island), but turned out to actually be the right-handed bus lane. Luckily, as it was rather late in the day, no one was coming and we were able to get across three empty lanes of traffic to where we were supposed to be, but it was very scary. We couldn't wait to get rid of the horrible car! We parked and walked to try to find a movie theatre to see Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith. Getting movie theatre tickets was funny, as you needed seat reservations, just like the regular theatre. We had an hour to kill, so we ran to an Internet cafe, which is where we did our first update. Back at the movie theatre, we went to get snacks and I was disappointed to see that they don't have buttered popcorn in England. Only "sweet popcorn" or "salty popcorn." The theatre there was very large, but wasn't sold out, and Mike said that the sound system sucked (he was pretty sure no surround sound; I couldn't tell). I didn't see anyone dressed up in costume in spite of it being a college town and I was a bit disappointed when no one cheered during the "A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away....", but when the intro started, there were some cheers. The movie was okay, it definitely tied up a lot of loose ends, but could have gotten rid of some action scenes in favor of some further character development.

When we got out of the movie at midnight and headed back to our B&B, we discovered, to our horror, that the small parking lot where we were supposed to park was absolutely full (already was completely jam-packed with cars blocking each other in). Apparently, parking in residential areas is a premium in these small suburbs of Oxford, and we spent the next 45 minutes searching for a legal parking spot. We finally found one and had to walk a good half mile to mile to get back to our B&B. I was really cursing myself for having thought it a good idea to get a rental car, since everywhere we went we could have gone by train or bus and probably faster after counting all the getting lost times. Owell. Now we know and knowing is half the battle.

May 18

May 19