Donald Trump and the Return to ‘Leave it to Beaver’
I have previously only made one political comment in all of my blog postings and that was to express my relief in seeing Barack Obama (a man of integrity) replace George W Bush as President of the United States. Now that Donald Trump has been elected as the new President of the United States, I […]
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Back to Heathrow
We left Cheltenham this morning without a firm plan as to what to do during the day as we drove back to Heathrow where we will stay overnight before catching our flight home tomorrow morning. We started with a visit to Gloucester to see the redeveloped area around the docks n the River Severn. Its’ […]
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West in the Cotswolds
We awoke to a bright, sunny day today – although it was very crisp. It was a beautiful sight in Cheltenham, where we have been staying, to see the streets and their grand Georgian style buildings lit by bright sunlight. The yellow autumn colour of the elm trees was vibrant. Our guide book tells us […]
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North in the Cotswolds
The weather has cooled over the last couple of days and I’m back to wearing warmer clothes. For the last couple of days it has been 18C and very mild. We have been very lucky with the weather. Over the last four weeks, we have only had one rainy day and a couple of other […]
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East in the Cotswolds
Today we drove eastwards to see more of the scenic villages that we had identified in our pre-trip research. I really enjoy driving through these country roads and little villages although most other cars on the road (especially Audis and Jaguars) drive much faster than us and invariably tail-gate us right up our clacker, as […]
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South in the Cotswolds
We’ve begun the final phase of our visit to SW England and that is to spend a few days in Cheltenham so that we can visit some of the beautiful villages in the Cotswolds region of England. The time has changed for us today as Summer Time ended last night. Moving the clocks one hour […]
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A Day in Bristol
We spent a lot of time today visiting the museum site of the SS Great Britain in Bristol. This is a womderful exhibit of a ship which, on its own, during the second half of the 1800’s took about 4% of the population of Australia (at that time) out to the colonies. The ship made […]
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Driving to Bristol
Our journey today turned out to be just a transit day as we travelled from Ifracombe to Bristol. This positions us to have some time to look round the city tomorrow before we reach our next (and last base) at Cheltenham. We could have whizzed up the highway and been in Bristol in a couple of […]
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Cornwall and Devon Discoveries
We had a day, yesterday, of accidental discoveries. Sometimes, when travelling, these are the best. We planned to drive from Truro to Ifracombe, in Devon, and in our usual way, this meant following a semi-planned route but heading off to places that appeared interesting as we went. It wasn’t long before we came across the […]
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Exploring East Cornwall
We spent our last day in Cornwall exploring some countryside to the east – about the last area that we have yet to visit. We spent the whole day within 25 kilometres of our hotel but it felt as if we were a lot further away. We started by driving to the town of St […]
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Looking Up My Cornish Family History
Some of my ancestors came from Cornwall and today we had some fun looking at the locations where they lived and worked. My mother’s maiden name was Davey and it is quite a popular Cornish name. We can trace her family back to the area of Crowan in Cornwall over at least seven generations but […]
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Restaurants, Mines and Beaches
Sunday was a lazy day for us. We slept in for an hour, had a late breakfast and then headed north to the village of Padstow to go to Rick Stein’s famous Seafood Restaurant for a lunch that we had booked online before we left Australia. It’s a very popular restaurant and almost impossible to […]
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