So, Jamie decided that we should go to the Cotswolds as we have said that we always wanted to go. We got close when we did Jamie’s birthday trip to Bath.

We decided that we would take the plunge and we booked a hotel room for Saturday night and drove down straight after I finished work on Saturday afternoon. We decided that we would take Sugar with us since we were going to be away overnight. We spent all of (actually, most of) Sunday doing our Cotswolds drive. We had to cut it short by about 20 miles due to a nameless rabbit!

The drive to Lechlade where the hotel (a term I use losely) was wasn’t a bad drive. We decided that we would stop after an hour or so to let Sugar out to run around and stretch his paws. We stopped at Pear Tree in Oxford. It was actually quite good to be close to Oxford again after not being there for 13 years. After about a 45 minute stop, we headed on our way again towards the hotel.

We decided that we would take a little detour along one of the many single track roads that were on the way. Jamie and I are explorers at heart and we like to go off the beaten path and see what is there. We came across several small villages that seemed to have stood the test of the times and seemed to be places that technology forgot. They were really quaint and somewhat typical of the Cotswolds. We came to a t-junction and the sat nav told us to turn right. We decided that we would ignore it this time and turn left. It was actually quite good, we found more quaint places along the way. We eventually ended up by the hotel and decided that we would drive a little past it to see what was there. We found the sat nav constantly telling us to turn around. We tried to reprogramme the sat nav to give us a more straightforward route. We kept on carrying on and it eventually found us a more direct route.

Our night in the hotel was less than perfect. The room was cold, dirty and miserable. The heating wouldn’t turn on so we had to request an electric heater. The wifi didn’t work. The room was full of cobwebs and dust. Sugar ran around the room and under the beds and he had dust all over his whiskers – that’s how dirty it was! There were dead bugs all over the sheets (someone put the quilt over it). The bathroom was just as dirty. I felt like I needed to dust my feet after we left. It’s such a shame the room was awful – as it was right next to the river Thames. Oh well, we’ll find somewhere better next time! We didn’t sleep well at all – Sugar made good work of that. We put a gate across the bathroom door and he wasn’t having any of it. He managed to pull the gate away from the door just as I was about to nod off. That woke me up. He then jumped on the gate in the bath and that again woke me up. We had to tie the gate to a chair to make it heavier. He had a couple of tries at that and gave up as it wouldn’t move. We finally managed to get some sleep! I told the owner of the hotel of the issues and he knocked £25 off the bill.

We finally set off on our way. These are the stops that we made on our drive:

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  • Burford
  • Taynton
  • Great Barrington
  • Windrush
  • Sherborne
  • Bourton-on-the-Water
  • Farmington
  • Northleach
  • Hampnett
  • Hazleton
  • Compton Abdale
  • Withington
  • Yanworth
  • Chedworth
  • Fossebridge
  • Winson
  • Ablington
  • Bibury
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There were 6 others stops, but die to the nameless, restless rabbit, we couldn’t continue and headed home after Bibury.

I’ll post the pictures in the next post since this was quite a long post.