Blighty 2025 - Unplanned Oxford

 A sound sleep did help, but not as much as I'd have liked, and it was still a stressed morning as everyone started to find their feet in their new surroundings. Still, the shower was nice.

We had another run into Witney to complete the immediate supplies requirement. It was still busy through Burford, where despite a perfectly good, and free, Car Park at the bottom of the town, people were causing all manner of traffic-related problems while they tried to park at the side of the main road. 

Sainsbury's in Witney was very busy, which is something we're not used to, comparatively speaking. Charlie was "wired" and had to be withdrawn from the fray so that Mummy and Grandma could complete their shopping without losing their minds completely. Back at the cottage, Charlie's excitability continued, so his mother decided that a ride on a train might help. With remarkable spontaneity, off we trotted to the village of Charlbury where a reasonably priced train ticket could be had for the seventeen minute run into Oxford.

I'd never been on "The Cotswold Line", and like a lot of Britain's railways, it's been brought back from near death over the past few decades by paying passengers wanting to go into London after moving out into the countryside. The train, a nine(!) car Hitachi set in the dark green of the Great Western Railway company, pulled up at the tastefully refurbished station. (I just read about the station, and it's second platform and double track were reinstated in 2011 after being removed in 1971. The reinstated platform was extended to accommodate the nine car sets in 2018). It had come from Great Malvern and was heading into London Paddington, carrying a fair few more passengers than I'd expected, especially given that it was a Saturday. I pulled a face about the nine car set because that's a very long train compared to the five car sets on most UK Cross Country operated trains that do far longer distances. Indeed, there was even an hourly service in each direction on that route, which kind of knocks spots off Canada's VIA Rail's sad attempt at providing a service with a four car train only four times a day servicing Chatham Ontario.

Anyway, a swift seventeen minutes later we were walking into an incredibly busy Oxford, not looking for anything in particular. Goodness, but Oxford is vibrant. Obviously it's a university town, the university town I suppose, so there are hordes of young people about, but it was also full of day trippers and longer-term, more serious tourists as well. With Charlie in tow, it's not easy to walk around too much, so we visited a Pret A Manger store for a snack, a gift shop for some gifts, and did a small circuit that included Cornmarket Street, the Covered Market, Turl Street and Broad Street. It is a fabulous little town, even when crowded, and I'd recommend it to anyone visiting the UK, and that's not mentioning all the fabulous colleges and museums that you can visit if you stay longer. The high point of the day was witnessing one of Farage's Reform/right-wing "National Strike" demonstrations in town. There were about a dozen "Reformers" waving Union flags (the biggest of which was upside down), two dozen Police officers, and hundreds of counter-demonstrators waving Pride flags and easily out-demonstrating the Reformers. Fun, fun, fun. 

When Charlie started to get anxious about missing the train, we made our way back to the station, and then back to Charlbury and the car. We took a detour around the lanes to get chips from a place in Witney, but the little fellow had crashed out in the car and he wouldn't even eat his vegan nugget thingies when we arrived home. He cuddled with his mum and went to bed, which was really him doing what we all wanted to.

If things go according to plan, we'll go a little further afield tomorrow, but that's another day.

Blighty 2025 - The Beginning

A long time in the planning, a significant family birthday is our prime motivation for yet another grand tour of our joint fatherland, England. This is a long one, just on four weeks, and is costing not only an arm and a leg, but the foot and the hand as well.

Planning started over a year ago, and we'd booked three weeks in a charming little house in the centre of the Cotswold town of Burford. Why Burford? Well, it's central, it's pretty, and is far enough away from our usual haunts that it makes this trip a little different.

The only trouble was that, a month out from departure and we are on the hook for the full accommodation cost, but we discovered to our horror that the cottage we had booked had been removed from the cottage rental agency's booking calendar, but no one had thought to mention this small detail to us. Given how close this was to departure, and we'd already paid in full for the air fares and the rental car, there was no backing out, and an awful lot of panic on our part. Step up Gardeners Cottage, in the almost as pretty Cotswold village of Shipton-under-Wychwood, just a few miles north of Burford. A place that had all the Burford place had, and more, and was available for the three weeks that we needed it. A quick booking, and a shed load of money, later and Bingo! The deposit we'd paid on the first cottage was fully refunded, naturally.

So, it was a long a fraught morning that we waited at home before setting off for Toronto's Lester Pearson airport and our overnight flight to London. It was fraught because the British Airways computer had decided to schedule a different aircraft and the seats we had paid a King's ransom to reserve didn't exist on the new aircraft. Again, without anyone actually telling us, we had been allocated different seats, none of them close to a window. Sure, a seat is a seat, but why pay a ton of cash for a specific seat and then have it whipped away from you on the morning of the flight? Decisive action was called for, so I put in a claim for the refund of the money paid to reserve the seats; take that BA!

The drive up to the airport wasn't great. The weather was horrible, low cloud and rain for most of it, and of course given the hour of the day and multiple collisions on our route, our four hour journey ran into five. It was a good job that we'd allowed so much extra time.

Check in at the valet parking was simple, as was checking in for the flight, so bagless, thank goodness, we made our way through security and into the vastness of Terminal 3. I've moaned before about the removal of most of the regular seating there, in favour of tables aimed at food and drink service from a number of outlets recently installed. Ordering food and drink isn't mandatory if you use the tables, but I still prefer a proper "comfy" chair and a good view out of the window, both of which were achieved, thank without having to settle for the table arrangement. The food and drink outlets are scarily expensive, as are all of the shops and whatnot in the terminal building; there are a lot of people making a lot of profit from their captive audience, and I object to that. 

The aircraft due to take us to London arrived late thanks to the weather, so was late in loading and late in departing. We pushed back about thirty minutes behind schedule, and the aircraft's pilots bolted for the runway. I commented to DW on how fast we were taxiing, and as we turned onto the runway, we promptly turned off it again and parked on one of the runway exits. This wasn't looking so good. After about ten minutes, the Captain came on to say that one of the aircrafts brakes was overheating so they had to wait until it cooled off before making a second attempt at getting to the runway. Curiously, I wasn't surprised at this news. Anyway, at the second attempt we took off, very smoothly it has to be said, and headed east into the night. 

The inflight food was OK, in as much as any inflight food is OK. I had Macaroni and tomato sauce, which wasn't too too horrible. Then it was time to achieve the almost impossible, some sleep. The seats on the Airbus A350 are not comfortable, and while dozed through Singing in the Rain, and a Harry Potter audio book, I didn't feel very rested as I awoke properly somewhere over Northern Ireland. We were served one of those odd aircraft "light snacks", a kind of pastry filled with tomato sauce, and to go with it, a very small cup of coffee. It was a strange snack, but we'd paid for it, so it was all dutifully consumed.

We arrived more or less back on schedule in a warm and sunny London, and Heathrow Terminal 5 wasn't too awful. We made our way to the Sofitel Hotel, just outside the Terminal, where Sixt car rental have a desk, and went through the usual "upsell" routine with one of the agents there. On a twenty-seven day rental I didn't really want to be upsold, despite the agent pretending that there was no way our luggage would fit in the type of car I'd already paid for. She set us up with a Skoda Karoq, or "Carrott" as it will be known for the next four weeks, and guess what? The luggage fitted in. Just.

I haven't driven a manual car for a while, but took to it quite easily. You never forget clutch control. Modern cars no longer have a manual handbrake, so I was having to get used to the electric version, and learn to trust it when it released automatically, but it was all fine. Our official route to Oxfordshire had us on the dreaded Orbital motorway, the M25, for a few miles. But this was Friday afternoon, at the start of the schools' half-term holiday week, so the normally busy road was doubly-busy. I opted to avoid the stopped traffic and made for the slightly less busy M4, and a cross-country route, despite the protestations of the lady in the Satnav. 

We came off the M4 at Theale, made our way through Pangbourne and Streatley, then skirted the Berkshire downs, took a detour through the village of Blewbury, my home for fifteen years, then onto the A34 to Abingdon, and across country to Witney, just a few miles short of our destination. We were some hours ahead of schedule, so stopped to pick up some supplies at Waitrose, the excellent grocery arm of the John Lewis group. Far from picking up "a few bits", eighty-five great British Pounds later we struggled to fit our many purchases into the already well packed Skoda.

What should have been a fifteen minute drive to the cottage took nearer forty as we crept through Burford in gridlocked traffic, victims once again of half-term Friday. There's a bridge across the River Windrush at the bottom of the hill in Burford, so narrow that it's controlled by traffic lights, and that was the cause of the delay, at least in terms of how the really heavy traffic coped with those traffic lights. I'm hoping that it's not so bad on other days. The slight upside of the hold up was that we arrived at our home for the next three weeks, more or less at the time we were supposed to.

I'll write about the cottage in another post, but it really is a nice place to be, right on the edge of the Cotswolds. 

And so to bed. Everyone was dazed and confused after the (mostly) sleepless overnight flight, so tempers were beginning to fray, and I couldn't find the car keys which didn't help the general mood. Still, a good night's sleep will surely sort me out.