Month: October 2016
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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Southern Cornwall
We have positioned ourselves in the city of Truro in central Cornwall for the next week as a base for exploring the area. This is the capital Cornwall with a cathedral (only finished in 1911) and a popular shopping centre. We choose to stay here because of its centrality – only 30 to 40 minutes […]
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Arriving in Cornwall
Our time in Exeter ia over and today, we drove on to Truro in Cornwall. We will spend the next week here exploring the county. Our travel was less than 100 miles for the entire day, so we set our GPS on a much more adventurous setting – not the fastest route or the shortest […]
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A Feast of National Trust Properties in Devon
For the last two days, we have been travelling through the beautiful rolling hills of Dorset. We left our hotel in Salisbury and drove through some lovely country roads and lanes and by late morning we had reached the village of Cerne Abbas. One thing really surprised me. I have always associated red double decker […]
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Stourhead – A Gorgeous Garden and Estate
Today, is our final day in Wiltshire and the end of our exploration of this beautiful region of England. We visited the outstanding gardens of Stourhead – the last remaining place we had yet to see in this region. Stourhead is a 1,072-hectare estate at the source of the River Stour near Mere, Wiltshire and […]
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Two Historic Wiltshire Towns
Our explorations around Wiltshire took us toward the west of the county today as we travelled to the historic towns of Bradford On Avon and Warminster. The easiest roads on which to drive around here are the ‘A” class roads. They are broad highways with lane makings and a good way to get between places […]
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