England #12: We Head Off For the Cotswolds in The England Chronicles - September 2024

(Saturday September 14 2024)

I’ve been !!!retired for a week!!! but oddly enough I don’t seem to have finished my England entries yet. Or finished my novel. Or made a fortune with my jewelry empire. Or even reopened my Etsy shop. It  does not seem real at all and I feel like I’ve just taken some vacation days. Apparently it will take a little time to get used to this and stop thinking I’ve got to go back to work soon, but I certainly am enjoying the staying up late, sleeping in, and doing a whole lot of lying around reading and drinking coffee from the french press. 

But now, on to the England Trip - Week 2, at last!

We departed Bath bright and early on Saturday and headed to Chedworth, sad about saying goodbye to Bath but very excited about the Cotswolds. For the most part we had no issues at all getting there. Except the one where the GPS immediately tried to route us to Bristol, which was in the completely wrong direction, because there is a Chedworth Road in Bristol. I don’t know how the GPS could mistake a road for a town but it was a really awful GPS. Fortunately I realized very quickly that we did NOT want to go to Bristol - at least not at that moment- and got turned around. Usually the GPS was more accurate around Bath than Siri, other than wanting to direct us down B roads, but oddly it was just the opposite in the Cotswolds. We generally had them both on and fighting it out - providing we could get the GPS to accept the location we were trying to find - largely because the GPS would let me know if I was speeding. Speed limits are very generous outside the towns and I was an extremely cautious driver, but they would plummet as we entered the many little villages, where I’d be too busy gazing at the gorgeous buildings to watch my speed. SO it was very helpful to have the GPS scold me in her chiding voice the second I got ONE mile over the limit. We started calling her Ms. Chidey, but I did appreciate that feature and did not get a speeding ticket.  

We stopped off in Cirencester first, which is a good sized town near Chedworth with around 20,000 people. Chedworth is tiny, with a population of about 700, and we thought we’d best get lunch in Cirencester and stock up on supplies. That was a very good idea, as it turned out. It only took us about an hour to get to Cirencester from Bath, and the drive was gorgeous, via a couple of A roads through the countryside. Cirencester is an extremely pretty old market town and we expected to go back often since it’s only a fifteen minute drive from Chedworth, but strangely enough we never did. I think because we kept going to Bourton-on-the-Water, which was about the same distance in the opposite direction, and was really easy to get to and find parking and also had an impressive array of restaurants and pubs despite being much smaller. 

We used our Just Park app and snagged a spot in someone’s driveway, quite close in to the main part of town. It seemed so weird to be parking in front of a stranger’s garage, right beside their car, but it certainly was handy! That’s our little car on the right, acting like it belongs there:

I really liked Cirencester, and do wish we’d spent more time there, although Bourton-on-the-Water is even prettier. We nearly got an Airbnb in Cirencester, right in town and close to everything, but a number of reviewers complained about the neighbors being very very loud. So we were glad to find the Chedworth one instead for about the same price. 

Somehow I managed to not get a good picture of these dancing rabbits - the only one I got from the side has a big white van right behind them. ***edited to say that thanks to an OD noter, I now realize these are NOT dancing rabbits - it’s a dancing horse and a dancing rabbit, and is called Horse and Hare. The horse’s tail really should have clued me in!

We had lunch at The Crown, a very nice pub. I had Ratatouille and Spinach Pie, and a Doom Bar beer (the darker one). Yum! Peas seem to be hugely popular in England, and I don’t know why, but I do like them and don’t eat them often here for some reason. 

There were several seemingly related people coming and going from that window table, and an adorable dog underneath it, just out of sight.

After lunch and walking around the market, we got supplies at Tesco Metro and some coffee at Costa, because of course we did! We were kind of on the hunt for an actual coffee maker since Kim felt strongly that we would not survive in the wilds of Chedworth without one, although I was pretty certain we’d be okay, especially with the surprisingly good Nescafé instant we’d finally found in Bath - it was much nicer than the usual Nescafé and tasted very much like brewed coffee. And of course we couldn’t find anywhere right in town selling coffeemakers. There was a Sainsbury’s further out but it seemed like an awful lot of trouble, and expense, for something we’d have to leave there. I finally messaged our host to see if they did have something for making coffee (it wasn’t mentioned in the listing) and she said they had a plunger. I wasn’t at all sure what a plunger even is, but of course it’s what we call a french press, so problem solved! (In retrospect I bet that’s what the Bath Airbnb had at some point and it got broken since they had ground coffee but no way to brew it.) We bought some ground coffee (and cream, lol) and Kim was reassured that we would in fact make it through the week. I think her worry- a valid one really - was there might not be Costas/Cafe Neros/Starbucks all over the place in the Cotswolds like there were in and around Bath. And there weren’t, but like in Somerset everyone serves fancy coffee. 

Then it was onwards north to Chedworth! Which was an easy drive, as far as getting to the Chedworth turn off the A429. But naturally, because we are us, we didn’t think we would ever find the Airbnb. It’s a tiny village with very little in it other than pretty old stone houses and gorgeous hilly fields and an astonishing number of teeny one-lane roads. The roads mostly go in loops so we kept finding ourselves back where we’d started, over and over. Many of the houses had names but we couldn’t find the one we were looking for that was right at our host’s house. Baker B and I had tried to find it on google earth and never could exactly locate it either. We finally stopped and asked some people who were standing in the road chatting, and they did know where the hosts live - which was just a few houses down from where we were - so yay! We found it at last!

The host’s house was up a little hill off the road and the Airbnb cottage was totally out of sight above it, so for once it really wasn’t us being dim. And I’ll admit right now that it took quite a while before we could go right to it without circling around a bunch of back roads. Kind of like Bath! But so gorgeous we never really minded. 

 This is the driveway to the host’s house, and our car sitting out front. 

And this is our host’s house from our Airbnb doorway. It is an amazing house, and I would LOVE to see the inside!! That is our car way down there - you could drive up and park in front of the cottage but there was nowhere to turn around so you’d be  backing down, and the driveway was very narrow with big rocks on each side so walking up was way easier. 

And this is the little cottage. It was quite small but very cozy, and had been renovated fairly recently with a lot of very modern eco-friendly touches. I think maybe it had been a garage in its previous life due to those big doors, which led to a strange extra room with a pool table that took up the entire space, and a fold out couch that there was no room to unfold. We kept wondering why they didn’t turn that space into another bedroom since two bedrooms would have made it a perfect spot. 

There was only one bedroom - with the bathroom off it, unfortunately, and this little space that has the kitchen on one end and the living area with a foldout couch on the other (a much more modern couch than the one in the weird back room so I think it was a recent upgrade too). It would be great for a couple, but was admittedly a little cramped for two people who were not sharing the bedroom. Still, I really did like it. It actually looks a lot nicer in person - these are badly lit photos. 

Also the bed was not sideways, lol, and was extremely comfortable. 

This bathroom was SO nice, except for that bizarre shower, which, as you can see, had an inexplicably abbreviated glass wall, so the water went EVERYWHERE. No matter how hard you tried to NOT get water everywhere… you got water everywhere. Because there was nothing to keep it from getting everywhere. 

And the bizarre “other room”! You could technically play pool but would bang the cue into the wall if you did. This room was very nice for storing our stuff, though. This was the morning we left, so you don’t get to see all our stuff everywhere. Just Kim’s pink suitcase. We ended up trading off the bed and the fold out couch every night, so being able to pile our luggage up here helped enormously. 

I took the fold out couch the first night and didn’t think I would ever get it unfolded. I struggled and fought and swore and drug around the cushion which seriously weighed like 50 pounds. At one point I had the back folded down over the seat and thought I finally succeeded although it seemed awfully narrow … then realized my head and feet would both be hanging off. It actually became hilarious - YOU SHALL NOT PASS INTO SLEEP UNTIL YOU SOLVE THIS RIDDLE!! Between the incomprehensible set up and the insanely heavy cushion, we just put the cushion on the floor after that.

The very best thing, though, was the garden space out back. Chedworth is in a dark sky area so the stars were amazing, and even though it was chilly we sat out there every night. And we were there during the full super moon!

 Wow, what a long entry for our first Cotswolds day! And we ended up not going back out for dinner so were really glad we got supplies. Sadly the much loved pub in Chedworth, that would have been close enough to walk to, had closed temporarily. Given our late lunch, long day, and lack of desire to go back out then try finding the house again after dark, we just had wine and cheese and crackers and other assorted snacks for dinner and sat outside looking at the stars. I’ll post more pictures of the area itself later on since we did a lot of walking around there.