Day 98: Oxford

Time to leave Bath, our home for the last few days. It's been a nice place, and our apartment is quite good, though it was definitely on the expensive side. We left town around 10am ready for a long day of driving. First stop was the tiny hamlet of Castle Combe, a very picturesque town in a little valley. It's got a bubbling brook, beautiful old buildings, a stone bridge, the requisite war memorial (with a big plaque for the Great War dead, and a hastily-added second plaque for WW2), and of course a couple of pubs.

We spent about 20 minutes wandering up and down since that was about how long it took from end-to-end, but it was very pretty and we took a lot of photos. Afterwards we stopped at one of the pubs and had a cream tea, as is fast becoming our daily ritual!

Onwards we drove to Oxford, arriving around 1pm. Grabbed a bite to eat at a student food market literally right outside the carpark, then started exploring. It was a bit different to how I'd pictured it, because your first thought is essentially "where's the university?". But it's a difficult question, because the university is the town, and the town is the university. The colleges are all scattered around downtown, as are the other buildings like the library, commencement hall, study areas and so on. They don't seem to have "faculty buildings" like we have in Australian universities.

Most of the buildings are very old and impressive to look at of course, though we didn't go inside any as most of them charge and we had Schnitzel with us besides. So we just kept wandering around and looking at various things. Schnitzel was of course his typical rock star self, perhaps even more so since the locals were typically students and a bit friendlier and chattier than average.

There's also some nice parks and gardens on the edge of town which we quite enjoyed, along with a huge area where a bunch of kids were practising cricket. All very English and proper!

Back to the car where we drove to the outskirts of town for my own personal pilgrimage: a visit to the grave of JRR Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. I've genuinely lost count of how many times I've read these books in my life, and I'd say that LOTR made a huge impact on my young mind when I first read it. As you'd expect for a quiet, humble and unassuming man, he's buried along with his wife in a small plain grave at what was his local cemetery. Thankfully nobody else was there, so it was a nice quiet moment. But it seemed to be a popular spot, as there were plenty of flowers on the grave, along with hand-written notes and a couple of pages from his books that people had left.

Onwards! Our digs for the next two nights were slightly outside of Oxford at a place called Bletchingdon, so we grabbed some supplies from the supermarket and settled in. It's a fairly nice apartment, on the upper floor of a large converted barn in a very quiet area. Or at least it would be quiet, if not for the peacock that wanders around outside! They are very noisy birds.

I spent the evening watching the Europa League final on TV: Manchester United vs Ajax. We won, 2-0! Very happy with the result and I downed both of my beers in celebration. Editing video and writing diary entries can wait for another day!Read more