Day 3 Picking up Austin and birthday dinner- (Sept. 18)

Best Birthday Ever!!! Oh yes, somehow I managed to plan our trip to England so that I could celebrate my birthday abroad! We love to plan our vacations for the Fall months as the weather is usually pretty nice and there aren't so many tourists. It just so happens that my birthday is in Sept. and our anniversary in Oct., so oftentimes I get to celebrate one of these specials days away from home.

We left the hotel pretty early in the morning to head back to Heathrow to pick up our youngest son, Austin. Austin was at a concert in Ohio with some friends when we left for England, so he flew out from Columbus on Monday night, arriving on Tuesday morning around 11:00am.

3rd largest airport in the world

The drive back to the airport wasn't too bad, considering that were on the motorway most of the time.

Here's some interesting factoids about driving on a UK motorway:

They use MPH rather than Kilometers
On and off ramps are called slip roads
Pass on the right
Speed limit signs are digital and can be changed for conditions
There are speed cameras EVERYWHERE!
"Give Way" means Yield

rush hour on the M1

We picked up Austin (who was very tired) and headed back to Rutland Water. After a break at the hotel we headed over to the village of Langham for birthday dinner.

Langham is a quaint little village about two miles from Oakham. This village was once considered a hamlet of Oakham. It was largely a Royal properly, given by successive kings to various favored families, including Thomas Cromwell by King Henry VIII. Like many English villages, Langham is home to a parish church, and of course a pub.

We heard that the food at The Wheatsheaf Pub was really good so it was the perfect spot for my birthday dinner. In 2016, The Wheatsheaf beat out 100 other bakers and butchers to claim the title of "Best Overall Small Producer" at the British Pie awards in Melton Mowbray. So, of course, Eric and Austin ordered the Steak and Ale Pie. I had checked out the menu online before making our reservation so I knew that they had vegetarian options.

Wanting to be a little adventurous in my food choice, I opted for the halloumi burger. I have never heard of halloumi, but according to google (how did we ever make choices without it??), it is quite the thing in the UK. You will find halloumi burgers, halloumi on salads, halloumi fries, halloumi kabobs, the list goes on and on.

So what exactly is halloumi you might be asking? Well, according to wikipedia, "it is a semi-hard unripened , brined cheese made from a mixture of goat's and sheep's milk and sometimes cow's milk. It has a high melting point so it can easily be fried or grilled" . It was kind of similar to mozzarella but not as soft. All I can say is DELICIOUS! When will we get halloumi in the US???

Halloumi burger, yum!!

Since it was my birthday, I just HAD to get dessert :) I decided on a Baileys torte- a malted milk cheesecake, with baileys soft center. Topped with chocolate shortbread balls and chocolate ganache. Served with cream (that means delicious clotted cream ice cream). They had me at ganache! It was an excellent ending to a wonderful meal. The Wheatsheaf has a warm, friendly and inviting atmosphere and certainly lived up to our expectations for a great meal. We had an amazing server who spent quite a bit of time chit chatting with us about our travels (I was definitely getting the feeling that they don't get a lot of Americans in that part of the country). Once again I felt like all that I had heard about Brits not being very friendly was just a myth. 

The Wheatsheaf in Langham

interior of the Wheatsheaf pub

 We rolled our full bellies back to the room for a good night's sleep in preparation for a big day on Wednesday as we would be heading to Madresfield Court, ancestral home of the Ligon (Lygon) family.

Day 2 Melton Mowbray and Langham (Sept 17)

After a good night's sleep we were able to get up at a decent hour and start exploring. Since it had been closed the day before, we made a stop at the famous Hambleton Bakery in Oakham on our way out of town. We had looked for another of their locations the day before and got confused by our GPS, so I was happy to find one of their satellite locations right in town.  This little bakery has been selected as one of the top 20 best bakeries in the UK! Everything looked so good and it was hard to decide what to get. I opted for a carrot /cardamom cake. I could smell a hint of orange zest in it as well. It was delicious

Morning treat from Hambleton Bakery

on the road to Melton Mowbray via the beautiful English Countryside

We decided to head out about 24 miles from our hotel to explore the town of Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire County. This town is a little larger than Oakham, but has just as much charm. It has been a market town for over 1,000 years and is the third oldest market in England.

After we found a place to park we headed out into town and immediately found ourselves right in the middle of some very awesome Tudor history. The sign on the building caught my eye as it is called the "Anne of Cleves" and had a picture of King Henry the VIII on it. Upon reading the sign out front, I learned that it had once been the home of a famous advisor to Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, and then after his execution it was given as part of the divorce settlement to Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. Eric wasn't at all interested in the Tudor history, but the fact that it had been turned into a really cool pub good enough for him! We decided to stop back by a little later in the day for a pint.

It's a pub...ok, now he is smiling!

Former home of Thomas Cromwell

The town has a really cool heritage trail. You can wander around and see trail signs that explain some of the different buildings around town. There is an old hunting lodge, several market crosses , a beautiful parish church and many other historic buildings.

I had done some reading online about the town before our visit and found out that two things they are very well known for are their pork pies and their cheese, so as we were wandering around town we kept our eyes open for the pie and cheese shops. We found Ye Olde Pork Pie Shoppe which is housed in an old bakehouse from the early 17th century. In 1851 it was taken over by John Dickinson and became the home of the Melton Mowbray famous pork pies. Eric got a small pie for lunch and a larger one to take back to the room for dinner.

Dickinson's Pie Shoppe

Famous Pork Pie

Since I don't eat meat, I selected a delicious vegetable pasty. I noticed that the English love wrapping their food up in yummy pie crust! Works for me!! We sat down outside in the town square for some people watching while eating our pies.

vegetable pasty

Melton Mowbray Town Square

After eating our pies, we headed back over to the Anne of Cleves pub for a pint. It was very quiet in the pub and we had the opportunity to have a very nice chat with the bartender. She asked where we were from, we chatted about the US, the UK, traveling and of course, British cask ales. It was a very traditional looking pub and had a great selection of local brews

 Next we headed down King Street in search of the Melton Cheeseboard. We found it a few blocks down, and arrived about one minute after closing. Since I was in full toursit mode, I peered through the window to see what I was missing. The lady inside motioned me inside and said if I had something quick she could stay open for me. How nice! I told her we were on holiday (that's what vacation is called in the UK) and asked her what is their most popular cheese. She said they are famous for their Stilton Blue Cheese. Honestly, she had me at Blue Cheese!! We bought a block and headed off to Anne of Cleves pub. 

Stilton Blue Cheese

The Cheese Shop

The arch at King Street

 Cheese in hand, we headed back to our hotel. On the way back, we stopped in the very small village of Langham where we discovered "The Wheatsheaf Pub" and made a reservation for Tuesday night's dinner.

     

Day 1 Oakham and Uppingham (Sept 16)

We instantly fell in love with this beautiful market town of Oakham.  When you picture a traditional English village, you picture something that looks like Oakham. The buildings are brick, many with thatched roofs, and give you a sense of stepping back in time. The town is filled with history, cafes, pubs, a castle, a church and even stocks.
We spent a lot of time wandering around, just taking in the sights. Many people take advantage of the great growing climate and flowers and plants abound.

We spotted our first thatched roof.

It was a Sunday and so the town wasn't terrible busy, but that also meant that many of the shops were closed. After we wandered around for a while, we decided to take a drive in search of a bakery that I had seen online (we would come back to Oakham the next day to explore). For some reason, our GPS was having issues with the address and we didn't find the bakery (but don't worry, we eventually found it) but we did end up finding the smaller village of Uppingham.

street in Uppingham

Uppingham town hall

Uppingham is about 6 miles from Oakham. It's much smaller than Oakham but every bit as charming. It's been a functioning market town since the 14th century. It has traditional country inns, pubs, rooms, a beautiful old church and a market square.


As in Oakham, since it was a Sunday, there wasn't much open in town. It was a little rainy outside, so we decided to stop for a cup of coffee at Don Paddy's cafe. Eric ordered an Americano and I got a hot chocolate. What a beautiful cup of hot chocolate! As we sat with our drinks, Eric pursued the menu and ended up ordering a chorizo hash brown breakfast that was fabulous. 

Irish cafe in English village

yum!

My favorite thing about sitting in Don Paddy's was hearing everyone around me speaking with a British accent. I think that for the first time it really sunk in that I was in England!

As we were exploring in the village, we came across the beautiful St. Peter and St. Paul's church. We would soon discover that every town/village we were in had its own parish church. Most are still in use today. Surrounding every parish church is also a parish cemetery. It was interesting seeing headstones from the 1700's. We assumed that many are older than that but they are too worn out to read.

                          

                                              St Peter and St. Paul's church in Uppingham

church cemetery 

After exploring Uppingham, we headed back to Oakham for some grocery shopping. We parked a ways away from the market so we did some more sight-seeing around the town. I was getting a bit hungry by then so we looked for a place to grab a quick bite to eat. What we found out is that on Sunday, the Brits are all about the "Sunday Dinner". Every place we checked had a set "Sunday Dinner" menu and usually a long wait. We ended up sitting in one place, The Admiral Hornblower" for a while in the bar area hoping for a finger food menu, to no avail, but Eric did get to have his first English pint. Most English beer is served at around 55' degrees and is very low alcohol content as compared to Oregon's craft beers. He enjoyed it nonetheless.

A pint at the Admiral Hornblower

We took the opportunity while back in Oakham to explore Oakham Castle. This castle was built around 1180 and is one of the finest surviving examples of Norman domestic architecture in Europe. I loved seeing the Great Hall of the castle and could just imagine all of the activities that would have gone on there in its heyday. 

Parish church next to Oakham Castle

exterior of Oakham Castle

The Great Hall of this castle is famed for its collection of over 230 ornate ceremonial horseshoes donated by Peers of the Realm (Royalty and nobility such as Dukes, Marquis', Earls, Viscounts, Barons and Bishops). The oldest surviving horseshoe was given by Edward IV in 1470.

wall of horseshoes

 Just outside the castle is the town buttercross, a type of market cross associated with English market towns and dating all the way back to medieval times. This is the place where the town's people would gather to buy locally produced butter, milk and eggs. It's also the location of the town stocks. We were quite curious as to why there five holes in the stocks??                       


We finished up our afternoon at the local market, called Tesco. It was a very nice grocery store and it was very fun exploring and seeing so many different foods and brands that we don't have in the US. We picked up some items for dinner and headed back to the room for an early bedtime. 

UK grocery store 

Day 1 Rutland County and Parking (Sept 16)

I have to admit, my obsession with England has always pretty much centered around London. Being the capital of England and with the most people, it's easy to see how London gets so much of the attention.

 For this trip, I was planning to use some rewards points I had saved up and a condo exchange. When searching for a condo exchange I found out that there really wasn't any inventory in London so I decided to look for a place in the countryside and use my rewards points for my London hotel. I was able to find a place in Rutland County, which is in the East Midlands area, about 2 hours north of London. The hotel is called Barnsdale Hall Hotel and it is a former hunting lodge set on the shore of Rutland Water which is a manmade reservoir that not only serves as the county's drinking water reserve, but as a recreational area.

Front of the Barnsdale Hall Hotel

staircase to our room

hotel lobby

Rutland County is the smallest historic county in London and the fourth smallest overall in the UK. The only towns in Rutland are Oakham and Uppingham. Our hotel was about 3 miles from Oakham. 

We started off our morning exploring Oakham. One of the first thing we noticed was how interesting parking and driving would be in a small town. I have two words...NARROW ROADS! It's probably because these villages/towns are so old and were around way before cars that they really aren't very accomodating to cars and parking. There are really no two lane roads, only one lane roads disguising themselves an one lane roads. Lots of yielding to cars when the road was too narrow for two cars to pass.

You expect two lanes of travel on this road?

Parking is very tricky in these towns/villages as well. There just isn't much of it. So many areas are for "permit parking" only for the residents that it makes it hard to find a space (see future blog post for more about that, lol). If you find a parallel parking space, you just whip into it, never minding the direction of travel. Oh and if there is not enough room, just park on the sidewalk like everyone else! If you can't find parking on the street, you can always look for a "car park" and pay for a space.

UK car park

Let's talk about the roundabouts...if you have never driven in a roundabout in England you are missing out! What an adventure. Actually they aren't so bad once you figure out the system. And when you are moving 66 million people around a country, you need the efficiency of a roundabout. To tell the truth, by the end of the week I was actually liking the roundabouts :)

The dreaded roundabout

Once we found a place to park it was time to start exploring Oakham...

Welcome to England! (Sept 14&15)

There is no getting around it. If you are going to an international destination, you have to deal with a long flight. Not my favorite part of the trip, but not as terrible as I expected. We flew out of Portland, had an hour layover in Salt Lake City and then went straight through to England. It's somewhere around a 12 hour flight (all total). We left about 2pm and landed at Heathrow at 10:00 am London time, which is 2am our time. Delta did a great job with service, I might add (even the in flight meals were tasty). Thank goodness for in flight movies, a kindle and downloaded shows from Netflix!

I have to say that the view of London from the air made the whole flight seem worthwhile!!

I spotted the Tower Bridge and Tower of London!

I had heard how big Heathrow airport is and was expecting quite a process to get through customs but it was really quite easy. Hardly any line and we zipped right through! After making our way through customs, we picked up our rental car. You definitely have to feel adventuresome to get a rental car in England! We had talked a lot about transportation for our first week and decided that with all sightseeing we wanted to do we really needed to get a car. Easy for me to say as I wasn't going to be the one driving, lol! Trust me, though, being the navigator isn't so easy either.

Everything is opposite!

Driving like a pro

That first trip out of Heathrow was scary! Not only is Eric sitting on the right side of the car, but we are on the left side of the road and we immediately get to a roundabout!! Right then I wondered if we were going to get our rental car back in one piece after a week of driving?? We had a two hour drive to our hotel, on very little sleep, went through roundabout after roundabout but somehow we made it! We even had a pit stop for a bite to eat and a spot of tea along the way. An interesting thing about England is that they have "services" alongside the highway every once in a while. It could be just a gas station/mini mart, or maybe a hotel/restaurant, but often they are like big US shopping mall food courts. The place we stopped for lunch was a food court style. We ate a place called Patisserie Valerie, which is a UK chain bakery/cafe. It was here that I had my first real English tea.

We made it to our hotel dropped our bags and then went into town for a quick grocery run before passing out for the night.

First view of Rutland Water from hotel room

View from bedroom

What an awesome condo!

Planning for Adventure

For as long as I can remember I have had a fascination with England. My sister, Jennifer, and I share this love of England/London. I don't think we were a bit surprised when my sister had her DNA done and we found out our heritage is almost 95% from the UK (mostly English but some Scottish and Irish too).  We love the history, the places, the accent, the culture etc. but we had never actually been to England!  It's been our dream for a long time to go to London and especially to go together.

A couple of years ago my sister told me that she and Chris were planning to go to Europe in 2018. Her plan was to visit Edinburgh, London, Paris (her #1 destination), Belgium and Amsterdam. I am thankful that my husband got on board with us going with them so that my sis and I could see London together. As it turned out, the dates we selected would be very close to our 30th wedding anniversary, so there you go, "Happy Anniversary" to me from Eric.

After much discussion Eric and I decided that we didn't want to go to as many places as Chris and Jen (just sounded too exhausting for us), so we decided to spend our two weeks in England. As it worked out, our first week would be spent in the countryside (in hindsight, best decision ever!) and one week would be in London (where we would meet up with Chris and Jen)

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Let the planning commence! We had over a year to plan for the trip. Did I tell you I'm a planner?? Well, my sister is even more of a planner than I am! We both did a lot of research for our trip. Read articles online, read books, watched travel videos, had lots of conversations, bought travel essentials, made lists of places we wanted to check out, etc.

We even practiced our packing! Before our trip to Vegas, Eric and I decided that we were going to start traveling with carry-on only. Vegas was a trial run for me as me traveling lightly wasn't really a concept I knew very well. We bought travel backpacks and packing cubes.

Osprey FarPoint 40 backpack

Packing for two weeks wasn't actually as hard as I thought it would be. A few changes of clothes, three pairs of shoes (maybe a bit too much but I hate having sore feet when there is a lot of walking to do so I wanted to switch out), raincoat (it's England!!), puffy jacket, personal item tote bag with neck pillow, kindle, snacks for flight, iphone, travel journal and I was pretty much ready to go!

Having never been so far away from home, on such a long flight and for two weeks, I was a mixture of excitement and apprehension. Would the trip overwhelm me? Would I  be exhausted? Would I be homesick? Would England live up to my expectations? I made up my mind that I was going to think of the whole thing as an adventure...no matter what happened, it was all part of the adventure. Relax and enjoy the moment.

With those thoughts in mind, we were off across the wild blue yonder, next stop, England!