It’s been two weeks we are touring around in England, to be more precise in the South West of this country. Just to swipe away all prejudices: most of the time we had fantastic weather, a bit colder than expected and only once we had heavy rain. However, we learned that English people do not call it rain when it only lightly drizzle (I would call it fine rain), they make very subtle differences for the amount of rain. The weather was an important element of our journey, as we camped all the time. I booked a few places in advance, mostly on farms and I have to say that was a very good choice. All of the places were situated in a marvellous scenery, clean, with all the comfort needed and very welcoming people.
When telling friends where we wanted to go, they thought we will be away for at least two months. Unfortunately, we did not have that much time, so we did the tour in two weeks. We started in Kent by visiting Sissinghurst Gardens, after we went to Brighton, drove further down along the south coast, with a short stop in Portsmouthand a longer one in Exeter (nice little town with a beautiful river side). From there we continued to Salcombe, St. Michael’s Mount(the smaller brother to Mont St. Michel in France), St. Ives (too touristic), Port Isaac (still a nice and authentic fishermen village) and Tintagel. We drove along the coast in North Devon to Somerset and stayed a night in Bath (soo beautiful!) before heading to Malvern for a visit of the Morgan Motor Company and then further to Albrighton for the David Austin Roses Garden. On our way to London we visited some picturesque villages in the Cotswolds.
Admittedly, it sounds a bit gruellingly, but we really enjoyed that journey. It’s a beautiful country.
For me, it was a kind of revival tour as about 19 years ago, I visited most of these places with two of our daughters while they went to school in UK. Of course, a lot has changed in that country, it became more modern, by keeping traditions and heritage, a very good mix, I think.
I needed to fill my head with all these pictures, stories, colours, landscapes, people, I soaked it all up like a sponge.
Now I need time to digest it all, I probably will take a long pause on our beach 😉