Cotswolder Travel Guide

Today the pound is at $1.50 USD.

And British Airways has a 3 day sale (ends tomorrow) with prices as low as $648 Dallas to London (return) for travel until March 22 (many other European destinations are included in the sale). Remember when looking at BA sale prices, they usually list one way prices based on a return purchase. The only sales on Business Class are for flights originating in London - none for US originating flights.

I am waiting for a BA sale on Business Class so that we can use miles to upgrade to First. When we flew on January 1, we were offered the chance to purchase an upgrade to First for $400 each. Expensive but we took it - probably the only time we will ever be seated in that First cabin. It was well worth the money - it was like flying in your living room.

Here is a video I made on that flight. When I made the video I thought BA was remodeling all its Club World and First cabins, but I was wrong. A BA crew member posted a comment today saying it was only Club World that is being upgraded (really, First was incredible - how could it be better?). The website says that all 747 aircraft have been remodelled in Club World, but the 777 aircraft remodels will not be completed until October 2009. Boeing 777 aircraft are used from both Denver and Dallas (the hubs we fly from).

“Affordable England” has been almost unthinkable in the past few years, with the pound at $2.00 at the start of 2008 (when we were in England), but on Friday the pound was below $1.60, making England more affordable to American tourists.

The high for the pound was $2.11 in November 2007. On August 1 2008 the pound was at $1.97, then there was a steep dropoff to $1.75 by September 11 and $1.59 on Friday October 24.

Here are some sample prices.

• Our vacation rental cost £340 per week (large 2bed/2bath house with garden, including all utilities and broadband) - $680/week last January and $544/week now - a savings of $136/week.
• A Cream Tea (tea/coffee, two scones, clotted cream, jam) cost £4.00 (at The Kitchen, Minchinhampton) - $8.00 (per person!!) last January and $6.40 now.
• Lunch at a pub was about £25.00 for the two of us (Fish and Chips, a veggie bake, two half pints at The Tunnel Inn, Coates) - $50.00 in January and $40.00 now.
• A Tall Americano at Starbucks was £1.75 - $3.50 in January and $2.80 now. Yes, they have Starbucks in England :)
• A “Saver Return” train ticket from Stroud to London cost £39.00 (off-peak hours, return) - $78.00 last January and $62.40 now (still worth driving to Oxford where the price is £19.00, the trains run frequently and you can use a network discount card).
• We experienced the $100 tank of gas last January. Diesel was £1.15/liter - $2.30/liter (about $9.20/gallon). Diesel costs £1.07/liter now (according to What Gas) - $1.71/liter (about $6.84/gallon). Since our midsize car got very good mileage - over 40 miles per gallon - and at home our old gas guzzler gets 16mpg, gas did not seem expensive.

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The Towns and Villages of the Cotswolds section has been published on the website! I have been working on this section for the last several months (but kept getting interupted by other projects) and I am pleased to have it finished. For me, this means Cotswolder is finally a full website. I will write about more topics, and I want to reorganize how the material is presented, but the base of the website is now there (over 50 pages not including the blog or photo gallery).

So, this is the official “launch” of Cotswolder!! This is very exciting for me because I have been without a website to run since I sold SlowTrav.com last year.

The Towns and Villages section has a page for each market town describing the town, the historic sites in the town, food and drink options (not all places are listed, just the places that we have liked or that I know are good), shopping (mostly food shopping options - i.e. the nearest Waitrose :) ), what there is to see nearby (villages, historic houses, gardens, prehistoric sites) and walks in the area (walks we have done from the Jarrold Pathfinder or Goldeneye guides). Throughout each page I link to other websites with more information.

My goal is to update the site on a regular basis, with information from our trips or that people send to me, so that it remains an up-to-date guide to the Cotswolds. I have dated each article so that you can see when it was written or updated.
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Our news has been concentrating on our own weather and financial disasters. Meanwhile, it was the wettest and least sunny summer on record and in the first part of September there was flooding in North-East England. Some articles in the UK press about the weather this summer.

The Observer, It’s official: the summer was a total washout, Caroline Davies, Sunday September 21, 2008
“Summer officially ends today, with the Met Office confirming it as one of the wettest and least sunny of any on record.”

The Guardian, Sodden farmers struggling with a changing climate, John Vidal, Friday September 12, 2008
“A terribly wet summer in the UK has left farmers facing the worst harvest in 40 years and the task of adapting to new conditions.”

The Guardian, Flood damage to cost ‘tens of millions’, Monday September 08, 2008 
“Insurance companies warn of huge repair bills after several regions devastated by weekend downpours”

The Guardian, Downpours force people to flee homes, with warning of more heavy rain to come, Martin Wainwright, Monday September 08, 2008 
“Lifeboat crews were sent 35 miles inland from the North Sea coast to help with hundreds of evacuations at Morpeth, Northumberland, while volunteers built sandbag walls round town centres in North Yorkshire as flash floods poured down from the North York Moors.”

On a more cheerful note (as Joe Biden would say - literally!), here is a video that I found on YouTube when searching for “rain england”.

James Taylor signing “Fire and Rain” (live in England), September 2008

I have heard from many of my England friends that it has been raining a lot this year. That they really had no summer. It turns out that we were lucky to have spent January and February in England, because those months had good weather.

January was typical English winter weather - we even had snow! - but it did not seem that bad to us. Santa Fe is much colder in the winter. In England we went walking most days in January.

February was exceptional weather, considering it was winter. The photo above was taken on a very warm sunny weekend (we did not need our winter coats) on a hike near Nympsfield - Sunday January 27, 2008.

Usually It Rains One Day in Three in England

The Met Office says this about rain in England: “Typically, it rains on about one day in three in England, perhaps somewhat more often in winter, though long, dry spells occur in most years.” Read more - Met Office - Climate - England. I think the “long, dry spells” did not occur this year. From what everyone tells me the spring was wet, June was good, but the summer was very wet. And it does not look like they will get a break this fall.

I hired a photographer to spend four days driving around the Cotswolds taking photos of the market towns. I planned to use the photos on this website (in the Towns and Villages section which I am still working on - almost done!). She was able to do half the work on a few sunny days in July, but has not had a good few sunny days since, so the northern Cotswolds remain unphotographed by Cotswolder.

A Year in England

2008 was supposed to be our “year in England”, the one we have been talking about for the last few years. I was almost ready to do it. Last year we got our house organized and got rid of a lot of “excess”. I still have boxes of extra clothes stored in the garage. Buddy the cat has been ready to go since fall 2006 (shots, blood tests and paperwork - which I renew each year).

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The September issue of Travel + Leisure has an article about the Cotswolds: Discovering England’s Cotswolds, by Alexandra Marshall. Plus a Guide to the Cotswolds. A photo from Winchcombe is on the front page of the magazine.

“With its bucolic setting, stylish manor houses, and the influx of a new generation of Londoners (rocker turned cheesemaker?), the Cotswolds, one of England’s loveliest areas, is now also one of its most glamorous.”

The article makes the Cotswolds seem like a luxury destination, which it can be, but did not talk enough about the charming, down-to-earth qualities of this area. Still, it is great to see the Cotswolds in a major American travel magazine!

For a contrast, read our article: Create Your Wellness Vacation in the Cotswolds. We outline a spa vacation without the spa - staying in a cottage and having a healthy countryside retreat.

When I started writing the content for Cotswolder, back in the spring, I thought I would be finished by June. Then July. Then August. So, here we are in September.

Over the last few months I have been adding new pages, but my main section - Towns and Villages of the Cotswolds - is not finished yet. It is amazing how much there is to say about an area of countryside that you can drive across in an hour (and up and down in an hour and a half). I have been working on it, going through piles of resource books, my trip notes and maps. I am now predicting it will be done by the end of September. 

I have also been working on Slow Europe, my site about finding vacation rentals in Europe. Several of us are working on it and I hope to launch it in October. We are putting together our lists of favorite agencies and resouces for vacation rentals by country and region.

But tomorrow we pack up the car and drive up into Colorado for a week - vacation time! We had a hot summer in Santa Fe with most days in the last two months having mid-day temps in the low 90s. Last weekend it turned cold and wet for a few days, then our fall weather started. Mid-day temps in the low 80s, sunny and cold at night (down into the 40s!!).

This year has gone by very fast for me. At one point, probably on a very hot day, summer seemed to be lasting forever, but now it feels like it went by in a flash. September already!

Cotswolder has a new look and a new logo - based on the spring bluebells. The look for this blog is mostly the old look, with a little of the new look here by mistake. I will get the blog and photo gallery changed over tomorrow. It is exhausting working on colors :)

The Cotswolder logo was designed in July 2008 by Ginés Valera (www.mediacomm.es and www.lumina.es (under construction) - email: info@mediacomm.es).

Ginés is Lumina on FeaturePics, a great site for buying graphics and photos to use on your websites.

Ginés lives in Spain. The logo for Cotswolder is a spiral of bluebells. My favorite time of year in the Cotswolds is the spring when the woods are filled with bluebells and Ramsons (also called Garlic Flowers). I sent Ginés some of my spring flower photos and this is what he came up with for our logo. I love the spiral and the gentle colors and being reminded of spring in the Cotswolds.

The original look - photo in the header, greens and golds.

The new look - bluebell spiral logo, purples and blues - with a little green that Chris suggested (great suggestion!).

This is more fun than rearranging the living room furniture! I still have to finish my main Towns and Villages section (new deadline - end of August).

I have not been posting to this blog lately because I have been busy writing the last major section for Cotswolder - Towns and Villages of the Cotswolds. I am having a lot of fun going through my old trip journals, dragging out the guidebooks and looking over maps to remember all the great things to see and do in the Cotswolds. A Cotswolds friend, Kazz, is helping by driving around and taking photos of all the main Cotswolds towns (but it has been overcast a lot lately and she has to wait for sunny days).

Reading about the Cotswolds, I keep coming upon historical references that are confusing. For example, the church in Windrush is Perpendicular*. (The photo shows the double row of beaked heads on the Norman doorway in the Windrush church.) I keep forgetting what this means (I eventually found the explanation on a page that Valerie wrote for Cotswolder about the History of the Cotswolds). I know that Georgian Bath was built in the the mid to late 1700s, and that it has something to do with King George, but again I was confused**. I did some more research and wrote British History and Architecture Timeline.

There are some great web resources with more information than my brief timeline. I have these listed with the article but here they are for easy reference.

Resources for British History

• BBC - History: Detailed explanation for each era of British history, with a very good interactive timeline.
• British Monarchy
• Britain Express - English History
• Britain Express - English Monarchs

Resources for British Architecture

• Britain Express - English Architecture
• Wikipedia - Gothic Architecture
• The Black and White Village Trail - Herefordshire: Get a brochure from Hereford Tourism outlining the 40-mile driving route through north-west Herefordshire to see the Tudor Black and White buildings.

*Perpendicular is a period of Gothic Architecture from the late Middle Ages (1380 - 1520).

**The Georgian era was from 1714 to 1836 during the reigns of George I, II, III and IV and George IV’s son, William IV. The Regency Period, from 1811 to 1820, started when George the III’s son, the Regent, took over when his father was ill.

“I live on the Circus in Bath.” That statement is false, but it could be true for a week, because I found four vacation rentals on the Circus in Bath. Or I could live on the Royal Crescent, where there is a hotel and four vacation rentals.

I will show you my Bath vacation rentals “finds” later in this post, but first a bit about Bath.

Bath has been a popular destination for thousands of years. Bath was settled in 836BC when Prince Bladud (later to become King Bladud) and his pigs (long story) discovered the healing hot springs.

A thousand years later, those same hot springs drew the Romans to Bath (they were in the area anyway, conquering Britain). They built a large bath complex so they could enjoy the natural hot springs (the baths are still there and you can tour them). Like Rome, Bath is set in a valley surrounded by seven hills, so the Romans must have felt at home.

In the mid-1700s those hot springs again drew new visitors to Bath when it became a popular spa destination for the English upper classes. They came to Bath for the season and to “take the waters”. “Georgian Bath” was built to accommodate these new visitors (the Georgian era was from 1714 - 1836, when the rulers were Kings George I, II and II - with an interuption for the Regency Period from 1811 - 1820 when King George the III’s son took over while his father was ill). Bath changed from a medieval walled city of 3,000 to a Georgian city of 30,000.

These three men were important in the creation of Georgian Bath:

• Beau Nash was the “Master of Ceremonies” in Bath and set the social behaviour, making Bath a popular resort for the wealthy of England. (1674 - 1762, buried in Bath Abbey)
• A local architect, John Wood the Elder, conceived of the design for the new neighborhoods in Bath, outside the city walls. (1704 - 1754, buried at Swainswick Church in Bath)
• Ralph Allen funded the project. He also owned the stone quarries on Combe Down that provided the stone to build Georgian Bath. He lived at Prior Park, now a National Trust site open to the public.  (1693 - 1764, buried in Claverton churchyard, on the outskirts of Bath)

At the age of 21 John Wood the Elder had a vision for developing a new area of Bath to accommodate the new visitors. Queen’s Sqaure was his first project in Bath (1729 - 1739). He lived to see that area built. He designed the Circus and the Royal Crescent, but did not live to seem them built. His son, John Wood the Younger, continued the building of Georgian Bath after his death.

Bath is still a top travel destination for England, attracting visitors from around the world. They come to see the well preserved “Georgian Bath”.

I created a Bath Google Map showing the main historic sites. Click the marker name for more information and the “SV” to see a close up satellite view. I can spend hours looking at Bath from above!

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The International Driving Permit (IDP) is a translation of your driving license and is needed, with your valid driving license, when driving in some European countries. This is a hotly debated issue on travel message boards because it is not always clear whether or not one is needed.

By Italian law, you need an IDP (and your valid driving license) as a foreigner driving in Italy.

You do NOT need an IDP for driving in Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales) - all you need is your valid US or Canadian driving license. If you are not from the US or Canada, check this Directgov Motoring page: Driving in GB on a foreign licence for more information.

The Automobile Association in the US (AAA), who issue the IDPs, imply that you need one for Great Britain. The VisitBritain site is a bit vague saying you need a valid, full national license. I was not sure what that meant, so I emailed the DVLA - Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency for Great Britain - and they said that you do not need an IDP. From the DVLA: “I can confirm that as a visitor you will be covered to drive for 1 year from date of entry in to the country on a valid US licence.”

The IDP looks like it came out of the 1950s (and it did) with its plain cover, staples and ink stamps. It is a remnant of the way we used to travel before cheap international flights, cell phones and online booking. Back in the days when flying to Europe was a very big deal, when calling home while on a trip meant finding the phone center and lining up to use a phone box, when you did not book ahead but instead went to the tourist office when you arrived - the way we traveled only ten years ago. I like my IDP because it looks so old fashioned and reminds me of those old trips, but it hardly seems relevant these days. You have your state-issued driving license and your passport - seems like enough identification to me.

Going to England? Just say “no” to the AAA and their IDP!

If you are planing to rent a car, we recommend our affiliate AutoEurope. I wrote a new page for Cotswolder with tips for renting a car in England - Planning Your Trip - Car Rental.