Cotswolder

Bath is one of my favorite places in the world, and this summer it is going to be even better than usual. Starting on May 19 there will 100 pig statues, life size and individually decorated, all over Bath - King Bladud’s Pigs in Bath. In October the pigs will be sold at auction.

There have been similar projects in other towns. The Cow Parade has been done in many cities. In Germany they did Storks on the Danube (Flickr). The Trail of Painted Ponies started in Santa Fe in 2001.

Pigs were chosen for Bath because of the legend of King Bladud and his pigs who discovered the natural hot springs in Bath.

Kaffe Fassett is one of the artists making a pig. Fassett is an American, from Big Sur in California, who moved to England decades ago and “revolutionized” needlepoint and knitting in the 80s. His family owns the wonderful Nepenthe restaurant in Big Sur. This is a great place to stop for lunch when doing the California coast drive. They also run the Phoenix shop beside the restaurant which sells many Kaffe Fassett things. They used to have a couch that he had covered in needlepoint, but it was not there the last time we visited.

The money raised by the Pig Project goes to the Two Tunnels Project which I had not heard of until today. This is a project to restore a four mile path - involving an old railway track, a viaduct and two tunnels - to connect the center of Bath with the Sustrans path NCN 24 (Sustainable Transport - National Cycle Network route 24) south of Bath near Milford. From there you connect to many biking and hiking trails. The route will be for bicyclists and walkers. One of the tunnels is one mile long and goes beneath Combe Down (high area south of Bath). See a detailed map.

Currently you can walk from the Center of Bath to Milford, but the path is longer and more difficult. With the Two Tunnels Project the path will be shorter and level.

I found out about this event when I was writing about Knitting Socks for my Views from the Slow Lane blog. I was reading Kaffe Fassett’s website to find out about his sock wool, and there was the information about the Pigs in Bath!

I am not an expert on politics in England, but thought I would post a summary of the results from Thursday’s local election and some links to articles with more information. 

The Labour Party, headed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are currently in power (and do not have to have an election until 2010), but the local elections put Labour in 3rd place with 24% of the vote, after the Conservatives (44%) and the Liberal Democrats (25%). This is Labour’s worst local election results in 40 years and may signal a change in English politics.

Tony Blair brought the Labour Party into power in 1997. Gordon Brown took over the leadership in June last year. David Cameron is the leader of the Conservatives.

Read more on BBC News - Cameron hails Tory ‘big moment’

London gets a new Mayor

Boris Johnson (Conservative) beat the incumbent Mayor Ken Livingston (Labour) by just over 50% of the votes (of over 2 million total votes). Livingston, called “Red Ken”, was mayor since May 2000. This is going to be interesting to watch because Johnson is quite a controversial figure in England. I love that floppy hair!

Autolycus, who lives in London, posted his comments: Cripes!

Read more on BBC News - Johnson wins London mayoral race
Read more on BBC News - The Boris Johnson story 
Read more on BBC News - BNP wins seat in London Assembly
Read more on the New York Times - Colorful Tory Beats Laborite to Become Mayor of London

Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 - Podcast

The Friday Night Comedy show on Radio 4 broadcasts with “The Now Show” or ”The News Quiz”. Both are very funny shows with local comedians discussing the week’s news. The News Quiz, which we get on our iPod as a Podcast, is my current favorite thing on the radio (for now it has slightly beat out my devotion to Michael Feldman’s What do you Know? on NPR). Yesterday’s broadcast had some funny bits about the election.

The Friday Night Comedy is best appreciated if you listen to the daily BBC news - then you get all the jokes!

Old Bailey Online - The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913. A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

Want to find an interesting branch of your family tree? Try searching on this new database of criminal records. Anyone involved with trials at the Old Bailey in London (England) between 1674 and 1913 is on this data base. The Old Bailey Online was launched this month and is already swamped with visitors (so the site may be slow). We heard about it on the BBC radio news.

I don’t know enough of my family tree to do any searching but I would love to hear from anyone who finds a relative in the database. They have a nice feature on the home page, “On this day in …”, where you can start diving into this interesting database, but each time I click it, nothing appears. We all need to wait a few weeks until they get their servers up to speed for all of us who will be searching.

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865) wrote the novel “Cranford” (published in 1853), a comic picture of life in an English village in the mid 1800s. She wrote her novels just after Jane Austen (1775 - 1817) novels were written.

The first season of Cranford comes to PBS in North America in May (airing May 4, 11, and 18) in three episodes. From the PBS site: “Welcome to Cranford, circa 1840…a rural English town where etiquette rules, undergirded by a healthy amount of gossip. ” Staring: Judi Dench, Philip Glenister, Francesca Annis, Michael Gambon. Read more on the PBS site.

Cranford was filmed in the historic Wiltshire village Lacock, just north of Bath. We visited Lacock a few years ago.

The novel Cranford was adapted for TV by the BBC and shown in five parts at the end of last year in England. Read more on the BBC site. A second season will be shown on the BBC for Christmas 2009.

If you can’t wait, it is already on DVD - Cranford on DVD.

» Read the rest of this entry

We are working on creating our Cotswolder website, a travel guide for the Cotswolds in England. We plan to launch the site in June.

I will be posting weekly to this Cotswolder blog with posts about England, travel to England, the Cotswolds, or experience England when you are not there.

I moved my Views from the Slow Lane blog from slowtrav.com (my old website) to sloweurope.com (my new website). This blog focuses on European travel and European vacation rentals. Come and see us there: Views from the Slow Lane.

We have been home for several weeks - recovered from jetlag, unpacked, bonded with the cat, got the leak under the sink fixed - and are back into our routine. I am happy to be back in my nice home office! I have been working on the content for the “Cotswolder” website and hope to have it ready in another month or two.

Here is a good article about vacation rentals for two in England: 20 Romantic Cottages for Two, Treat your loved one to a romantic Valentine’s getaway in a bolthole for two. From a converted dovecot to a former coastguard station, Annabelle Thorpe picks 20 unique country retreats which are all available in February. The Observer, Sunday January 13 2008.

I am making a list of my favorite vacation rental agencies and other resources for finding vacation rentals in the Cotswolds - comparing websites, comparing prices for US agencies who represent England agencies (I am surprised at how much you can save by booking with the English agency). I am also writing up descriptions of our favorite Cotswolds towns and activities. I will post on this blog when I get the new pages added.

Chris and Frank are in Paris

Chris, a SlowTrav moderator, and her husband Frank are in Paris for three weeks. I have been following along on her blog The Best Trip Ever. The weather has been colder and wetter than she expected, especially compared to their California weather at home, but the trip sounds relaxed and delightful.

More About Jane Austen

I uploaded my collection of Jane Austen photos to Cotswolder. Over the years we have been to Steventon where she was born and lived for the first part of her life, Adlestrop in the Cotswolds where she visited her uncle, Bath where she lived after leaving Steventon, Chawton where she moved to after Bath (her father died and she moved with her mother and sister to live near her brother), and Winchester Cathedral where she is buried. We have not seen the house she lived in at Winchester for the last few months before she died and we still have to see some southern England sights that she would have seen.

I found a good “Jane Austen” walk from her home in Chawton on a Hampshire tourist website. Literary Walks in East Hampshire: A Walk from Chawton to Farringdon (a PDF file opens).
“…and the plan is that we should all walk with her to drink tea at Faringdon” Letter to Cassandra, 29th May 1811.

Church in Steventon where Jane Austen’s father was the Rector.

» Read the rest of this entry

We left the Nailsworth cottage on Monday around noon and drove to Gatwick. It was a three hour trip: two and a half hour drive, half an hour at a M&S motorway stop for a sandwich. This was my first time driving this close to London and on the M25 (London area ring road). The driving is more intense closer to London - more cars, faster drivers - and the roundabouts are less casual. You have to know which lane to be in for your exit and if you get into the wrong one, people do not like to let you change lanes.

The last two trips, when flying from Gatwick, we stayed at the Alexander House, a beautiful country house hotel in Turners Hill, about ten minutes from Gatwick. This time we stayed in their sister hotel, Langshott Manor, a 16th century manor house on the outskirts of Horsley, ten minutes from Gatwick.

Langshott Manor, hotel near Gatwick

The hotel was very nice. It is small - 22 rooms and a restaurant - and even though it is very close to the airport and on the edge of Horsley, it is in the beautiful West Sussex countryside with a few acres of beautiful gardens.

We checked into the hotel, walked around the gardens, then took our bags to the airport. British Airways offers evening checkin, the night before your flight. The airport was empty and the checkin went quickly. This meant we were checked in and had our boarding passes, so would have an easier time in the morning.

» Read the rest of this entry

I have a lot more time to spend at the computer now that we don’t have to spend the day getting ready for a hike, doing a hike, recovering from a hike, planning the next day’s hike. Plus we have about 1 1/2 hours more daylight now than when we arrived. In early January it was dark by 5pm, now it is light until after 6pm.

Today was beautiful and sunny, so I took photos of the plants blooming in the garden. Have a look - Eastview Cottage Garden. I included a couple of photos of Whiz, the cat next door, who has finally got used to us and comes for regular visits.

We did our last visit (for this trip) to Cirencester and saw something we had never noticed before. Some of the older houses, at the end of Black Jack Street on the way to Cecily Hill and Cirencester Park, have built-in boot scrapers by the front door.

House in Cirencester. Notice the built-in boot scrapers.

» Read the rest of this entry

I can’t remember when they brought in the One Bag Rule in UK airports, but it was in response to some terrorist incident. It is always difficult to work out the rational that airport security uses these days, but I think this is to make the security lines move faster.

The first time we had to deal with this was last summer, flying through Gatwick to Geneva. At that time, if you were connecting in any UK airport, you were allowed only one carryon bag. If you flew to the UK and did not connect to another flight, you could have the normal two bags, but could only have one bag when returning via the UK airport.

I am a disorganized mess when I fly. Anyone looking at me would assume it was my first international flight because I obviously don’t know what I am doing. I get on the plane with computer equipment, piles of books and magazine, iPods, DVDs, a knitting project (heaven forbid that I be bored for one minute!), extra sweaters (what if I get cold?), a change of clothes (our luggage gets delayed one time in three when flying to Europe), a packed lunch in case they forget our vegetarian meals, and usually a work project that I am convinced I will do on the flight (I never do). Since December 2006, when those planes were kept on the runways for 8 - 10 hours and passangers had no food or water, I also carry a big bottle of water (purchased in the airport) and enough Granola bars to feed a large family.

» Read the rest of this entry

The last week of a long trip is always a strange time for me. When we first started taking yearly trips to Europe in 1996, they were eight to ten weeks long. A few years later, when we were both busy with work, we shortened our travel time and took four to five week trips. This year I wanted a long trip, a mini “moving there” experience, so we did a nine week trip. Instead of moving around in one or two week increments like we used to do, we spent eight weeks in one cottage.

Nine weeks is a long time. I miss my cat. We had thought of bringing Buddy with us, but only if we were going to stay here for the year. I miss my house. And my friends in Santa Fe. And being able to pick up the phone and call friends in the same (or close to) time zone. I didn’t vote in the New Mexico primary. I didn’t watch the Academy Awards.

Then there is the other component. “I can’t have been here for 8 weeks already! I still have not done x, y and z.” I wanted to meet Felicity for tea in Chipping Campden, drive to north London for Sunday lunch with Beebee. At least we went to a GTG lunch in London our first week, met up with Amy and Larry in London another time, spent the weekend with Valerie and Bryan who flew up from Italy, spent a day with Wendy and Richard, and have had several visits with Jonathan and Philippa (all friends from the Slow Travel community).

It has been a wonderful trip and we have had a great time. This photo is from our one trip to the Northern Cotswolds, when Valerie and Byran came for the weekend.

Snowdrops in Adelstrop, near Stow-on-the-Wold. February 2008.

» Read the rest of this entry