OneAndOneIs2

Wednesday came and I spent the day doing very little until Lou got back from work. Then we packed up & headed for her parents, who live in Watford and thus are a convenient halfway-house on a journey to the Cotswolds.

Besides, they had our tent. . .

Reclaiming our tent, we set out Thursday morning and arrived at our campsite not long after noon. We set up our tent & went for lucnh at the nearby pub - and I have to say it was a very nice lunch, too. . .

Then we went into Chipping Norton for a look around, made the fatal mistake of going into a second-hand bookshop, and then headed for some town or other (May have been Stow on the Wold) for a look around.

Looked around, yawned, went back to camp via some standing stones.

There were in fact three lots of stones in one place. The most impressive one is the stone circle known as the King's Men, but there was a coachload of grannies looking at it, so we went up to the furthest set of stones, the Whispering Knights.

Try as I might, I couldn't make out what they were saying. . .

The Knights are around 6000 years old, and are believed to be what's left of a burial dolmen. Quite impressive to think they've been there that long. . .

The standing stone is only around 4000 years old, but still look profoundly weathered:

They were probably for some religious use or other. Here you can see an amazing display of supernatural energy bombarding the site:

(Or sunlight in the camera lens if you're less credulous ;o)

Next day we went to Oxford, which was a bit of a let-down - nothing but big department stores. Nice architecture, tho. And there were two saving graces: A little French restaurant that did very nice hot chocolate & cakes; and a Molton Brown shop where I bought my mum's birthday presents.

Giving up on Oxford after that, we headed to a nearby zoo. This was a real highlight of the trip, because they have two actual Firefoxes!

Yes, there really is an animal known as a firefox. It's proper name is the Red Panda. I have a plush one sitting on my desk at home, but the real ones are actually even cuter. If camera-shy:

Aren't they sweet? We managed to get a video, too.

They had a rather cute freshwater turtle there, too. . .

Saturday saw us in a town whose name I forget, but it had a pretty good maze: Not only was it quite tricky to navigate, there were 14 tiles with pictures on them, from which we had to work out a message to solve the puzzle in the maze center.

1. A flat fish
2. A paddle + y
3. a clock face with no numbers
4. "on the"
5. A friar
6. a key

and so on. Which should of course be read as "Plaice yoar hands on the monk-key" - at the center of a maze was a small room with a large frog in it, and lots of animal designs on the walls and floors. You had only truly solved the maze when you saw the dragonfly, which you did my placing a hand on the monkey-tile on the wall and standing on a caterpillar design on the floor. This caused the frog's mouth to open, and upon its tongue was the dragonfly.

Clever, eh?

On the way back, we noticed "The Devil's Chimney" marked on the map, and by luck and judgement we found it eventually: A big stone pillar with a lovely view behind it.

I did my bit for preventing soil erosion while we were there - it worked up an appetite for lunch, if nothing else. . .

On Sunday morning, it rained so the tent was wet when we took it down. Bloody typical, isn't it?