Cotswolds

We get back on the bus and luckily our tour guide has a towel for

me to sit on because I got some mud off of me, but can do nothing besides wash my pants for the worst of it.  We head to Lacock, a Cotswold town where we’re going to have lunch and walk around.  We get 3 hours in this little town of two streets in order to eat.  I’m not 

sure why a tour that I know people only came on to go to Stonehenge and Avebury spends more time in this little town than both of those sites put together, but there it is.  At the Red Lion pub (which is closest to the bus and I’m able to hobble to it) I came face to

face with the fact that the British cook differently than us.  We order a pear tartine and it is awful.  Burned carmelized sugar to the point where it just tastes like your eating charcoal.  I tell the waitress that something is wrong with it, the manager comes out and tries it 

and says that it’s right, but gives us our money back anyway.  I refuse to believe that any tartine is supposed to taste like that.  I know I’m American and I love sugar, but that didn’t taste good and I’ve had pear tartine before.  It didn’t taste like this.  Even John said that it

was awful.  I refuse to believe it.  We wander around the one street and as we do, John starts to get madder and madder that the tour is set up to spend more time in this little town than the places that we wanted to go.  It’s a pretty town, Pride and Prejudice was filmed here you 

know, but still.  We get back on the bus to hit another Cotswold town, Castle Coombe and it’s pretty too, but I’m not in to little village in the English countryside.  Warhorse was filmed here, so I guess I can try to pretend that Steven Spielberg walked where I’m walking

   now, but it doesn’t have the same cachet as say Ben Franklin or Julius Caesar….It’s raining again and cold and at this point, I don’t care what I’ve paid for the tour, I want it to be over.  Which is why I hate tours and avoid them like the plague.  I would rather wait at a bus stop for 30 minutes to take public transportation and have my own time table, than put up with

 being someplace I don’t want to be.  At least we get to hear Salisbury Hill by Peter Gabriel as we go past it on the bus, but John says this just ruins the song for him.  John is much more relaxed than me about these things and I’m surprised at his level of annoyance.  We are able to walk to a pharmacy when we return to Bath and get me an ankle brace and John some more cough drops.  We stop to eat at the Stable which is a pizza and cider haunt.  We have amazing pizza and cider here.  It’s like a Hopcat for cider and the way they do cider here is amazing

and worrisome.  John gets a cider taster and I get a rhubarb cider.  What’s worrisome about them, is you can slam them back because they’re so delicious with nothing to stop you. They’re only 4-5% alcohol content and you feel it when you’re least expecting it.  But I want to bring it all home with me, that’s for sure.  We head home in a taxi again because of our various injuries and with plenty of pizza for later.