The Cotswolds - a place of beauty

Despite the creakiness of the place we all slept well last night and headed down to the restaurant for a very yummy cooked breakfast. After fuelling up for the day we were ready to head on to the Cotswolds – “A place of outstanding natural beauty”!! We were very relieved on returning to the car to find it not vandalised and all in one piece! Our first stop this morning was Bourton-on-the-Water – a very picturesque town in the Cotswolds. We went into the visitor information place and got some information on the walk from Bourton-on-the-Water to Upper and Lower Slaughter – about a 90min round trip. We decided this would be a good way to see the countryside around here as well as a couple of the chocolate box villages and we were right. It was a lovely walk through sheep and horse dotted country fields under an almost blue sky and before long we were in Lower Slaughter. The Old Mill was closed but we had a lovely walk through the village and then on to Upper Slaughter. Again we had a lovely walk around a very picturesque village and then it was time to retrace out steps back to Bourton-on-the-Water. We decided to drive on to the next village before stopping for lunch and were very glad we did as we had a nice walk through Stow-on-the Wold and a delicious lunch at the Talbot Inn. Before heading back to the

car we had to have a look in the Cotswolds Sweet shop – possibly a mistake as we were tempted to buy way to many treats!! Back in the car we drove on through some more beautiful countryside. We took a slight detour to the Donnington Brewery - unlike an Australian brewery there was no beer tasting, only sales but the drive to it was very picturesque so well worth it despite the lack of beer tasting!! From Donnington we drove on through more glorious scenery to the very pretty town of Broadway and stopped at a lovely little café for afternoon tea. Then it was time to make tracks to Stratford-Upon-Avon which is where we had booked an Air BnB for the night. We found our accommodation without any trouble and settled in to our lovely cottage for the night, on the edge of Stratford-Upon-Avon and across the road from the Avon Racecourse. It was a really nice place, very tastefully furnished with plenty of room for the 4 of us and very comfortable. There was an open fire in the lounge that we thought about lighting but the house was already lovely and warm with central and floor heating so we didn’t bother. Ian and I headed into Stratford to get some food for dinner and breakfast – we decided that after our delicious pub lunch we would be fine with soup for tea and found a M&S food hall to get this plus food for breakfast and lunch tomorrow. We had a very relaxing evening - tea and then another Harry Potter movie on TV.