The Sound of Silence

This past Friday and Saturday, our sponsorees graciously watched the kids for an overnight as well as giving us a gift certificate to a nearby B&B called The Green Dragon for an overnight stay. We had a wonderfully relaxing time and were amazed at the quiet all around us, so quiet that we had real conversation time and were able to visit a church, a cemetery, take a short walk, eat three meals completely uninterrupted AND visit two towns in the same day. The Green Dragon is in the VERY small village (if you can call it that) of Cockleford. The dinner and especially the breakfast were well-worth the stay. The furniture is made by a famous craftsman who also did the woodwork in the Yorkminster Cathedral and his "signature" is the engraving of a mouse on every piece. We saw these at Yorkminster as well.

In the morning we took a stroll down a side road and came upon hunters who were pheasant hunting. The double barrel shotguns were a bit unnerving but we were well within sight and away from the actual hunting area.


Run Mr. Bunny!

We then proceeded to a town called Northleach and visited the Church of Saints Peter and Paul and the cemetery there. We got to spend as much time as we wanted because we STILL had no children in tow!





Those two images are wool shears and a sack of wool.

My Three Sons - brass on a grave




This door was squished in a corner off a small street and looked about as authentic as it gets.

We jumped back into the car and went to Burford for lunch. We had visited Burford when we brought the kids out for a visit back in 2005 and the town looked exactly the same. We had a small pub lunch with pudding because we were still full from our breakfast. We antiqued a bit, snapped some photos and headed back to relieve Amy & Scott of the burden of our children.




Later that evening we went to a friend's house for an awesome dinner and great conversation. The kids got along well even though Owen was exhausted from a busy couple of days especially an all day field trip to London and the school Hallowe'en disco the day/night before.
Sunday was filled with more relaxation and two Cheltenham Literature Festival events. Owen and Craig went to see Chris Bradford who wrote a thrilling Young Samurai series (Owen was enthralled by the karate and sword demos) and Finn and I went to see Michelle Paver who wrote an amazing series called The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, a must read for the 10-14 year old set.