The English Countryside

Waiting for a call

Hi everyone! So, it’s been a while, but there will be a few rapid-fire entries now.

The final leg of our trip to Europe included a long visit to England before our final stop in Frankfurt. We flew from Edinburgh to Birmingham and picked up a car there to drive south. I like driving in the UK, even though it’s on the wrong side of the road, and we were in a car with manual transmission, so I had to shift with my left hand. It takes concentration, but I see it as a challenge. It was all fine until we got to out destination near tiny Stonor, England (140 homes, pop. 304), about halfway between Oxford and London, and the gorgeous house we were staying on for 11 days in the rural English countryside.

First, the house, which was a 17th century farmhouse beautifully renovated, idyllic, and generously provided to us by my long time colleague and friend, Ilina Singh, who was holiday with her family in the U.S. It sat surrounded by farms, and cows, and nothing but country air and fields.

The back patio:

Every morning and evening we sat out in the back, and one evening while basking in the bucolic setting and marveling at out good fortune, who should come and pay a visit, landing not three feet from Val’s head? A wise friend:

Tawny Owl

Anyway, the English countryside is absolutely beautiful. We hiked everyday, through fields and along streams and on people’s private property, who have given others the right-of-way to follow these ubiquitous paths that meander throughout the countryside, where every turn is another pastoral scene:

We visited all the lovely little towns around us - Helnley-on-Thames, Turville, High Wycombe (don’t you love those names?) and had absolutely terrific food - a couple of the best meals we had in Europe, perhaps surprisingly - England isn’t known for its cuisine. But the food was fabulous.

One strange quirk - all over the area where we were staying were these incredibly narrow roads, just barely wider than our car, bounded on both sides by large impenetrable hedgerows. I had to drive down these cattle chutes in our manual car, driving on the wrong side and shifting with the wrong hand, and here’s the kicker: they were TWO WAY STREETS. Every 100 yards or so the road had a little cut out on one side or the other, which made it so two cars could (barely) squeeze by each other. And if you encountered each other in between cut-outs? One of you had to back up to the nearest one. The native drivers whizzed down these lanes, fast, so every time I approached a turn I was sure I was going to smash into a car coming the other way.

Counterintuitively it was much easier to drive these roads at night, because you could see the beams and the headlights of cars coming the other way from much further away, even around curves.

We watch a lot of British crime series, we are Britbox fans. There is something engaging and lovely and somewhat mysterious about the English countryside. I get it now.