Cotswolds and Londontown

So it's been a while since the last update and I figured I'd try to catch the site up.

After York we continued south into the Cotswold's area. Cotswold's are basically a series of quaint little towns lightly sprinkled across the hilly meadows of south west of England. It's a postcard place: Old stone buildings with grass thatched or slate shingled roofs, country gardens full of lavenders, daisy, and other brightly colored wildflowers, long grassed meadows and shaggy trees all woven together by lazy streams and cobbled country roads.

Cotswold's apparently was the center of the English wool trade some yrs back and was quite wealthy back in the day. While the wool industry has since waned the austerity of the area has remained intact, the manor homes and wool monger shops have since given way to restaurant's, pubs, B&B's, boutique candle shops, antique china dealers, specialty hat and mitt shops and all the other things you'd associate with your old English grandmothers place.

Our particular town was called Bourton on the Water. We stayed two days and relaxed and enjoyed the decent weather. We rode bikes in the country side one day and horses the next. The rest of the time was spend wandering the town centers, eating, sleeping and enjoying.

From the Cotswold's we headed east towards Steve's amazingly well organized flat in London. London was alot flatter and wider than I expected. It is more like LA than than Manhattan. None of the building are particularly tall with no particularly recognizable skyline and it's sprawl has several 'centers'. Still it was an amazing city. We toured all the sites: Buckingham Palace, the Mall, Trafalgar square, Greenwich, Piccadilly, Covent Garden, Soho, St. Paul's, the Houses of Parliament, the British Museum, etc.

It was interesting to see how much the founding fathers had pulled from London when designing and building Washington DC. The concept of the Capital Mall with its government bldgs and free museums for instance seems directly pulled from London mall and its government bldgs and free museums; the Capital bldg looks strikingly similar to St. Paul's; the White house seems a scaled back version of Buckingham Palace and so on.

While Soho, Covent Garden and Piccadilly were very cool, Greenwich actually was my favorite place. We went to the Greenwich observatory where time starts and took turns jumping back and forth between the Eastern and Western hemispheres.

All in all it was a great time. On Wed (5-23) we jumped a plain to Bergamo, Italy to meet up with Den and Nano.