We had a great full day in London today, with lots more sunshine than forecasted, including a long (but not long enough!) visit to the medieval galleries in the British Museum by myself and a cruise on the Thames that we both really enjoyed. But first, some catching up with photos from the last few days.
On Friday we visited some little country churches and a cathedral in Herefordshire, which shares a border with Wales. We had a good time with our tripods in the small churches and it was a pretty relaxed day, although it involved a lot of driving on tiny roads.
St Michael's Church in Castle Frome, from the 12th century
Then a stop at Hereford Cathedral:
After visiting the cathedral, which didn't take too long, we had lunch down the street at ASK, a chain Italian restaurant. We used to eat at ASK in Oxford regularly, so it was friendly to be back, and it was good food, too.
For mains, David had chicken marsala and I had spaghetti bolognese, both of which were good but not worth writing home about. But it appears that I am anyway.
Then it was back out into the countryside to visit another little church and enjoy a lack of people again. This one is called Eardisley and, like Castle Frome, its main claim to fame is its carved baptismal font. All the churches we visited had such beautiful decorations of flowers and harvest-related things like wheat and apples.
It was nearing dusk by the time we got to our last stop, which wasn't planned but ended up being mostly on the way: Dore Abbey in the aptly named village of Abbey Dore, which we visited three years ago, also on a whim.
Our last visit was really memorable because it was almost completely dark out and we couldn't find any lights inside for quite some time, so we did a lot of wandering around in a very large, very dark church by ourselves! It was a bit spooky and highly atmospheric.
This visit wasn't nearly as dramatic, and we were worn out from the long day so didn't stay long, but it was nice to get some photos with a bit more light available.
After driving at least another hour, we spent the night in our cheapest hotel yet, a Premier Inn in the modern outskirts of Gloucester. It wasn't horrible, but it was very small and the carpets felt weirdly damp. We had a sad dinner of sandwiches from the huge Tesco grocery store across a roundabout from the hotel. I was ready to leave the next morning.