The Cotswolds!

We are in the Cotswolds in England, and I am in love. This is my new favorite place in this country. It is quaint and beautiful, with sweeping farmland and rolling hillsides, large dark green trees, and charming villages with stone and/or wood houses and buildings, some of which date back to the 1600’s.

Churchbells chime, birds chirp, and (in what I gather is a rare occurance) the sun has been shining for the past week, and continues to do so.

Our hotel, The Close, in the town of Tetbury, has a beautiful walled garden, a four-poster bed in our room, thick drapes to block out the sun, and possibly the longest bathtub I have ever seen. The photo above is of our hotel from it's back garden.

It is, to say the least, wonderful, and relaxing, and we love it so much, we have decided to stay past the wedding weekend for an extra three nights.

Today we explored a wonderful little village called Painswick, nearby there is a supposedly amazing botanical garden, Bath is about 30 miles away, and about a 45 minute drive from here is a vineyard/winery!

I must comment, however, on what I feel to be England’s excessive use of the roundabout. They LOVE the roundabout here. On a 27 mile drive today, we encountered no less than 1400 roundabouts. I kid you not. There are more roundabouts than there are straightaways. I felt like I was on that crazy spinning teacup ride at Disneyland.

Being on the wrong side of the car, on the wrong side of the road, entering and exiting the roundabout from the wrong side just really does your head in.

We cannot have so many roundabouts in the US because, let’s face it, we just couldn’t handle them. We just can’t drive that well.

Here in the UK, people entering the roundabout actually yield to the cars already on it. They really yield-like sometimes they actually even stop. And they don’t enter the roundabout until it there is space for them to do so.

That would NEVER happen in the US. I’ve barely ever seen a car that yielded merging on to the freeway. In the US everyone assumes they have the right of way, and the other cars should just watch out and make way for them.

Growing up there was one roundabout in Newton, and every time you drove on it, you felt as if you were taking your life into your own hands.

Speaking of which, the most insane roundabout I have ever seen is the one around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. For some inexplicable reason, the drivers who are already on the roundabout must yield to the traffic coming onto it, instead of the other way around.

This leads to masses of cars suddenly slamming on their brakes inches away from the cars that are entering the roundabout. I have never seen anything like it.

Steve’s parents once wound up on that roundabout by mistake, and it was such a disordered mess, they couldn’t figure out how to get off of it and they just drove around and around it for hours. In fact, I think they’re still there.