After spending an entire day at the sleepy village of Bibury, we checked into our room, a last minute booking on AirBnB. The spotlessly clean (and new) room and a bathroom all to ourselves cost me a grand total of £35. Yup. That's it. After a hurried breakfast, we set off on our journey for the next Cotswolds village on my list - Chipping Campden.
The skies had turned grey with ominous clouds on the horizon. It was barely 12.30pm but it was already getting dark. The drizzle had turned into a downpour. Chipping Campden is an affluent and bustling market town with nary a spot in sight to park my compact rental car. I felt like I'd stepped into a Barbour advert seeing that's the preferred attire here. Jodhpurs were a common sight too.
We were getting wetter and colder by the minute as we trudged up and down the streets looking for a café with an appealing menu. Lil L and I finally agreed on Huxley's, a gastro pub-cum-café housed in a 500 year old building with a large open fireplace. It's small and packed to the gills with regulars where the staff pretty much knew everyone by name. We perched ourselves by the fire because frankly speaking, we looked like drowned rats and this was the quickest route to get dry and warm.
My beef casserole was fantabulous. The meat was melt-in-your-mouth tender, infused with guinness ale after hours of stewing. Lil L waxed lyrical about her mushroom on toast. We had to hurry along to our next destination - Bourton-on-The-Water.
Well. When it rains, it pours. I'm talking about torrential downpour here. We ended up huddling inside the car at the parking lot as the rain came down hard and fast. We had a moment of respite so we dashed out and did the world's fastest sight-seeing in the history of mankind. And then ran into Smith's of Bourton to seek shelter and enjoy their famed cakes. The lime and coconut cake was divine. I rarely if ever walk into a tearoom decorated with all things chintz (I'm allergic to floral prints). It was such a novelty experience......for me anyway to be in a proper old fashioned tea room, drinking tea instead of tossing back cups of coffee and surrounded by floral prints.
Too bad about the weather. Guess we'll have to make our way back again to The Cotswolds.
