Cambridge, Fitzwilliam and not eating sushi at a sushi bar

I once again wanted to see a bit of the countryside, so I set off from Stratford fairly early and headed south (I think) for a while, taking my time driving around enjoying the pleasant countryside. After a while I realised I had better get on with it, so I reprogrammed the TomTom so it would take me to Cambridge.

We took what seemed to me an odd route to get there, but in this part of the UK the roads don't run especially straight east-west (or vice versa for that matter); this meant I ended up going a ways south towards London (almost all the way to Milton Keynes) on the M1 before turning north-east and heading towards Cambridge.

Shakespeare's Houses, Warwick Castle and the RSC

Up bright and early because I wanted to get around to the inside of the three Shakespeare houses in Stratford and then head out to spend a few hours at Warwick Castle before getting back into town to have dinner and then go see Henry IV part 1 at the RSC theatre.

As I noted yesterday, there are three 'Shakespeare houses' - his birthplace, new place/Nash's house and Hall's Croft. First up was his birthplace, which has a museum attached to it that's got some interesting stuff in it. Oh, the swan statue isn't at the house; it's on the bank of the river.

Shakespeare Country

I'd gotten a little annoyed with how little of the countryside I was seeing from the motorways, so on my way back to England from Wales I decided I'd take a slightly more scenic route. This mean (roughly) going north to Monmouth first before heading east into Gloucestershire and then north again into Worcestershire (I didn't see any sauce factories, which seemed odd) and then east again to Warwickshire, which is the county where Stratford-upon-Avon is.

And now I've remembered I meant to buy some Stinking Bishop (it's made in Gloucestershire) in Cambridge and I forgot, dammit. Maybe I'll find some in York.

The Doctor Who Experience and Cardiff, boyos!

I'd now flown to another country I'd never been before - well, two if you count Dubai, but I don't really; that was just an airport - and now I was going to drive to one, going to Bath, England to Cardiff, Wales. It's also not a very long journey, slightly less than 60miles/100km. So, after my breakfast in Bath I tossed everything into the Vauxhall Corsa and hit the road.

Not a lot to describe about the journey, other than the route I took meant going over the Severn Bridge, a rather impressive structure that also cost me an impressive £6.40 for the privilege; I've now also had the experience of paying a toll in another country while never having done so in my own.

Bath, baths and Jane Austen

I now had to face the challenge of my first serious drive across country in the UK. Not that it was especially serious - it's only something like 80 miles, or 130km. But that's a lot further than I've driven in Australia for quite a few years, and in a country where I'm far less familiar with the countryside.

But the motorways here are impressive, though the downside is you don't get to see very much of the countryside - which was kind of annoying for me, since that was one of the reasons I'd opted for the self-driving holiday.

So, after about an hour and a half or so of driving through some quite pleasant (what I could see of it) landscape, I arrived on the outskirts of Bath. It's not a very big place, but my plan was to park in a carpark somewhere central (since I couldn't park at my hotel until the check-in time, which I think was 3.00pm) and wander round from there. I'd done my research and found one in town, so I headed there.