It's another nice afternoon here in England, partly cloudy, somewhere around 65 and not windy either. I am writing this from outside a pub, in shorts and a t-shirt, enjoying the weather and a good cask pale ale. Think I'll give you a little overview of my day so far and then go back and catch you up on the last week, or has it even been two since I wrote a real post?
I woke up a little after 7 this morning to watch the pre-race (they call it "build-up" here) and the Chinese Grand Prix. The race turned out to be absolutely thrilling, lots of good battles for position, no safety cars, tons of strategy, and couldn't tell who was going to win the race until fairly late. I won't say anymore in case anyone reads this before watching it on their DVR at home! I then made some good progress working on a simulation program for our project, though I still have some complications to work out. Just like yesterday I decided to ride my bike the appx. 4.5 miles to the gym after lunch. Then I decided to take advantage of the weather and my new Netbook to write this post from a nice pub on the way back home (ok, it's actually not on the way back home, just slightly out of the way, but they now have a selection of 9 casks on all the time).
The trip into London to pick up Jess was uneventful, but long. There are faster ways to get to Heathrow, but much more expensive, so whatever. I was actually worried I'd be late to get her, as the plane seemed like it would be significantly early to land. We took the tube over to Parsons Green nd enjoyed sliders and a Ploughman's salad for lunch at The White Horse. Our train to Oxford was extremely crowded and really hot. Easily the least pleasant train ride I've had over here so far. We made it though, and our B&B was a 2 minute walk from the station. It was a cute little spot and we got the ensuite bathroom at no extra charge because something was wrong with the public one!
The MIA dinner at Williams F1 was good, though I was hoping that the networking part of it would've been a little easier. I should've used the time I spent looking at some of the cars upstairs finding the people I wanted to talk to. I did find most of them after the dinner though, we'll see what comes of the connections. Gian Paolo Dallara, the guest of the night was really good, very insightful, honest, humble, and really entertaining. The Williams museum was great too, though I think they intentionally lit the place so it was nearly impossible to take pictures. Maybe it would work with a DSLR or something, but I dunno. I did meet and have a long discussion about our project with Sam Collins of Racecar Engineering in the museum, which was helpful. It wound up being a late night, didn't get back to Oxford until like 12:15 I think.
Next on the itinerary was a place called Stonehouse, and the train ride there was nearly empty and much much more comfortable than the previous one. The hotel I'd booked there wound up being the accomodation highlight of the trip for sure. A lovely old stone building, well done restoration, good restaurant, and just fabulous weather. We wound up eating lunch and dinner at the hotel, enjoying some white wine on the patio in the early afternoon, and enjoying how uncrowded the place was. It helped that they didn't seem to be too worried about adding all of our charges to our room, we wound up getting a decent portion of our food and drink for free :) We did explore the nearby larger town of Stroud, which was a neat little town. The next morning we did absolutely stuff ourselves on the breakfast at the hotel, which turned out to be a good thing...
Our third stop of the trip was pretty far off the beaten path, and we decided to pay for a taxi to get there instead of a bus and a walk with all of our luggage. We got there to see a "Pub for Let" sign and no one answering the door! Finally someone came out though, and we dropped our bags off and got checked in. We started off on our journey to walk and explore the beautiful scenery in this part of the country. I'd been hopeful to find an easy path to the Cotswolds Way, but hadn't found a good enough map of the thing to locate it. So we just set off towards what I thought would be the most scenic path. Unfortunately it was up a steep hill, advertised on the warning sign as a 25% grade! And it kept going and going and going too. But partway up we found the actual Cotswolds Way, which got us off a road and into some shade, which we actually needed at this point. The destination was a town called Edge, with no idea what we'd find there, but hopefully some food of some sort. I think it was probably 3ish miles to this town. We got disoriented at one of the path markers, but eventually found the town, but it seemed to be purely residential. The next town over was Painswick, and another 1.5 mile walk. So this is where the huge breakfast was paying off! We had planned to walk back to Haresfield where our room was, but decided to continue to Painswick and get a taxi back. Luckily once we got there we did find snacks and drink. Jess continued to try various ciders while I stuck with cask ale. Google Maps did fail us miserably at the end of our journey in Painswick, which led to a massively frustrated Charles and calling our taxi driver back for a ride home. It's funny now I suppose, but definitely wasn't at the time! Dinner was at the Pub, The Beacon, where our room was, and it was absolutely massive. I think it could've fed a family of 6 or 8 probably. Nothing spectacular but it worked, ribs and chicken wings for me, and a burger for Jess. I did find it funny that as my side option I asked for a jacked potato (baked potato) and actually got 2!! Insted of breakfast we decided to get the pubs Sunday roast, and spent the morning watching the Malaysian Grand Prix and then another short walk around the small town of Haresfield. It was decent, nothing fantastic, but a good experience nonetheless.
Another taxi ride took us to Cheltenham, and a studio apartment style hotel. It turned out to be an interesting place, it was cheap and, I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew we were sharing a bathroom, but we had a shower in the room, just a shared toilet, and a kitchen sink, refrigerator and microwave. Cheltenham is famous for being a "Spa" though I'm not sure exactly what that means. We walked around the town center, through a few nice parks and tons of shopping. It was a nice area. The last place we stopped, a pub called the Jolly Brewmaster was fantastic. We wound up trying all 8 of their cask ales (not pints of each though) as they had a huge outdoor seating area that was packed. We noticed a few patrons with some serious sunburn going on though! Dinner turned out to be some pate, cheese, crackers and fruit that we found on the walk home.
I didn’t finish writing this at the pub, it was getting a little colder, and I needed to begin the ride back home ;)
The train back home to Milton Keynes was in the morning, in time to get me back to campus for a presentation. We got breakfast at a local deli, a baguette for Jess and a piece of quiche for me, both very tasty. It was hectic when we got back here because I had to move my stuff into the room I was staying in. We barely caught the bus to campus, the one time that it being a few minutes late has helped me. Jess entertained herself at the CSA during our presentation, then sat in on our group meeting afterwards. She had been craving some Indian, and had found one of the places in Newport on the web during the afternoon, so that is where we went. It implied there was a buffet, but it must’ve been old, it was a “banquet menu” instead. It was tons of food for only £7.99 each. I got lamb in a mint coriander mild curry sauce, and she got the house special sauce with lamb as well. The chicken chat appetizer was very good too. We left stuffed again, even after deciding against trying a dessert. After that we, well I had to pack for the next night in London. This involved doing laundry first though, as I hadn’t done that in quite a while because of moving. I was glad Jess was here to help me clean up the bathroom and room, it wasn’t very clean at all, and the vacuum was all kinds of clogged up too.
After my group presentation in the morning we headed back to London for the afternoon. Picked up lunch at a little sandwich shop in Newport, with a chocolate éclair for me (see I’m not trying to lose weight) and a coronation chicken sandwich for Jess. The chicken was good and I’ll have to get it there again sometime, I’d stayed away from it in general because I think I saw it had mayo in it, which I generally avoid anyway. We really did a mini pub crawl in London, mixing in a beer store to pick up a few bottles to take home and ending up at a relatively new restaurant and beer place for dinner. They even had a special menu going that saved us some money because we ordered before 7. We had Scotch quail eggs, boar sausage, and duck breast. Dessert was a rhubarb tart and cranberry eton mess. All very good and glad we tried it out.
Our last place to stay, in the Chiswick area, was easily the most interesting. It was really just a guy’s house, who rents out his spare rooms. A pretty neat concept, felt much more comfortable than a lot of hotel rooms do for sure. It was a shared bathroom, but it was basically right outside our room. It was a bit noisy at times, hearing people go up and down the stairs and what not. We had full access to his kitchen in the morning for breakfast. Jess made eggs in the hole, which were tasty. After breakfast we walked around the area a while, and discovered that it was quite nice, lots of neat looking shops, tons of restaurants, even more bakeries, and overall a place that you could spend a lot of time and money exploring. We’ll have to remember it in the future, it’s a good place to make getting to Heathrow a lot less time consuming.
And that was it, the week was up unfortunately. It was hard to leave Jess at the airport, but it was a really great week and I was super glad to have her company.
School is going hard and heavy with our project work. After talking to one of the supervisors about some data we were struggling to get, we realized that we should have gone and brought up our concerns earlier. He had some ideas as to how to get around not having the exact figures, and had been hoping someone would come ask! We were the first though, and he gave us some good ideas and there is still time to implement most or all of them actually. It was a very encouraging discussion actually, it had been very discouraging with some of the problems that we had not been able to get around.
I did make some pulled pork and vinegar based bbq sauce on Saturday, using a steamer as a slow cooker. It came out better than I was expecting, though if I do it again I’ll buy a cheap slow cooker from Tesco or Asda. The pork came from the local butcher shop that I found in Newport on Friday when I walked up to the bi-weekly farmers market to buy some vegetables. Both of those will be a nice bonus to living here I think.
Well 3 pages later and I think I’m finished writing. I’m going to finish up a little project work with baseball on in the background and then head to bed relatively soon. As far as pictures go, Jess is putting together a slide show I think, so they are coming J
