Kathleen and Peter were very generous and took us motoring out to Oxfordshire.
Now let me explain to my American friends. “Shire” was originally an old name for county. So Oxfordshire (pronounced OX-ferd-sher) is Oxford County. In a lot of ways, that area is like home for Peter who is in his 80’s.
On the way to Burford, we went through Oxford University. It was amazing to see this campus. It has to be one of the most prestigious universities in the entire world. I’m not sure that I saw Christ Church (the college where John Wesley studied), but I might have and did not know it.
On our way to eat, we stopped at Huffkins
to have a spot o’ tea. It was great. High Street which this faces must have a 1:4 elevation rise! The Mrs. And I walked around town, and they were having a bazaar in the basement of the Burford Methodist Church (Zoom out and it's to the right of the Gallery) there on High Street.
We then stopped at the Church of St. James the Great (zoom in all the way to the point and double click on the church at the top of the picture) across the river at Fulbrook. This church has been in existence since the 1200’s. Absolutely astonishing to me. They finally decided to take out a few pews from the back of the nave, and use more flexible seating to have a social area in which to visit and for community use. Since doing that, the church has had more people to come to it.
We had lunch at the Masons Arms at Fulbrook.
It was a pub at which we ate a wonderful meal.
(The insides were really much darker. The camera inside of my telephone compensates for the lighting in a way over which I had no control). I had Oxford sausages and for dessert I had Apricot pudding. But it is not pudding as we think of in America. It is much more akin to the style and substance of bread pudding, albeit there is no bread in Apricot pudding. (Just like Yorkshire pudding is not pudding as we think of it in America, but a baked, stiff, puffy, wonderful delicacy that was eaten before the main course, filled with gravy so that guests and family members would not eat as much meat!)
From there we saw a lot of the country side. I have a couple of pics from St. Edward’s at Stow on the Wold (that's the name of the town).
You have to almost be rich to live in England. Two of our dollars about equals one pound (£). Some of the residences out in the country with their dry stack stone walls were breath taking. It was like in one of these kinds of places that people like John Lennon or Madonna would be living I suppose.
A very moving day and we covered lots of sites.