Bart, Ann, Mark & Jim wandering and catching up in The University Parks

Our penultimate stop on this nine-week exploration of the UK was Oxford, home of course to Oxford University, the oldest university in the English-speaking world. (The oldest university in Europe, if you’re wondering, is the University of Bologna while the oldest university in the world is the University of Al Quaraouiyine in Fez, Morocco. Yeah, I didn’t know that either.) Back when we were in Cambridge University we learned that the town was named because early on it had one of the first bridges over the River Cam. And Oxford? You might guess that it got its name because at a narrow and shallow part of the Thames River oxen would ford the river. Who’d have guessed? At any rate no expansive trip through England would be complete without at least a quick stop here.

I have to say, we both found it hard to fall in love with Oxford. Maybe it was the cold, overcast, occasionally rainy weather, maybe it was just that we’ve overloaded on old historic cities in England, but first impressions weren’t great. Both of us though came to really like the city. I’ll explain why.

Imposing architecture and threatening skies in Oxford

First, though, a highlight of the stop was a quick visit with our old Cambridge, MA neighbors Bart and Ann. They were in the area visiting a cousin of Bart’s (his only first cousin it turns out which I find amusing; you see, I have literally dozens of first cousins) and so they drove over to Oxford for lunch with us. Walking around with them a bit, having lunch, and just catching up was great fun.

And speaking of lunch. Way back early in the trip in Cambridge, England, we discovered an Indian restaurant called Dishoom. We loved it. We found that there was a Dishoom in Edinburg and loved that one too. But there were no more Dishooms as we wandered through Scotland, Wales, and back into England until Oxford. I was a little concerned that we had built our hopes up too high and I’d be disappointed but no worries – it was as fabulous as we remembered. So we went back for lunch the next day, too. And to make it all better yet, we’ve learned that they’re opening their first U.S. restaurant some time next year in New York City – lower Manhattan even. I’m afraid we’ll never eat at home again!

Lunch at Dishoom. Or I should say, one of our lunches at Dishoom.

On our arrival day, then, we spent much of it with Bart & Ann. The next day we scheduled a tour of Oxford University with Alumni Tours, the same company we used in Cambridge. As the name suggests they have alumni giving the tours (though in this case she was a current student, but close enough) and they can give a real flavor for the school. She showed us around a bit, told some good stories, and it was OK. Not really worth two hours, and maybe that’s why neither of us fell in love with the city right away.

Rose, our tour guide, is studying physics and philosophy. I suspect she’s pretty smart.

But then when we had time on our own, we really came to appreciate it. I wandered around the core city for a while and went into a bookstore called Blackwell’s. Today it’s a huge store and part of a large chain of academic bookstores but it started a tiny shop, literally just 12 square feet. It grew and grew, taking more floors and more buildings and even remained family owned until 2022. I could have spent hours in there wandering around finding unusual and interesting books. I have to say if you enjoy reading British history, this is the place for you.

An underground space at Blackwell’s

After an hour or so there I looked at the map and realized that Oxford sits on the Thames River, so I figured I’d go see what the river looked like this far north of London. And there I discovered this great walking/running/biking path along the river, plus – this being a college town of course – lots of people in various crew configurations. It was beautiful.

It’s worth adding just how much I’ve loved these trails in England. Many of them (including the trail along the Thames River here) are part of the National Cycle Network, some 13,000 miles of shared use paths, disused railways, minor roads, canal towpaths and traffic-calmed routes in towns and cities. I’ve walked, run, and bicycled on a number of these routes and they’re usually well marked, gently engineered, and in reasonably good condition. And what I honestly love is that they’re really well used; you always see people out getting their exercise and enjoying nature. It’s truly a fabulous national asset.

Lots of shells out on the Thames

OK, so that’s how I fell in love with Oxford. And Mark? It really wasn’t until our last morning before checking out and heading to our final destination that it all clicked for him. After breakfast he went out and decided to pay the £10 (roughly $13.50) to tour Magdalen College. You see, for the most part tourists can’t get in to see the grounds of most of the colleges that make up Oxford University. The tour we did took us into Trinity College and a little bit of the Divinity School, but that was it. But unlike Cambridge University, here in Oxford the colleges will sell you access.

So with an hour or so to kill Mark bought his ticket to Magdalen College and just thought it was beautiful. I mean, it even had its own deer park! Seeing the University close up like that from the inside was all it took. So while after a day-and-a-half Mark wasn’t too keen on Oxford by the time we had to leave he was wishing we’d had another day here. But we don’t. One more quick stop and then it’s back to New York.

The deer park at Magdalen College

While they have to pose for tourists, apparently the deer get a 10-minute break every so often

On the edge of Magdalen College

Christ Church college and it’s War Memorial Garden. That’s the Cathedral up there and oddly this is one city where we didn’t go into the Cathedral. Just never got around to it…

The Thames River in Oxford with a faint rainbow barely visible

A cozy breakfast cappuccino with rainy streets outside

The Bridge of Sighs. When Cambridge University built one, Oxford had to, too. Allegedly, this one is one inch wider than the one in Cambridge.

A real rainbow

The Radcliffe Camera, named after the funder named Radcliffe and the Latin name for room, camera. It’s a circular library which … doesn’t really work well when you think of what book shelves look like. Hint – they’re not curved.

Part of the grounds of Trinity College

And one last view of Magdalen College

Mark enjoying canapés and a martini before a fancy dinner at Lympstone Manor, with the Exe Estuary in the distance

For this three-night stop we stayed at Lympstone Manor, an old country manor with more modern rooms attached. The hotel is out in the country about a mile-and-a-quarter from Exmouth, a little port town at the mouth of the Exe River. The attraction was the hotel itself, a place Mark thought would be pretty great. And while it had its upsides, there were a couple problems. The biggest was that most of the rooms (including ours) were in a relatively modern structure designed such that the rooms had … no windows! The doors had windows that opened a couple of inches, but that was it for fresh air. Oh, and there was no air conditioning. As a result no matter how delightfully cool it was at night, the room was way too warm. And too dark, even on a bright sunny day. Strange.

And then there’s the issue that the hotel advertises a “heated pool.” My guess is that it was ever-so-modestly heated; the water was cold, but would have been way colder in this climate without some added heat. But we’ll just say gently that the hotel’s version of “heated pool” differed dramatically from Mark’s expectation. Neither of us went in.

Mark along a bike path

There was one part about the hotel that I loved. They had a few bicycles available that you could just check out at no cost, so we did a beautiful 11-mile ride into the city of Exeter mostly on a dedicated bike path along the Exe Estuary and then the Exe River. And not only did we enjoy the bike ride but we loved the little town of Exeter – a beautiful cathedral, lovely restaurants; it was quite the treat.

The Exeter Cathedral has the longest uninterrupted medieval stone vaulted ceiling in the world. Pretty impressive!

There’s this weird thing about Exeter. We didn’t plan on coming here at all; it was just fortuitous that the hotel had the bikes and we were close enough for an energetic but doable ride. But we’d already stopped in Exeter on the way between Bath and Dartmoor. Mark had figured out that the most efficient way to get to Dartmoor was to take the train to Exeter and then hire a driver to take us an hour to Dartmoor. Then we took the train to Exeter again on the way to Lympstone Manor, getting out and hiring a car for the last 30 minutes to the hotel. And when we left the Lympstone Manor, the best way to our next stop – Winchester – was to take a taxi back to Exeter and catch a train from there. So we spent a lot of time in a city that we never intended to visit at all!

At any rate, the bike ride and visit to Exeter was a highlight. The only bad part of the ride was that on the way back we were following signs to Topsham – a little town we biked through on the way up to Exeter – “via ferry.” The ride was beautiful and I was loving it until we got to the ferry … and it wasn’t running. I don’t know if it was because of the low tide or because it was a long weekend or what, but there was no ferry. And since that was the last crossing before the Exe River dumped into the sea, we had to go back 10 or 15 minutes. It seems like they would warn you with a sign saying “via ferry, if it’s running…” or something like that. But still, I thought it was a great ride.

Me, discovering that the signs pointing to the Topsham ferry were a lie!

We had some good food on the stop. The hotel has a Michelin-starred restaurant that we ate at one night that was pretty special. And one night we took a taxi into Exmouth and ate at a really good seafood restaurant. It was a bit of a strange night, though, insofar as we were walking around town a bit just to see what was there and walked through a somewhat down-scale residential neighborhood that was between the town center and our restaurant right on the coast. There was a lot of police activity across the street from us in front of a small house and we thought we heard a bystander – presumably a neighbor – use the word “murder.” We just kept walking.

Part of the delight for us over this portion of the trip has been the transportation. We’ve had to spend money hiring drivers to get to some of the out-of-the-way places, but then we don’t have car rental and gas and parking and all that to deal with. And sometimes you learn a thing or two from the drivers.

We chatted a bit, for instance, with the driver who took us from St. Mawes to St. Austell, where we would catch the train on to Exeter. He asked us where we’d been in the region and we talked about Padstow. Now, I didn’t want to be too negative about a place that maybe he loves even though it was hands down the least interesting stop on this trip. I needn’t have worried. “Oh, people hate Padstow,” he said. “They call it Pad-sty!” He even told us about a couple he drove once who had worked in hotels and restaurants all over England. When he asked what was the worst place they’d worked they immediately responded that it was Padstow. So it wasn’t just us who didn’t like it!

Exmouth was the 23rd of our 26 stops on this Explorer, so we’re definitely winding things down now.

Mark, near the start of our ride

The beautiful Exe River along our ride

Our first glimpse of the Cathedral as we were riding into town

The Cathedral

Another interior view

The grounds of our hotel included a vineyard

A little pre-dinner bubbly and nibbles, but the real reason I took the picture was because the gladiolas behind him were spectacular!

And finally, here I am on one of our many stops in Exeter. Never have we made so many stops in a city we hadn’t intended on going to at all!

Looking happy in the old fishing village of Padstow

Let me quote from Lonely Planet:

“If anywhere symbolizes Cornwall’s increasingly chic credentials, it’s Padstow. This old fishing port has become the county’s most cosmopolitan corner thanks to the arrival of a bevy of celebrity chefs, and restaurants and boutiques now sit alongside pubs and pasty shops. …[I]t’s hard not to be charmed by the seaside setting.”

Not to be too negative but in our two-day stop we never saw anything remotely chic and we weren’t charmed a bit. And to make it worse, the little town was absolutely filled with tourists such that you couldn’t so much as go into a drug store because everything was so crowded. I find it amusing, though, that Mark managed to take some photos that make it all look attractive. Trust me, more illusion than reality!

The Camel Estuary

To be fair, much of the problem could have been that the weather was not great – overcast, periodic light rain. So not as beautiful as it would have been and maybe those hordes of tourists expected to be on the beach but instead were all crowded together on the town streets trying to get into the same drug store. And of course we’d just come from Hotel Endsleigh in Dartmoor, probably my favorite stop on the whole UK Explorer so I was bound to be let down.

And then there was Rock, the town across the Camel Estuary (the River Camel empties to the sea in Padstow) described in Lonely Planet as “an uberexclusive getaway.” Given that ferries run back and forth between Padstow and Rock every 15 or 20 minutes or so, it was not remotely exclusive, much less uberexclusive. We went over for lunch one day and it was … fine. It’s a mystery to me though why people would go out of their way to get here. As Mark asked rhetorically one day, “Have they ever seen Greece?”

The view from a coffee break in Rock

One of the primary attractions for Padstow and Rock is the dining scene. A couple of celebrity chefs have opened restaurants that were supposed to be really special. We ate at three of them and they ranged from pretty good to not so good; I thought even that part of the stop was over-hyped.

A sashimi appetizer in The Seafood Restaurant, the one genuinely good restaurant we found

Of course, there were some bright spots in the stop. The Camel Trail is an old railroad bed converted to a walking/running/biking trail heading inland out of Padstow that I enjoyed a great deal. We spent part of one morning sitting outside at a coffee shop reading with great views of the estuary and all the boats bobbing along. We had a nice water view from our room. All in all though neither of us understood the charm of Padstow or why there were SO MANY tourists there.

I guess all the stops can’t be perfect, right?

A water view from our hotel room

Celebrating our 21st wedding anniversary with a Negroni

The town looks charming, right?

Tons of tourists in Padstow’s small village center

Early morning on the Camel Trail

A nice path leading down to the beach at St. George’s Cove

Picturesque boats at the town pier

On the ferry over to Rock

Part of the walkway from town down to St. George’s Cover. It was a pleasant walk with lots of benches to sit, read, and enjoy the views.