Catching up.

Oh boy, am I behind.  This blogging thing's a real responsibility; I'm going to have to stop doing things so I don't have to report back about them!
First things first.  Mia and I got back from the Cotswolds late Sunday. We had a wonderful time, although getting a cold took a shocking amount of fun out of things.  Such is life.
We first met up with one of Mia's friends who is studying in Oxford, and she showed us around.  You can't access the campus if you're not a student or if you're not willing to pay (meaning you're a student somewhere else), so it was great knowing some one with all the ins.  Oxford was beautiful, my kind of town.  It was refreshing after London, where I have mistakenly equated city ways with English ways, because I've never lived in a city and can't easily separate the two attitudes.  In Oxford I was able to say, This is the England I've heard so much about.  Just look at it!

It only got better in the Cotswolds.  We stayed in a hostel in Stow-on-the-Wold, and trekked - in January, and as I mentioned, with the snivels - to the Slaughters, Burton-on-the-Water, and Icomb Hill.  The charm of the Cotswolds was readily apparent from the night we arrived, when we had fun discovering the oddities of our living accomodations.

You got vertigo just going up the stairs.

And I'm pretty short.

On the "footpaths" (which turned out to be private farmland kindly paved for us with horse manure), we encountered a wide variety of gates and locks ingeniously designed to keep the animals from getting out.  In some cases, they were rather effective at keeping us from getting out, too.  We decided they needed a guidebook on how to work all the gates, like the following:

 

All the work was worth it.  The area was phenomenally beautiful, even - or perhaps, especially - in winter.

Other highlights of the trip included having a full English breakfast (the largest meal I've ever eaten), seeing the church entryway that inspired J.R.R. Tolkien in his creation of the entrance to Moria (in The Lord of the Rings), and meeting just about the nicest people in the world.  But be warned, they take a hard line against criminals:

 

Lots more soon!