A Weekend Tour, Part 1 - Cathedrals and Roundabouts

Last weekend was my first full weekend off since I started work (usually I work on Saturdays), so we decided to make the most of it by hiring a car and seeing some more of our new home country. We didn't have many concrete plans when we set out, and we ended up covering more ground than we expected, in all passing through 10 counties over the two days.

Our first (and more-or-less only) settled destination was the small town of Brandon in Suffolk, the home of Jo's great-aunt Dora. But first we had a journey of 2-3 hours ahead of us, and it wasn't long until we had developed an intense frustration at the British motorways. There is one particularly awful feature that you may well have heard of or experienced yourself: the roundabouts. Every bad thing that people say about them is completely right. The British road system is littered with hundreds of the buggers, and they serve no practical purpose other than to annoy. Often after you successfully negotiate your way through a three-lane monster complete with traffic lights and many exits, it is only 20 seconds further down the road until you encounter another. Sometimes there are even two or more roundabouts placed adjacent to one another, so you exit your roundabout... into another roundabout! Just in case you couldn't wait for the next one! Many of them have poor (or non-existant) signage, instructing you to get into one lane before making you swerve violently across others lest you miss your exit. Other countries have perfectly functional highways without these monstrosities, and I cannot figure out the need for them. I know I have been ranting about roundabouts for a while now but I just hate them so much! And I wasn't even driving!

*Deep breath*

Shortly into our journey, our rental car started beeping at us and flashing symbols on the dashboard, which we eventually figured out was it telling us we were low on fuel. We checked the map for nearby towns to refill, and I saw we were near St Albans, which my friend Elizabeth had recommended to me a while back. It turned out to be an fine decision, providing us with the first of many excellent cathedral visits for the weekend.







Our other port of call in St Albans was to stop for lunch at the local waffle house at the recommendation of our Lonely Planet Great Britain guidebook. It seemed that a lot of other people had also read this, as the restaurant was very busy, though we were lucky to arrive at a time when we were able to be seated within five minutes before watching the queue extend to around five times that length while we ate. The restaurant serves a large variety of waffle dishes, including exotic-sounding savoury ones (eg: Mediterranean vegetable waffle, waffles with curry). In the end we went for the more familiar sweet waffles: Dutch apple waffle with loads of maple syrup for me and banoffee waffle with vanilla ice cream for Jo; both incredibly good.

With both our car and our stomachs refuelled, we set out again for Brandon. It rained.


We did make it eventually though, where Jo and Dora had a very touching reunion after three years had passed since their last meeting. Dora, still very lively at 92 years old, was obviously delighted to see us, and kept saying how she often thought of her relatives in New Zealand but never thought she would see them again. She was the perfect host, having made us ham sandwiches and cheese scones and it was lovely to sit down and chat with her for a couple of hours over our food and tea. Possibly our biggest mistake of the trip was not taking any photos with Dora, but we will make up for that next time we visit her.

After saying our goodbyes we headed for nearby tiny Lakenheath station, where Jo's grandfather and grandmother (Dora's sister) had met during the war, and later lived when her grandfather was the station master there.




Our next stop was the small town of Ely in Cambridgeshire to check out another famous cathedral. We didn't go inside this one as we were there later than the 7pm closing time, but it was a spectacular enough building from the exterior.




Finally, we headed for the town of Bury St Edmunds as our last destination for the evening, where we enjoyed a lovely dinner and wandered amongst the evening streets of the village for a while. We realised it was not going to be practical to find a room to stay the night out there, so we returned to London for the night (eventually, even in the middle of the night London cannot be quickly crossed from the northeast to our home in the southwest). We were pretty knackered by the time we got home well after midnight, and we had a full day ahead of us for sunday too.

Stay tuned for the second part of our weekend trip report, including Stonehenge, Avebury, Salisbury and Old Wardour Castle.