Recap

Despite several sleepless nights with Munchkin, who for some reason is actually waking up more frequently during the night than she was a month ago (perhaps because we just learned she's in the 90th percentile [!] for her age in both weight and length), we had an excellent long weekend in England. While the people in Italy were incredibly baby-friendly, London was a far easier city than Rome to manage with a baby. Oxford was the quintessential university town--each little college more picturesque than the next, young people out doing whatever it is young people do these days, lots of good shops, cafes and pubs, etc.





Part of the reason we went to Oxford was to see the Cotswolds, and my original brilliant idea was to rent a car and spend Sunday driving us around (I drove on the left side of the road in Malaysia and Thailand, so why not?). Then I was looking for information about our hotel and came across a company where you can hire a driver to take you around the Cotswolds. So I swallowed my pride and didn't drive us around myself, and having seen the tiny little country roads I would have had to navigate, was that ever money well spent. The Cotswolds were as charming as advertised...rolling hills, stone houses and fences, cute little rivers (what we might call a creek or a stream, they call a river), sheep galore, sunny skies, it was all good (except no celebrity sightings...sorry, Lee!).







The cold air meant that Munchkin even got to bust out her spiffy new hat-and-mitten combo:



And while our new life means pubs are no longer a regular fixture on our trips, we did manage to get to one for lunch in the perfectly named Stow-on-the-Wold: