Oxford, May 2023

• Sunday, May 14: Travel to Oxford, Blenheim Palace
• Monday, May 15: Oxford, Meet Ada, Christ Church, Tea
• Tuesday, May 16: Stonehenge, drive to Falmouth

The second leg of our 2023 England trip, following London.

Sunday, May 14

I bought train tickets from London’s Paddington Station to Oxford several months in advance of our trip. A few weeks before our travels, I got a notice of rail strikes in England near our travel dates and a notice that the direct train from Paddington would now be a train for only a short while before transferring to a bus — an unpleasant prospect made more unpleasant by the amount of luggage we’d have to wrangle. I bought two MegaBus tickets from London to Oxford as an alternative, then belatedly learned that there was still direct train service to Oxford from London’s Marylebone Station rather than Paddington. I decided to let the concierge at The Montague Hotel advise me on the best of these options once I got to London.

The concierge’s advice, and my instinct, was to take the train from Marylebone. So, we ended up taking a taxi from the hotel to Marylebone Station on Sunday morning and got on the 9:42 train for Oxford. So far so good. Our plan was to get to Oxford, drop off our luggage at the hotel, then catch a public bus to see Blenheim Castle about 20 miles north of Oxford.

We found a nice 6-seat section that held us and our luggage, despite a few side-eyes from other passengers looking for seats. Less than 10 minutes before departure, they announced there was some mechanical problem with the back half of the train cars and only the front three cars would actually go to Oxford. That set off a mad rush of people to get onto the first three cars. People shoved into every available standing space and there was still no way we were going to fit, so we elected to wait a half hour for the next train. 

Fortunately, they let us board the 10:12 one in priority so we again settled in a good 4-seat spot. Unfortunately, the car filled with a collection of increasingly drunk and rowdy football (or rugby?) fans on their way to a game in Oxford. The train departed on time and the first few minutes were fine, until the boys and men started singing their team song. I never figured out the words but they repeated it over and over and over, most of the way to Oxford, banging on anything that made noise along the way. It got tiresome very quickly and the ride seemed a lot longer than the actual 75 minutes. But we got there.

We got a taxi from the train station to the Old Parsonage Hotel very easily. The hotel looked nice, the folks at the front desk took our luggage (our room wasn’t ready but we didn’t expect it to be), and pointed us to the bus to Blenheim just outside their door. We got a good upstairs seat for the 40-minute ride.

Blenheim Palace, the ancestral home of the Dukes of Marlborough and birthplace of Winston Churchill, sits on a large estate covering 2,000 acres. It’s sort of England’s Versailles with a long and interesting history. The bus dropped us near a gate but there was still a long walk from the bus stop to the actual Palace. We saw a pheasant (or was that a grouse?) along the way near the parking lots; we later learned that there are still controlled bird hunts on the estate during the winter, so this was one of the lucky survivors. Maybe his (or her?) tactic was to stay close to cars, figuring he might not get shot near them.

Once we got to the gate, we sorted out some confusion with our ticket and got audioguides for the palace tour. The palace state rooms were very impressive with their own history; many of the rooms supplemented with costumes from TV productions of The Crown, Bridgerton and Victoria. It made for an odd juxtaposition of art, artifice, history and fantasy. I didn’t realize the palace is still the home of the current Duke of Marlborough in a separate wing, off limits to tourists.

We went through a special exhibit on Winston Churchill and his slightly attenuated relationship to Blenheim. I didn’t realize that he was only a sometimes visitor; he never officially lived there. We went on a Downstairs tour to learn more about the place and people that served as a model for Julian Fellowes to write Downton Abbey. After a busy half day touring the palace we didn’t have the time or energy to wander the extensive grounds and gardens. We did, however, save enough energy to hit the gift shop. In fact, Barb found a nice handbag that she decided would be her new travel bag…and a Mother’s Day gift from Allie. We also bought a Kings and Queens sticker book ostensibly for Emmy but partly as a tool to torture Sara.

After our full day we headed back to the bus stop only to find the palace gates shut. We faced the dispiriting prospect of having to walk a very long way to another exit but fortunately there was a security intercom and they opened the gate for us. After a bit of a wait we were back on a bus to Oxford.

Before the trip, I spent a fair amount of time researching places in Oxford to have a Sunday Roast, a meal we had never properly had in England. After much deliberation, I’d chosen to reserve a 7:30 table at our hotel’s Parsonage Grill. We got back, had time to unpack and shower, then came down for dinner. We were given seats at the worst table in the house and the waiter informed us they were out of the roast beef, which was the main reason we chose this spot. We decided to share a ribeye; Barb got an asparagus appetizer and I got a cheese souffle. It was all good in the end but I would have preferred roast beef.

We capped the evening off with a few hours of British TV: a celebrity Great British Bake Off followed by a Big Fat Sports Quiz that went on for two hours, far beyond when I wanted to go to sleep.

Monday, May 15

Breakfast was included but it was more of an a la carte order from the menu. Both Barb and I both got Full English Breakfasts which were good but did not allow for Barb to make sandwiches for lunch.

Just as we left the hotel to do some sightseeing in Oxford, we bumped into Ada on the street wheeling her luggage to the hotel, directly off her flight from Philadelphia and bus from Heathrow to Oxford. We turned around, got her checked in then went into town together. We stopped by a map near the tourist visitor center to get oriented and a nice “Ask Me Questions” man suggested a route for us. We stopped by the Bodleian Library and learned that though tickets were sold out for the morning, we could probably get tour tickets the next Monday when Barb and I returned to Oxford; only a quarter of the day’s tickets go online, the rest are distributed each day, first come first served, so we would have to get there early. Then we headed to the river and saw the punting boats; at 40 GBP per person for a 30-minute ride we decided we didn’t need to do that. We walked down Rose Lane to the Broad Walk which we never would have done without the information man’s suggestion. 

At Christ Church College we learned that the Great Hall was closed until 2pm while students ate lunch so we got self-guided tour tickets for 1:30, then walked over to the Covered Market to grab a bite to eat for ourselves. We were a little pressed for time so we didn’t scour the hall thoroughly for lunch options and ended up choosing to get things from a vaguely Greek deli. I got a tuna baguette to share with Barb; it was tasty, with very good French bread. But naturally the very next shop we saw had better looking lunch fare. Oh well, good enough. 

The Christ Church audio tour was informative. The cathedral was pretty with some interesting stories. The tour clarified the school’s connection with Alice in Wonderland: Lewis Carroll (nee Dodgson) was chief librarian and Alice was a child of the Dean.  The Great Hall was very impressive and very Potterish. More fact and fantasy intermingling.

We hustled back to the hotel for tea which I had reserved for the ladies. I was able to join in with a gin and tonic and tapped out my notes on the laptop while they chatted.

After tea, we headed back into town to shop at Blackwell’s, Ada’s favorite bookstore. Barb found some good books for Emmy; I found some nice seats in the back to research dinner options and do a crossword puzzle. The book selection was fabulous but it hurt my brain. After nearly an hour we wandered out to do a little more souvenir shopping, then headed over to the Thai restaurant I chose, the Chiang Mai Kitchen. I had the idea of getting an assortment of appetizers and some vegetable fried rice to share with the ladies. It was a nice idea, but the actual food was a disappointment. Nevertheless, the drinks were cold and the atmosphere in the centuries old building was pleasant. We plowed through the food and left without feeling stuffed, a first for our trip.

Ada disappeared to get a good night’s sleep. Barb and I settled into the room and found some British mysteries to watch, including a New Tricks episode we had definitely seen before but could not remember who did it. I tried getting to sleep at 11:30 but ended up mostly watching some other forensic mystery that took me past 1:30am. I slept fitfully, somewhat worried about tomorrow’s adventures getting the car and driving to Cornwall.

Tuesday, May 16

We met for breakfast around 8am and I left at 9 to get the car. The taxi from the hotel took a slow, busy route to the rental car place, putting me behind schedule, then it took a little longer than I expected to actually get the car, a Nissan Qashqai with Apple CarPlay so I could connect my phone. I made it back to the hotel by 10:30, successfully navigating on the wrong side of the road with Google’s help. 

We checked out of the hotel and got on the road, driving a little over an hour to Stonehenge. Ada had been there several times but Barb and I wanted to check it off our World Heritage site bucket list. Plus, it was the first site to try to use our new English Heritage membership for entry. We got to Stonehenge around noon. I downloaded the English Heritage audio tour, used it for the visitor’s center. The tour was marginally helpful, but I did learn that Stonehenge was built in stages over many hundreds of centuries which I hadn’t realized. The original outer ring of stones existed for at least 500 years before anyone got around to erecting the more iconic sets of inner stones. 

We took a bus from the visitor center to the actual site (“To The Stones” read the bus, as if we were headed to a concert). We walked around site, circumnavigating the famous stones and snapping photos as I listened to the audio guide. I don’t know if it was the audio guide in my ear, my preoccupation with trying to find a good photo angle, or the other tourists milling about but I didn’t achieve a proper level of respect or awe for this set of rocks. Maybe it was because I’d seen so many documentaries and pop culture references about Stonehenge all my life.

I was pleased with the photos that Ada took of the two of us.

The schoolkids and Ada were more interested in the nearby flocks of sheep. Did you know sheep walk in single file?

We went through the gift shop and checked with Allie whether to get her a cute woolly sheep hat. Allie said no, but Barb said it was because I took a poor picture. Sorry. We got lunch snacks, a sausage roll and some truffle potato chips for me that were pretty tasty.

We got back on the road for the 3.5 hour drive to Falmouth, We were mostly on a decent 4-lane highway that was easy to drive, but about 20% of the time it narrowed down to two lanes. As we approached Falmouth, Google said there was a 10-minute backup on our route and suggested an alternative that took us down some very small residential lanes. The car beeped anytime we got too close to a wall, which was often. Ada and Barb greatly enjoyed the exercise. I was happy when we finally came out of it and back onto a regular street.

We made it to the Greenbank Hotel, an older structure in an excellent harborside location, around 6pm. Our room 301 was on the top floor looking directly over the harbor, a very nice spot. Ada’s was way in the back, not as nice, evidently, but hopefully it cost a bit less. We had dinner in the hotel’s pub, The Working Boat. Barb and Ada chose fish and chips while I had a grilled plaice (instead of the advertised flounder); mine was very tasty with a hint of chili pepper to make it interesting. Ada came up to the room for a whiskey nightcap and a chat which lasted until I fell asleep in my chair around 10:30. Time for bed. Tomorrow we start exploring Cornwall.