Few warm days that feel like summer and many actually on weekends. We were able to take advantage of most of them – lot of traveling and picture taking, too little time for writing.

The first summer like day actually came at the end of May (and it was only one day) and we just happened to have tickets for the Chelsea Flower Show. Huge crowds, amazing flowers, good looking vegetables and some interesting garden designs. I will let the pictures do the talking.

(Click on the picture to see it full size, use a back button to return to this spot.)

This is the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII and 200 years since Trafalgar and leads to lots of events. We had tickets to the one that kicked it all off – a concert of military music at the Horse Guards barracks.
The best part was the 1812 overture when, as the score requires, they fired off field canons. Sort of thing that is difficult to pull off in a concert hall.

I also resumed my walk up the Thames. Have to rely on local buses now that I am getting deeper into the Cotswold. I asked the bus driver if he was going to Newbridge – the starting point of my trek.
He claimed he never heard of it (the bridge in the village dates from the 12th century!) but when I showed him the timetable I copied from the internet, he said “You mean the Rose Revived, I stop there”.He remembers his stops not by the names of villages but by the names of pubs! Nothing wrong with that. Upstream from Oxford the Thames gets quite narrow but remains navigable. All along it is still possible to see concrete pillow boxes, remnants of a defensive line from WWII. Somehow I do not think this would have stopped the Wehrmacht.

Then we headed a little further afield – lovely little port of Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast.
Known as the Jurassic coast, it offers excellent exposure of Jurassic rocks. Some beds are absolutely packed with ammonites – fossil cephalopods – extinct relatives of present day squids. The area is also famous for finds of fossilized sea lizards, these are a little less common and we did not see any.

We also spent a day at Blenheim Palace, a beautiful palace not far from Oxford, which
one of Winston Churchill’s ancestors (the first duke of Marlboro) received as a reward for leading the British army in the War of Spanish Succession.

Finally a visit to Rye, one of the 5 ports on the southeast coast which historically provided ships for English kings whenever they decided to do some fighting on the continent. Because of this service they had all manner of privileges and became quite wealthy. Now they lie away from all the commercial action and are just pretty little medieval fossils. Nearby is also a fortress built by Henry VIII after he broke away from the Catholic Church and was seriously worried about an invasion from the continent which never came.