We have Canceled Oxford!

 

We had planned on going to Oxford today, to a small museum, but when we got to looking at the map, turns out that it’s over 2½ hours each way!  That, after yesterday, was just too much driving.  As R pointed out, it’s not the car running out of gas, it’s us!  And I’m afraid it’s true!  Oh well!  At any rate, I didn’t get finished posting the blog until midnight last night, and finally got up around 7 this morning.  The day was grey from the start.  In fact, R thought it might be raining, although it wasn’t.  Just … grey.  Boy, I do miss blue sky, I have to admit!  According to the Weather Channel app, it was 52 degrees, but felt like 49 degrees.  Felt lower than that to me!  Additionally, Robert has Caltech work to do, and has been trying to fit it in when we’ve been at the house.  

 

So, after canceling Oxford, I decided that today we would make an attempt at divesting ourselves of our maps, books and the multitude of greeting cards that I’ve picked up over the weeks.  I figured I could get the “little stuff” – socks, tea towels, etc. home in the regular suitcases – it’s all the paper stuff that I wanted to get rid of.  And, I even had a plan!

 

Our lovely friends, Phil, Leo and Hugh are meeting us tomorrow morning at the Milton Park & Ride, which is very near here outside Cambridge.  Then we are taking the bus into Cambridge and going to the Fitzwilliam Museum and having lunch.  It will be really wonderful seeing them, as we haven’t been able to get together since pre-Covid!  I’m sure the boys have really grown up since the last time we’ve seen them; it’s been since 2017, I just had R check his trip file; six years!  At any rate, I wanted to make sure that we would have no problems finding the meeting point, so my cunning plan was to pack up things I wanted to ship, drive to Milton, then take the bus into Cambridge, find a Post Office and get everything shipped!  And it worked!

 

The Park and Ride lot is absolutely HUGE!  The bus is impossible to miss – it’s a double-decker!  We were able to climb up to the top (which we had all to ourselves!) and ride through all sorts of on-going road construction, right to the center of Cambridge to the bus station.  The clever folks in Cambridge (it’s not a university city for nothing!) have organized a series of these park & rides that fan out and cover all the areas outside the city.  The area around Milton, for instance, seems to be all science oriented, with science-park after science-park in huge new buildings and centers.  It’s one way of getting around the grid-lock of not having enough space inside ancient city walls, and still keep all the beautiful grounds and greenery of the various college campuses; very clever.  The buses depart from the central station every 12-15 minutes and run all day and into the evenings.  And, as I say, they let off right in the center of town!

On top of the bus heading into Cambridge!

Heading over the river Cam; punting on the river!

St. Andrews Street

Entrance to a College

 

Some of our lunch ... picture out of order; sorry!

Clock tower

Really a lovely restaurant!

Lucky we got there early!  Very popular place!

Beautiful flowers in Lion Yard!

Peaking inside a courtyard; lots of bicycles!

Playing Cricket on one of the playing fields!

Back over the Cam on our way out of town!

It was less than a block to the closest Post Office on St. Andrew’s street, and in we went.  There were a lot of people inside, but a very nice gentleman was on-hand to answer questions, and he immediately grabbed the perfect sized shipping box for us, handed us the correct shipping form and some tape, and led us to a desk to start filling things in!  (Which is what they say here; we in the U.S. say filling things “out”!  Who knew?!). Literally within minutes, our books, maps and greeting cards were on our way back to the States; I’ve got a feeling they might even arrive home before we will!  We shall see!  At any rate, having divested ourselves of approximately 7 pounds of papers, I suddenly felt very light!  Robert felt like celebrating, and suggested we find a pub somewhere, which sounded good to me!  We found what looked to be a suitable candidate on-line, and set the directions to find it, but as we were walking down one of the main shopping streets in Cambridge, a Japanese restaurant caught my eye!  Have to admit that we haven’t had much of an opportunity for Japanese food this past month, so we thought we’d take a look!  

 

The restaurant, Kineya Murimaru, was a Japanese fast-food restaurant, sort of!  It was lovely and new and very modern.  One ordered off a kiosk when entering – your main dish, with alternatives of beef noodles, rice dishes or vegetarian, with extras.  In our case, we both ordered beef udon noodles with no additions, other than the usual spring onions and sauces.  Then, you walked down a row of tempura presented things – veggies like asparagus and sweet potato, as well as pot stickers of various kinds, to tempura chicken and octopus (which we both declined) and took what you wanted of those.  Finally, there were Japanese desserts and drinks to choose from.  You got to the end of the line, scanned your initial order, the attendant added up with extras like tempura and drinks you put on your tray, and collected your main dish – and you were finished!  So!  Took us a bit of observing of what other people were doing to get the exact hang of things, but we eventually got it.  SO glad we did!  The food was really wonderful!  I thought, when we sat down, that our eyes had definitely been bigger than our tummies, but after devouring all our yummy tempura, we both still had room for at least some of our udon noodles!  Notice I said “some!”  The restaurant did a big business in UberEats, it seems, and we were able to get a container for our leftover noodles, so now if either of us gets hungry tonight, no fear – we definitely have food!  Either that or breakfast! 

 

After finishing our lovely lunch and taking a few photographs along the way, we sauntered slowly back to the bus station to catch our PR5 bus back to Milton.  I had thought about traveling out to Ely Cathedral today, but will save that for Sunday.  As Robert says, some days, naps just seem to call your name!  In fact, when we got back to the cottage, he was asleep before I even got our leftovers into the fridge!  Hating to admit it, I think we both slept for something like 3 hours, R downstairs on the couch, and me upstairs in the loft.  We must have needed it though, especially after yesterday!  In for the evening, and really hoping that the weather improves even a little bit!

 

Lots of love,

m

xxx