Stow-on-the-Wold was great. It's exactly what you'd picture if someone told you to imagine a tiny village in the English countryside, including low stone walls, narrow "fleece" alleys that were built to corral sheep single-file to market hundreds of years ago, small local shops and lots of public walking paths spider-webbing the surrounding landscape. Definitely tugged at the ol' country boy heartstrings, and I wish we could have stayed a bit longer.
Our host was a hilariously British, large and somewhat elderly woman who was incredibly gracious and warm but also had a definite inclination toward discursive, long-winded ramblings about everything from war to Obama to climate change, frequently punctuated with variations on the declaration "I don't know how you do things in America, but...". At any rate, the house was a great place to stay, and at 500 years old quite interesting architecturally.
Aside from the house, highlights of the town included meeting some (incredibly distant) relatives from my mom's side who live quite close by, looking at the outside of a hotel opened in 947 A.D., drinking fantastic hot chocolate in a small café near our house and stopping by a church with a door flanked by trees which supposedly served as inspiration to Tolkien for the entrance to Moria when he did a walking tour of the Cotswolds many years ago. We also visited Blenheim Palace, in another part of the Cotswolds, where Winston Churchill was born and where there is also a huge private library with lots of very old books. I found some by Darwin, but I'm unsure whether they were first editions or not.
The other interesting part about this section of our trip was the task of actually getting there from London; we rented a car and I, having what was apparently the right combination of driving experience and relative youth was selected to drive us the three hours to the Cotswolds. It wasn't terrible, but the car had a manual transmission and that, combined with the whole driving-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-road thing made for an uncharacteristically intense road trip.
