Blog On The Motorway Swan diving off the tongues of crippled giants

Oxford, Part One

This past weekend Ellen, Rosie and I decamped from our beautiful city to another beautiful English city for the weekend to celebrate Ellen's birthday.  Three days in Oxford was exactly what the doctor ordered, so forgive me if for the next few days I record the event for posterity. If nothing else it might be nice for Rosie to have a record of a holiday that she was too small to remember down the line.

We had a small hiccup on the first morning. Having opted for transport by coach we were due to leave on the 9.50 bus, so set the alarm for seven and book a taxi for nine. And then woke up at ten, just as our coach was probably pulling onto the motorway. I had obviously hit the alarm off switch rather than the snooze button, and while Rosie usually serves as a very effective second alarm clock this morning she opted for a lie in followed by quietly playing with the teddies in her cot.

Having hastily rearranged transport by train (at considerable expense) we arrived in Oxford around the same time as we would have anyway, and we caught the Oxford-London Tube bus to our hotel, a few miles outside Oxford in the small hamlet of Aston Rowant.  Once aboard however, things took a turn for the crushingly slow as the packed coach managed to take 45 minutes to even get out of Oxford.  We got off the bus near the hotel and discovered we would have to track through half a mile of grass motorway verge to get to the hotel. Travelling is never easy with a small child and so far it had been stressful from the point of waking up, but thankfully Rosie had been angelic throughout.

Once we arrived however, every moment of stress was worth it. We were booked into the luxuriant Lambert Arms hotel, and once we were in our room we crashed onto the beds while Rosie ran laps around the room, glad to be able to stretch her little legs.  We went down for a glorious meal in the restaurant and a bottle of wine, then went back to the room to put Rosie to bed.

This was the first time that we had tried sharing a hotel room with Rosie, and one of the first times she had a bed to sleep in rather than a cot.  When we had been planning the trip we had talked about putting Rosie down and once she was asleep returning to the bar for a few more drinks.  How very naive of us.

After about an hour of laying still in darkness as Rosie got out of the bed giggling every 30 seconds we abandoned any notion of her getting to sleep and decided to investigate the telly, which had a film on demand service so we selected the new Star Trek film and settled in with a bottle of wine from the front desk.  Rosie finally crashed out at about midnight, with us only minutes behind her.

The next morning, after enjoying a hearty continental breakfast we caught the Tube bus back to Oxford for a day of sightseeing.  Undeterred by the rain we took one of the walking tours of the colleges that make you feel like an absolute tourist, our tour guide having an excellently laconic delivery that pointed to the fact that he really regretted the fact that his Oxford University education had led to nothing more exciting than dragging tourists repeatedly around the root of his failure.

After a messy (for Rosie anyway) pasta lunch in the covered market, and with the weather clearing up a bit we walked down the the massively impressive Magdelene College and walked around their lovely grounds watching the deer.  This is exactly what these kinds of trips are for, soaking in history in beautiful surroundings and hanging out with your family. I know that as Rosie gets older it will be harder and harder to hold her interest in these kinds of trips, so we soaked every ounce of enjoyment from the day before heading back to the hotel, snapping photos of every beautiful view as we went. (I will try and get photos up tomorrow.)

Once back we fed at the excellent restaurant again and then retired to the room, this time forewarned of exactly what awaited us. Rosie didn't disappoint, staying up to midnight again, but as a result we didn't feel guilty about settling down to watch the X factor on our holiday, armed with a few bottles of wine bought from Oxford, my little family safe and happy and warm and exhausted from all the walking.

Tune in tommorow for the thrilling climax to our trip wherapon Rosie battles dragons and I am arrested for public nudity. Or possibly not.