Loving The Acorns

I woke up and leapt to the window to reassure myself that I really was here. Yup, not dreaming. I crept downstairs as not to wake Mom, and made a cup of tea and toast. I sat out in the so garden having a glorious breakfast. There was a crisp chill in the air, it was hard to believe we had left 90 degree weather back home. I walked around the garden and acquainted myself with all the different plants and flowers. Bluebirds flew past me, which I don't see back home, and the vegetables were bursting and ripe.










I picked a handful of flowers and found a vase for them inside. Then I went for a walk down the lane. I passed pastoral farms, quaint gardens, and a construction crew building a barn and cussing up a storm. Even English cursing was charming to me at that moment.







I found blackberry bushes everywhere, with the most delicious berries hanging ripe. I ate a bucketful, and stuffed my pockets with more to show Mom. When I got home she was up, and liked the blackberries very much. We met the neighbors, they were nice people. We didn't see much of them the rest of the trip, and I don't remember their names now. Anyway, we watered all the flowers and sat down to make our battle plans. In the home exchange we had given each other permission to drive each other's cars, so we were working up our nerve to hit the road. Mainly all we were striving for was the grocery store, but it was still a big goal for us.

The countryside in England is beautiful, and great if you are riding horseback. The streets are a car and a half wide, with tall, thick hedges lining most of them, or drystack stone walls. If a car comes toward you, it's a matter of who has a driveway on their side to duck into. Otherwise, the smaller car has to back up until they find somewhere to pull aside. Luckily, the family had left a basket of brochures, and an atlas, so we took a deep breath and got in the car.
We had some escapades, and LOTS of careening around, bumping into hedges and curbs before we settled on a system, Mom driving, me navigating. It was the roundabouts that gave us the most trouble, we got several firm honkings before we made it into the parking lot of the Tesco.
We paused in the parking lot to sing "Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow", we were so grateful to make it. Tesco was loads of fun, it's sort of a small scale Wal-Mart, without the cheap clothes and welfare moms. We saw all sorts of cool stuff that we would never see at home, and we bought every bit of it. Gooseberry fool, yumberry juice, wensleydale cheese, shepherd's pie, chocolate digestive biscuits, the works. If it sounded English, we got it. We somehow managed to careen home, with a fresh rendition of "Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow" for when we got back in the garage. We finished our mounds of laundry in the teeny washing machines, had a yummy dinner, and packed for our excursion further north to the area in which Pride and Prejudice was filmed. Mr. Darcy, hold on, we're coming!