Off to The Acorns

It is time to say goodbye to the minibar and hello to our home exchange. We've had a great three days but we are definitely ready to slow down and enjoy things more leisurely. The home we are exchanging in is near Northampton, roughly 2 hours by train north and west of London. The trains don't run all the way to Northampton on Sundays though, so we go halfway by train and catch a bus the rest of the way. What with dragging the crazy amount of luggage 2 women pack for a 2-week trip, we were definitely not bored. The people we were exchanging with had prepaid for a cab to pick us up from the train station, and he had never heard of the village we were going to, so we were crossing our fingers. We wandered this way and that, and finally stumbled on it. The village was named Farthingstone, and it's so small that they don't have numbers on the houses, only names. Our house was named The Acorns, and luckily Mom recognized it from the pictures she had seen, because there was no other identification. The Acorns! How awesome is that? Farthingstone consists of about 25 houses, a pub, and a church. Definitely my kind of place. The houses and pub are made from the old brown bricks that are so typical of 19th century English buildings, some even had thatched roofs. It was straight from the pages of James Herriot, and the plumbing and electrical fixtures haven't changed much either. Much of England feels as though it were frozen in the 1950's.
Our taxi driver, Sean Mulligan (a very interesting guy, more on him later) was (to be English about it) gobsmacked at the size of the house. European houses are much smaller, and by American standards this house was quite a comfortable size. He said he had never seen a living room (in England it's a lounge) that large.

What I was amazed by was the garden. Such a garden! I felt like I had stepped into the pages of a Jane Austen novel. You just have to look at the pictures to get the storybook feeling of it. There was a vegetable garden with a picket fence, a greenhouse bursting with tomatoes, and masses of gorgeous flowers. I can hardly believe it still, it seems like I imagined it. The family had the neighbor put fresh eggs, bread, milk, and bacon in the teeny fridge, so we had breakfast for lunch, and I say huzzah for English bacon. It's big, meaty, and delicious. We started laundry in the teeny washing machine, with biological washing powder, whatever that is. We ran from room to room exclaiming about the cuteness of everything, and finally settled down to explore the wonders of the BBC. There were homemade soups and dinners in the freezer, so I got brave and tried a steak and kidney pie. I had read about it, and I always assumed the kidneys were kidney beans. No, they're actual kidneys. They weren't really that bad, it's basically a beef pot pie with organs in it, but it's not something I would order every day. We had several gallons of tea and some digestive biscuits from the pantry, basically vanilla wafers, and called it a night. I laid down in my cute little bed with the window overlooking the picturebook garden, and I thought, I can't wait to wake up tomorrow!
















My fairy tale garden.