England Mini Breaks 2019-2020

England Mini Breaks 2019-2020

Nonstop red eyes make it easy to take mini breaks to England, where a weekend in London is always satisfying, or in the case of these 2019 and 2020 trips there are many wonderful places to explore within a couple of hours drive from Heathrow.

18 JAN 2020

Flight on time and car rental a breeze as we head up towards Cambridge and wait for Wimpole Hall to open.  The manor house is closed, but we walk around the grounds and the farm, where the animals are being fed.  It’s a popular jogging spot and the café is impossible so we have to eat a continental breakfast in the farm café, and they don’t know what they are doing and don’t even have proper ceramic cups for the tea.  Very disappointing overall, and the parking lot is a muddy mess.  Not up to the National Trust’s usual standards, but already an early sign of spring.

Fortunately our next stop, Anglesey Abbey, is much more exciting.  A monastery in the 13^th century, Lord Fairhaven occupied the home for 40 years until 1966 and left the National Trust with his eclectic collections, which is a theme with the NT.

 

On our way to the abbey we saw signs for a charity sale at a local community center, and so like at home we head over and get in line.  It’s very tiny sale but we leave with a paperweight and silver necklace. mEn route to Cambridge we stop at a massive charity shop, Emmaus, and purchase a few things including a 1 pound new pair of Reeboks.  Road works make it really difficult to find our hotel due to construction closures, so we’re so knackered from the search that we just eat in the Premier Inn Hotel restaurant (Thyme, not the usual Brewer’s Faire), which is fine and our pizza and salad hit the spot.

19-JAN-2020

Early morning wake up call to attend a car boot sale in the suburb of Trumpington, in the park and ride car park.    It is COLD, and many items are covered in frost.  Plenty of junk, but not a lot of new Chinese junk.

Some vendors include a meat truck selling discount lamb chops for 5 pounds a kilo, vegetable truck with fresh veg, a pillow truck selling copper infused pillows , a fresh bakery truck and a food truck selling breakfast sandwiches, instant coffee, tea and burgers.

Wife buys a few bits and bobs of jewelry, and I get a bacon, sausage, egg, mushroom and onion sandwich on a very soft and fluffy bun and a Lamborghini keychain for 1 pound.  The best part of the boot is the characters – both the vendors and the customers.  Reminded us a bit of the characters at Stormville Flea in New York, where you can really get your finger on the local pulse by listening to their conversations – just substitute the accents and the politician names.

 

We head to pick up our young German friend, Julia, who we met a couple of months ago in Spain.  She’s studying English and lives with a Korean student in a house with a cold room run by the English mum and her pit bull looking small dog.  Discovery that 3 decades later many things remain the same about studying abroad:  the kooky foreign roommate with inevitable minor culture clashes, the kooky local family with its many foibles, and the thrill of being young and making friends from all over the world and exploring new surroundings.

First stop is the National Trust property Ickworth, whose Pantheon like building roof is being repaired.  46, 000 pounds of slate tiles getting replaced, and because we love to drag home something heavy and awkward we make a donation and buy one to bring back home to write our house numbers on and hang outside our home.

The NT knows how to do things right, and in the darkness of the covered skylight they’ve made the best of it by highlighting a few key works with spotlight.

Upstairs they have a spot to take a Polaroid and to do interactive art.  I show some school kids how to make a turkey drawing with your hand, and they all copy.

The rest of the day is spent in the town of Lavenham.  Lunch is salmon and haddock fish cake, root veg pureed soup, leak and chicken gratin.  And, of course, shared chocolate sponge cake with choco frosting and dense lemon drip cake and tea with scones.  The NT operates a museum in the old Guild Hall.  Lavenham was an important mill town, and the mill later served as a poor house and mortuary.  .

There’s a nice antique shop in the town, and Julia bought a typical small painting of a Tudor house and we bought a pretty enamel brooch. On the outer edge of town there’s the beautiful St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s Church with a war memorial complete with American flag and a large used book store, where we all get a little something.

After we drop Julia home we stop at the One Stop for chocolate and beer and an absolutely ginormous fish at the Barracuda Fish and Chip shop.

 

20-JAN-2020

Full breakfast in the hotel restaurant.  We take a long drive to National Trust house called Blickling Hall.  One of the reasons we selected that rather than touring the city of Cambridge was to see the RAF museum, which turned out to be closed because it was “too cold.”  But the house is nice with an impressive library.  One room docent is a New Yorker married to an Englishman.

“Double border” garden outside.  Even though it’s January, there are early sprouting daffodils.  We drive through the small town Thetford and hit a few charity shops and late lunch at the café Tall Orders.

I ordered lasagna, but i got deconstructed sloppy joe in between 2 pieces of pasta sheets and some type of cream on top.  Wife got the last scone with jam and clotted.  A few antique shop stops en route home. Dinner in Histon (just north of our hotel) at a high recommended gastropub, The Boot.

We start with French bread and butter and some tasty gin cocktails.  We dine on pheasant with butternut squash and mushrooms, potatoes dauphinoise, smoked pork belly with a side of wilted kale and liquid cheese (delicious).  We saved 17 pounds with an internet coupon.  Magnum ice cream for dessert.

21-JAN-2020

Hearty full English breakfast again.  We stop in the market town of Hitchin and its shop the Vintage Emporium (overpriced and not very good).  But this is non-tourist England and fun just to walk around.

Traffic back towards London is just horrendous, and there is no way we have time to visit any of our planned stops, so we settle just to going back to Annabella’s old west London neighborhood Ealing, where she’d lived 30 years ago.  The change is just astounding and it’s unrecognizable except for Ealing Broadway Tube Station and the Polish church (once mostly just old immigrants and now filled with young workers from Poland).

Delcious tonkotsu type ramen at Tonkotsu, warm and filling before our flight home.

2019

6 April 2019

Our usual Premier Inn is booked so we stay at the Luma Concept Hotel in Hammersmith, more expensive than Premier but a smidge nicer with a good location near Hammersmith Tube State and an Italian desk clerk from Sardegna, who as usual tells us how there are no jobs in Italy.

Victoria & Albert Museum for food and art before heading back west to the National Trust property Osterly Park.  It’s a fairly long and not interesting walk from Osterly Park Tube, but doable.  They have an Easter Egg hunt via Cadbury so there are lots of kids around.  There were colored felt feathers hanging around the rooms for children to count.  One boy was serious, because he ran back from the exit to recount.  In the garden, most of the daffodils are dead, just green stalks left, but many other things are in bloom.

 

Dinner at Five Fields, where we’ve eaten their delicious farm-to-table cuisine before.  Saturdays are tasting menu only (but they do a great job accommodating preferences) and we enjoy a wonderful 2 1/2 hour dinner with 3 amuse bouches, see men, seafood turned into mousse, fois gras in red beet coating, and short rib. Service is top notch.

7 April 2019

Luma provides a little bag breakfast so we have a snack as we head to Heathrow to get a car.  We arrive to the National Trust Cliveden Estate just before it opens.  The parterre garden is in full bloom with tulips.  We drool at the breakfast diner in the house, now converted into a luxury hotel where Megan Markle spent the night before her wedding, but they don’t allow non-hotel guests to dine there.

We press on to Hughenden Manor, which had belonged to Victorian Prime Minister Disraeli.   The house also has a history of making maps in WWII and planning bombing raids.  Lunch in the NT café consists of honey ham casserole.

We’d made reservations in advance (obligatory) to tour Waddesdon Manor, a Rothschild house.  It might be the most opulent NT property we’ve seen.

One memorable item is a clock with elephants and many things that move and spin.  The dining room is setup with flower and silver – completely over the top.  In the wine shop we bought cheeses, Cotswold whiskey, and other gourmet treats.

I was yearning for a carvery, so we asked the ladies at Waddesdon, and they recommended The Long Dog.  We ordered two spring lamb dishes. The food was okay but it was completely worth the stop for a muddled berries gin drink that was sublime.

8 April 2019

Premier Inn buffet breakfast.  It is raining hard so we have to switch our itinerary since the garden we’d planned was not going to be fun.

First property is Packwood with a stop first at St. Giles Church, known for a faded painting.  It is small and all dark because we couldn’t find the light. One funny feature was the pews in the front area are locked down with brass locks.   One of the headstones in the churchyard said, “My tenants became my heirs”.

The lambs frolicking around the pasture are a delight. Packwood house is old, medieval furniture, really neat and clean.  We learned about special shields that are painted depending on who has died.

 

Many items throughout the house, like pillows and ceramic plates, have kind sayings about the last owner (who donated the house to the NT).

Queen Mary visited one time because he was known for his extensive renovation.  The long hall table was purchased from another house because those owners were running out of money.

The second property was Canons Ashby, once owned by an Edward Ferrars.  Having seen “Sense and Sensibility” dozens of times we can’t stop laughing and saying “Is that Ferrars with an F?”

It’s a short walk across a small moat to a stone house, where priests were hidden after the dissolution of the monasteries.

After the house we drove to Sulgrave Manor, ancestral home of George Washington’s family.  Having heard our accents people at the NT house had told us about it, but it was under construction and not opening until Easter.

Next place was the NT’s Farnborough Hall, with an outstanding library and gardens with a rooster and chickens roaming around.

We ate here, scone, tea, my wonderful sausage roll which was sausage meat inside of a puff pastry and an Emberly Tart with raisins, leek, raisins, cheese, raisins and walnuts in a thin crust.

Long ride to Clivedon to take a tour of the interior of the house, which is now a hotel.  A John Singer Sargent portrait of Lady Astor (first female MP) adorns the hotel lobby.  We drool at the guests enjoying a meal in the gorgeous dining room and hope for a day when we can stay overnight here.

2018 

See our England 2018 page for our mini break to Surrey and the Watts Village of Compton.