the Cotswolds

So way back at the beginning of July, after visiting Oxford with my mom and my sister, we drove through the Cotswolds.  We spend two days exploring small random small villages, which were all gorgeous.  The weather was perfect and the scenery was unbelievable.  Everything is so much easier if you have a car.  

In this small town, we ended up stopping for dinner.  We spent probably half an hour walking up and down the main street, reading every restaurant's menu and trying to decide which one looked good.  In the end, we probably had the worst meal of the trip, but oh, well.  We still had fun.

We also stopped by the side of the road too many times to take pictures of the fields or woods we passed.  None of the pictures here are very good, because I still haven't taken any of the pictures off of my camera (or had any from my sister and her real camera), but they're still fun.  This is the lawn of the hotel we stayed at one night, which was basically a converted, eighteenth-century manor house.  The grounds as you drove up to it were covered with sheep.  They were everywhere.  It was dark by that point, and we kept laughing as we'd roll the windows down and do our best to shoo the sheep off the road. 

The best thing about the Cotswolds is all the stone houses.  I love stone houses.  I've lived in one once, and it would probably be my perfect home.  Plus, they all had amazing views.  We also found an incredible church.  It had this entire wall dedicated to the life story (complete with weird statues) of the church's patron lady and all her children.  Her life was pretty weird, or at least, she made it sound that way.  I love finding little things like that in what you think will be a completely normal church experience.