My ambition to eat out every day while on holiday might have been thwarted by the unexpected failure of the Cornerstone to open on Tuesday, but the daily average has been improving. Twice out yesterday. And twice today. Excellent!

We went out to explore Oxford today. None of us has *really* been here before. The Builder and I have, in fact, physically been in Oxford. We have even walked along some of the streets. But we were meeting my mate Stephen who took us on a round walk once of about an hour, when we were actually on our way to Salisbury. The round walk didn’t involve any of the actual centre of Oxford. Our potterings today did!

But first - breakfast. Ian took us to a part of Oxford he had been wandering around with Tom yesterday. We found signs to something called the Vault and Gardens which said it did breakfasts. Found a door and went in - thinking it odd that there didn’t appear to be any gardens. I don’t think they were really quite open just yet. The door might have been open, but they were obviously just getting ready to get started. However, they agreed to do bacon and scrambled egg on toast for us. It was unfortunate that the toast was sun dried tomato and walnut bread :-( Couldn’t eat my toast :-( Wasn’t really expecting flavoured toast for breakfast! (Also - allergic to walnuts, sadly.) While we were eating, they opened another door. And several people came in. It was the front door! We had come in from the back entrance!! There are gardens outside the front entrance!!!!!

And so we meandered about Oxford. We visited the courtyards of the Bodleian. We ambled along little streets and lneways. And then we found the Botanic Gardens (at the gate of which we had met Stephen on our previous visit). We went in. And they are amazing! Ian wants a Victorian Hothouse for Ballarat to grow vegetables in. I want one too. Not for Ballarat. We admired the vegetables (pumpkins bigger than mine) and the fruit trees. We found Tolkein’s favourite tree - it looks quite remarkably like an Ent. There were AMAZING water lilies in the water lily house. It was all rather fantastic. I took lots of photos.

Then we went back to a little pub in a little laneway called the Turf Tavern. It’s a tardis pub. It looks to be quite tiny, but once you got into it you realised that it had lots of rooms all stretched out in a sort of zig zag. It also did quite nice food. And a rather nice pint of Old Rosie scrumpy. Ian and The Builder reported that the bar staff were a bit alaremd when they asked for a pint of Old Rosie. It was a bit early, wasn’t it. And was I intending to do anything else in the course of the afternoon? Ian assured them that I had seemed to know what I was doing and I was allowed to have my pint of Old Rosie.

And so to home, avoiding yet more hold ups on the motorway. More baking. Home made fish pie for dinner. Was a good day :-)