A Long Weekend - mostly in Salisbury

We headed down to Salisbury on Sunday at lunchtime, after a fairly quiet Saturday spent at home.

Most people who were intending to travel this weekend went to wherever they were going on Friday evening or Saturday morning, so the roads were fairly quiet on Sunday afternoon and we had quite a good run down.  On arrival we went almost immediately into the restaurant at the Old Mill for a late afternoon Sunday lunch.  After very nearly inhaling a plateful of roast beef with all the usual accompaniments, I finished off with this:

It was every bit as delicious as it looked!

We went for a stroll across the meadows on Monday morning after breakfast, then headed out to The Builder's brother and sister in law's place. I have met their little dog Daisy before, but I have never met their tortoises.  They have three.  And a couple of stone ones for good measure!

And then we went to pick Gwen up.  She has finally, finally, FINALLY got council funding to stay in the care home where she has been "temporarily" living since she came out of hospital before Christmas.  While she has been there she has been positively thriving.  She gets fed three times a day, with supplementary cups of tea and biscuits throughout the day.  There are games to play and people to play with. She is very well looked after.  So of course she is thriving.  The council social workers, in their wisdom, seemed to think that this meant she could go back to her solitary small flat where there is no one to talk to and nothing much to do and no one about to make sure that she eats and drinks regularly.  We all disagreed with that, of course - and Marie (The Builder's sister) and Jenny (the sister in law with the tortoises) have fought like tigers to secure funding for her to stay in the care home.  And now they are doing a mighty job of clearing out Gwen's unit so that it can be handed back when the rent runs out in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, we got the fun job of taking her out to lunch and then taking her for a drive out around the local villages and country lanes. She enjoyed her (small) plate of fish and chips and seemed to enjoy her drive around.  I definitely enjoyed my (not small) plate of steak and chips.  The Builder enjoyed his ham and chips.  Chips all round :-D

I had yesterday off so we didn't have to throw ourselves into the Bank Holiday motorway traffic. Instead we stayed another night in the Old Mill and came home after breakfast yesterday.  All in all, it was a lovely couple of days.

I love the colours at this time of year.  All the different shades of green, and the reds and browns of other trees

Click on the river to get to the photo album for the weekend