Finishing up our adventure before Ellen and Philip get home!

I am going to skip finishing the Paris blog for awhile because Monday and Tuesday were so wonderful that I want to share them while they are very fresh.  These are the two days left before Philip and Ellen arrive home that we can tour.  Wednesday will be busy with getting the house ready for them and moving into the guest areas for their return on Thursday, so we wanted to do some last time things.

Monday we drove to Henley-on-Thomas, a lovely village about 30 miles west of London and like its name, it is on the Thames!

I have wanted to go there for many years but there was no easy way to get there - no tube, no bus or train that wouldn't take hours whereas driving there from London was less than 45 minutes.  Since we have a car in London this trip, we decided to go.  John wasn't as keen on it as I because he hadn't spent the time I had reading about it, but he does love the idea of boat rides on the Thames and small old villages so he was game even if he did have to drive one more time!!

It turned out to be the idyllic village I thought it might be - old 15th and 16th century buildings and tiny cottages in row upon row on old streets going up from the riverfront.  BTW, cottages in England can be attached to each other as we might think of townhouses or they might stand alone.  You might remember our trip to Bibury last month with Ginger and Bill and the picture I included of the very famous row of attached cottages that you see all the time in English commentary about the beauty of the Cotswold's.

Lovely old church near the stone bridge which was built in the 1700s, wonderful old pub on the other side of the street and hotel next door to the church built in the 1500s.  Perfect village main street with walking only area, old pubs and hotels, shops, butcher, baker, almost a candle stick maker!

 One of the shops we went into was 14th century!!  If you click on the picture below and look closely at this picture its top floor in the shop behind and beyond all the chairs hanging from the beams, you can see a lot of the structure.  Definitely higgledy piggledy stairs that split in the middle to go to the front and back.  What a wonderful structure.  It was most likely a home over a shop. 

In the back where they were selling garden and outdoor stuff, you could see even more about the original building.

  Wonderful walk along the Thames, lunch at a museum cafe looking out on a nature reserve, canal locks to observe, a pint in the perfect pub with required dog

and the tranquil boat ride up and down the Thames.

Henley is famous for its annual rowing Regatta which brings 35,000 people EVERY DAY during the week it occurs.  This is a little town and I can't imagine the traffic that brings in or where the cars are going to park!  We got there the week before and could see the set-up of the course down the river; we could see all the banners hung across the streets and we could feel the excitement of the "craziness" that was coming in a week.

In the middle of the river area in Henley, there is an island with lovely little homes on it, some with boats moored in front; charming houses on the riverfront with their canal boats parked in front.  What an ideal life style - at least from our point of view!!

When it was time to leave, we started out of town and passed a sign that said "Hurley Village Only" pointing to the left.  Then we saw another sign that forbade trucks down the lane and I said to John that we were missing some special places, I was sure.  We got to a roundabout and John said "I'm going back to Hurley and see what that is about!"  Yeah!!  So roundabout we went and into Hurley and it turned out to be a TINY little village with one main street - with two OLD pubs - and sweet little homes on either side of the street.

 Well, this isn't exactly one of the small ones but it was very pretty and VERY old.

We later read on a sign that some of the homes near the river were out buildings of a monastery that was listed in the Domesday book and that was written in 1086!  There was a public footpath that took us across the navigable part of the river - which was very narrow at this point - to several islands that had public camping, picnicking and marina mooring sights with enviable boats that I could have lived on in a minute!

7 PM - Time to head home.  A beautiful day, as good as I expected, in fact better.   And we didn't get caught in any traffic!  Philip and Ellen can drive from now on....  By the way, Henley-on-Thames is a very relaxing place to spend the afternoon.

I'm posting this now - Wednesday - and hope to write our Tuesday adventure in London this afternoon.