Sunnyside

As I mentioned before, we are TIRED from the effort required in adventuring. We baked a banana cake and made soup all day yesterday and today we spent nearly all morning piddling the time away. We talked about trying again to go for Sunday Roast at the Golden Retriever, as we have yet to have the roast turkey because we cannot get there before 5 pm, however hard we try. Our biggest ambition for today was to get to the GR by 12 noon and have the roast turkey...with cranberry!

Mike announced that he wasn't feeling that plan, and should we do something else? Afterall, we are in England, there is a point to all of this, a grand plan.

But what to do...go to London? the abbey in Reading? Stonehenge?

I got on Wikitravel and looked up Reading, and we saw a house with a church and watermill on the Thames near a town called Mapledurham.

Today is the last day the home and the water mill are open until Easter. It seems many places close for the fall and winter and part of spring. This tends to worry me since I have no friends and need NOT to be trapped in our house for long stretches. At any rate, we made it and it was gorgeous. The house is big and old and filled with musty, dusty things. Lots of chairs embroidered by 9 sisters who lived in the home a long time ago and had no Gossip Girl to entertain them, a library with catholic books left by Alexander Pope, a collection of strange looking bath tubs and funky porto-potties. Massive stair cases, lots of massive portraits of dead people and a muy muy elderly historian in every room ready to chat about the house, its content and owners. Just the sort of place you want to bring a hyperactive almost 7 and 5 year old.

We spent about 10 minutes going through the house. No joke.

This is where the boys had the most fun. As we approached, we explained to them why we think it is important to be respectful in a graveyard, "we want to respect the families that have loved ones buried here, and we want to respect the dead people who are buried here." Ummmm...no one said not to play hide and go seek behind the gravestones or not to leap over the tombs. True that.

This is the inside of St. Margarets, where local residents have been worshipping for 900 years. OMG, it smells like it has been worshipped in for 900 years. I would love to see a service, Mr. Collins or Mr. Elton preaching from the small pulpit. And Jane Austen is one of my dearest friends.

Here is my favorite part of the grounds. The water mill. From 2 to 5 pm on Saturdays and Sundays from Easter to the end of September it is a working mill, grinding corn and wheat flour. I bought a bag of wheat flour and I am excited to bake a loaf of water mill/stone ground flour bread, with some oatmeal thrown in...mmmmm. Today there were 2 teen-aged swans paddling around, looking bored and annoyed with their parents. The teenagers are starting to lose their gray fluffy feathers, you can see the white poking through.

Mike and I can see our own white feathers poking through, more and more every day. Another reason to celebrate this adventure.

Dinner at the Bengal with Dane, forever grateful to Kwesi and Anita

By the way, I am a fan of must. It brings back great memories of the summer we spent with our Taylor cousins, Aunt Teri and Grandparents in New Hampshire in an old musty house.