TRAIPSING AROUND ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE with Coot

 Here's an account of my adventures on August 6, 2014. I decided to go to Claremont Landscape Gardens, one of England's Historical Trust sites. They're like our national parks. This one is right outside Cobham where my daughter lived. It was created by the Duke of Newcastle in about 1738 and it's really beautiful. Not WOW beautiful, but GOLLY-GEE beautiful! The royals used to go there to "get away" from it all. This one doesn't have any big flower gardens, mostly just lovely lawns, lakes and trees. I did get to see a strange bird called a "coot". I think God was laughing when he made that one. I remember a phrase about "the old coot" when they wanted to insult someone and I recently heard a lady remark that her grandfather was as bald as a coot. I will try to insert a photo of one.


My patient son-in-law dropped me off at Claremont and the plan, once again, was for me to catch the bus back into Cobham where he could pick me up. Well, I finished my tour of the Garden, went out the gate and , taking my life in my hands, crossed the road to get to the bus stop. I stood there reading the departure time and realized again that I had made a mistake on that so I call my family chauffeur, but when he answered I couldn't hear him very well. I turned around and there he was on the other side of the road! It turned out that I was standing on the wrong side for the bus that I needed, not remembering about their left side driving over there. God knows where I would gone if taken a bus where I was. How did he know I would be there at that time???

He dropped me off in Cobham and went home while I poked around the resale shops there and decided to have lunch again at Carluccio's Italian Restaurant. This time I had Salate Nicoise which consists of rock lettuce (don't ask because I don't know but it's better than iceburg, (well anything is!), tuna, tomatoes, calamati olives, boiled egg and anchovy with vinaigrette dressing. How healthy can you get? This was $8.98 lbs. which comes out to about $14.50. Could have had a ribeye for that in Texas!

Then I went to the grocery store which is called Waitrose and tried to cope with asking for "crisps" instead of "chips" and "baps" instead of hamburger buns. I just know that after this trip I am going to say "bah-nah-nahs". I must say that they are very ecologically savvy and most of the items on the shelves are fresh and from the U.K. or are Fair Trade. One thing we should do for sure is put braille on the medicine packages. Like their equivalent of Tylenol is Paracetamol and that is also in braille.

Side note: Every time I tell someone I'm from Texas, they ask if everything really is bigger there. I think they all watched DALLAS and believe all that stuff. Well, I guess we do the same about them.






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