(Shawford and Winchester, England, U.K.)
We have some family members living in Shawford, a small community just outside Winchester, England. After arriving at London’s Heathrow Airport, we decided to stay here for a few days before moving on to Wales.
After we had a small lunch at our airline’s arrival lounge, we took a (very full, very delayed) bus to Winchester and were met 90 minutes later at the bus station by our niece. Their house is about a 15-minute walk from the Shawford train station. And right across from the train station is “The Bridge”, the local pub. That’s where we had our first dinner.
Back at our lodgings, we made some rough plans for our sightseeing visit to Winchester. We slept that night for nearly 11 hours, after only about 3 hours of sleep on the plane the night before.
Winchester today has about 50,000 people in the city proper. But, just like my home city of Kingston, it was once much more influential. It was the “capital” of Wessex and even England for many years. It was also the second largest city in England (after London).
We started our visit by lining up a walking tour of the old city for mid-afternoon. We did a little bit of shopping on the “High Street”, and even stumbled upon a record fair at a local hotel. I won’t be doing any music shopping after leaving the U.K., because our future destinations on this around-the-world adventure will be even more expensive for music. And I don’t like the idea of travelling so many thousands of miles with large /fragile vinyl records. As a result, we just picked up a couple of CDs.
Lunch was just some take-out from a street vendor. We’ll be away from home for far too long to constantly have sit-down restaurant meals. We then returned to the tourist information centre and met our walking tour guide. We were now ready to discover the city’s rich and varied history!
One of the nice things about a walking tour is that you end up in places that you wouldn’t have found on your own…and you can also identify places that you’ll go back to later. It’s easy to find them on your own…you just need to retrace your steps from earlier in the day.
I’ll have more details on the walking tour in a later post. We finished our day with dinner at Gurkha’s Inn, a restaurant featuring Nepalese and Indian cuisine. Ever since Darbar closed in Kingston, I have been searching for a comparable dhansak!