Starting our Back Roads tour from near our London hotel, we made our way on a 16 seater 'boutique' bus towards the Cotswolds leaving London and the dreary weather behind. There were only 9 passengers plus the tour guide Bob, so we had plenty of room and there was a nice mix of people from the US, Canada, NZ and us. First stop was Oxford where we visited the university and in particular Christ Church College where parts of Harry Potter were filmed. Still cool here...

London - 4 days here until 22 May and we have a list of everything we want to visit. A couple of quick observations: - 7.5million people is a lot! (some say at least a million more) - every second vehicle on the roads seems to be a London cab - there are soooo many smokers - there is an incredible diversity of languages spoken in London, many more than we expected, it seems at times more often than English. And lots and lots of French. Or maybe it's just that we ...

In the late afternoon we left Bath and drove the hour or so to Cardiff, on the way crossing the Bristol Channel on the 'second Severn crossing' bridge - it is very long! And it cost £6! Once we settled into our very nice B&B we had an enjoyable pub dinner (pubs in the UK seem to have a much higher standard of meal than what we're used to) and then went for a drive around Cardiff that included the bay area and looking westward across the Bristol Channel out ...

Good things that happened on our way to Bath: - it was sunny when we left Dover - we picked up our hire car no probs - a red Hyundai i30 - we drove to Canterbury in about 40 mins - we JUST avoided a parking ticket by pleading that we were tourists - we had the best coffee since we've been on holidays, and with the best holiday sandwiches so far - we got to Bath safely - we had one of the best 'pub' meals we've ever had at the 'Bear' Hotel in Bath - the B ...

We opened our eyes and hotel curtains to a glorious day in Lille so all was looking good for the 90 minute train trip to Calais on the Inter-City train and the Channel Ferry crossing. Having made sure we stamped our train ticket to avoid a fine, we settled in and we must have looked like we were locals as we even had a French youth ask us for directions. We enjoyed the trip again across mostly flat country and having reached Calais set about finding an Internet c...