Aug 3 Cambridge

Due to a rather late night we slept in this morning. David had gone to work and Linda had driven Sean to work when we got up to have breakfast. Since we were going to be getting up very early tomorrow morning it was a good idea to get started on packing up everything now, seeing as how we all had plenty of clean laundry and had pretty much done all the major shopping we were going to do in England.

When Linda did make it back home from Maddingly House we chatted for a bit and got ready to go out. This morning the plan was to just tour and shop in Cambridge.

On the short drive into Cambridge there is a property where some guy makes metal structures purely as a hobby and puts them out in his front yard. He has some very curious and interesting rusting pieces of metal in his yard I had to take a picture.

Once in Cambridge Linda was able to find a parking place down by the library, using her University parking pass. From there we walked the short distance to town and over the river where we stopped briefly to watch the punts go by.

We walked around some of the colleges and shops downtown and practically straight to the West Cornwall Pasty Co. to get some lunch. I had previously told Linda that since being in the UK I had yet to have a pasty, so we had preplanned this as our lunch destination. I had a large traditional pasty which was very filling. A bit short on the meat I would say, and a bit long on the onion. Good though, and I ate the whole thing. Shannon tried a cheese and onion pasty too, probably her first pasty ever. She quite liked it.

After lunch we wandered around the market, some shops, and past some colleges. Of course we had to look at the fancy gold clock worth over a million pounds. I took several pictures of some of the colleges, including Peterhouse, which is where it all started in 1209. The University just celebrated it's 800^th birthday last year. The University here is not like in Canada, or anywhere else probably, other than Oxford. Linda says Oxford and Cambridge have similar systems, where there are many autonomous colleges which are governed by the University for setting terms and such. Each college has it's own administration and admits it's students based on it's own qualification process.

We stopped for an ice cream and a cold drink as it was another beautiful day. Quite warm again. In fact it was quite a nice relief to have Linda put the top down for the ride home.

At home Shannon and Shayla hit Facebook again while Linda whipped up some fajitas. After dinner Linda and Sean had a game of badminton in the backyard. I chatted with David for a while and we got around to talking about our travel arrangements the following morning and decided it might be best to buy our London train tickets on-line to avoid a wait at the ticket office, so I did.

Shayla had mentioned she really liked the movie “The Illusionist” when we were talking about movies, and since they happened to have that movie they decided to watch it. I think that is the first time since we left Canada that we actually sat down for more than a few minutes to watch TV. Excluding an episode or two of the Simpsons.

Even though we had to get up at 6 am it was still 11:00 before Shannon and Shayla put down Facebook.