Its sunday morning, i’m at the White Hart Inn, in Calne, (Wiltshire, UK) an 8 bedroom hotel with a pub and restaurant included. Last night there was a party here, and they didn’t serve food, so i walked two blocks in a light rain - that has continued all night - to the Landsown Inn.
The night was fresh and the streets were shiny... beautiful.
Turns out the Landsown Inn bar was full too, but It has a large restaurant, and it’s very likely THE place to eat in this small town (there a are a couple more Inns or restaurants). I had a Grilled Goat cheese entree, and a delicious Beef bourguignone that included vey small onions with the beef pieces, it was great both in flavor and in size, so I had a couple of pints of an amber local beer whose name I never got, but it was good . For dessert I had a Lemon/Lime tart with raspberry sorbet on top, form a large selection of desserts.
The waitress was fast and nice, and the Van Morrison album playing on the restaurant was the perfect complement for a quiet night.
The Landsown is quite an old place, as the eight pictures on the walls of the restaurant showed, they seemed to be early 1900’s B&W prints and you could see no cars in any of them.
I walked back to my hotel in the rain and arrived mildly wet, the party was still at full steam, but the insulation on this old walls is good so after smoking a cigarrette in the inside patio with some of the partygoers. I went to my room and passed out in bed and had the first decent - more than 5 or 6 hours - sleep of the whole week.
I got here by train, from Heathrow airport, with two transfers on the way, it was a two hour trip, where the landscape transformed from outer city suburbs and storage warehouses to green filed with cows, beautiful barns and rolls of hay on the green slopes.
The trains arrived to Chippenham, where i walked around a flea market that was starting to pack (the rain or the time, I don’t know) on the main street and found the bus station on the other end, and the fairly busy public libary on front of it holding the bus schedule.
My bus to Calne appered the very second I opened the schedule leaflet, and I got into a double decker that left me in Calne’s downtown, about 4 blocks from my hotel.
Its almost nine o’clock, I have to get up and get breakfast and somehow head to Christian Malford the object of my visit here, to see the origin of the Skinners that went to Chile. Then I’ll go back to Chippenham to catch my train to Bath and spend the day there, to take a late train to Birmingham tonight.
If it keeps raining I’ll have to get a good jacket, as
my thing white linnen jacket is not too water proof, it’s been tested to a limit of two blocks walk in light rain. It will be a good way to remember this beautiful Wiltshire region
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