Cambridge Rambling

I went for a walk with the Cambridge Ramblers on Saturday.  A pleasant English couple picked me up about a 15 minute walk from Christ's.  The husband drove us in a tiny little Honda like a bat out of hell down EXTREMELY narrow roads on which naturally, he drove on the wrong side of the road.  And yet, I am still here.

We made it (by the skin of our teeth) to a tiny village called Burrough Green.

Burrough Green

Could anything be more English than this?

A carload or two of people joined us for a total of nine including one other American (recent masters degree from Cambridge and working nearby) and a German lady.  The rest were native British.

So we set off, our leader navigating via a compass and an Ordinance Survey map showing every house, village, and field.  Here are some scenes from our travels:

Corn field or, as the Brits call it, Maize

Part of our rambling party and typical scenery

Every village seems to have one of these

Parts of this walk were just asinine

The horses were always friendly

Genuine thatched roof with a cat statue!

Lunch in a graveyard. Most gravestones were so old they were illegible

500 year old church largely made of flint

Same church inside

More friendly horses.  Yearlings according to our veterinarian rambler.

A good harvest this year they tell me

Through the woods

After the ramble the same English couple careened back to Cambridge where they "dropped" me (the British do not drop off) and refused my offer to help pay for gas which I quickly corrected to "petrol" but they claimed to have translated my Americanism quite easily.

After resting a bit (I was surprisingly not tired after 10 miles, but then it was all level walking) I met up with CJ and we had dinner with Ingrid of European archives fame.  After walking quite a ways, we settled on a Sri Lankan restaurant which turned out to be quite good.  After dinner we took a long walk through various parts of Cambridge including to Darwin College where the conference had been held that brought us to Cambridge in the first place.  I don't know how many miles I walked altogether.  15? 20?  Tired feet.