Road Trippin' Through the Cotswolds

We started off our travels today by making our way to our friends place near the Birmingham airport. We took the bus as we have National Express West Midlands travel cards for work. She met us at a pub car park and took us back to her place.

We warmed up with some tea, got ready and made our way towards the Cotswolds. They are located throughout several counties.

We did a detour through Kenilworth to see the castle named Kenilworth Castle. We did a drive by of the castle. We didn't get out and go inside.

Kenilworth Castle

We left the castle and continued on our journey to the Cotswolds area.

We drove through Stratford-upon-avon, which was looked lovely and we will have to go back and explore more.

We continued toward Cotswolds.

Into the countryside we went.

The buildings in the Cotswolds are made of Cotswold stone which gives the towns and villages a unique look to them. We drove through many little towns and villages all with the uniquely coloured stone buildings.

We've made it to Broadway! Broadway is a large village that has a bunch of shops and fancy restaurants.

We drove through Broadway in search of a pub we had heard about called the Mount Inn.

Thatched Roof.

Not going to lie, we did get a little lost...

We drove up some steep hills, and we made it to The Mount Inn. Mount Inn? Oh I see what they did there. ;P Anyway...the Mount Inn is a 17th century Cotswold Inn. It was built as a farm house originally and then was used by different businesses over the years. Now it is a traditional pub, with a nice view, where you can have a relaxing time by the fire. We did indeed.

Spectacular view

We went inside the inn, to relax from our drive and to have a beverage.

Loved the open fire pit.

Afterwards we went back to Broadway to look around and find some lunch. The weather wasn't the greatest so luckily our friend had a spare umbrella for us to share.

We went into a deli and had some lunch. The deli had a bread board with houmous, olives and salad which was pretty good. Somehow we had a feeling that we'd be having a breadboard for lunch since small pubs in villages usually have them as their sole vegan option. It was pretty tasty nonetheless.

After lunch we hit the road again towards Broadway Tower.

Here is the Broadway Tower gift shop where we bought our tickets for the tower. We just made it "by the skin of our teeth" the lady said before selling us our tickets. We got there just before they stopped selling tickets at 4:15.

It was windy, wet and muddy but we braved the elements and made our way to Broadway Tower.

It was a pretty looking tower. We climbed our way to the top.
They had a bit of a museum inside the tower.

We made it to the top which had an excellent view of the area.

We saw some fellow tourists fall in the mud earlier, down near the telescope, before we entered the tower. You can see how muddy it is. We didn't get pictures of their fiasco because it would have been rude to take pictures of them falling down in the mud. We learned from their failure and took extra care not to fall down in the mud. We didn't want to ruin our clothes or get our friends car dirty.

It's quite muddy down there. Be careful.

There were lots of sheep around the tower. You can see them in the distance.

Good times.

Next we headed to Stow-on-the-wold.

We walked around the town which was pretty nice and we tried to find a place to get some hot drinks but I guess everything shuts down at 5pm in Stow. We had a good time walking around Stow looking at all the cool buildings.

There were a few shops that were still open so we checked them out to see if they had any magnets we liked.

We walked past some tearooms that were closed for the evening.

This is England's oldest Inn apparently. At least that's what their sign says. A lot of Inns in England seem to say the same thing.

There were lots of really cool buildings to see and the sun was setting so it was nice to see the town with their lights on.

We found a hotel that we could sit down and drink some tea at.

We had some tea next to the fire which was needed for warming up and relaxing from all the travelling we did in the day. It was a good end to a nice day trip around the Cotswolds.

Our friend drove us to the train station near her house and then we took the train back in to Birmingham. This trip was a pretty fun little day trip and it has inspired us to take more little day trips around England because there are so many places left for us to explore. We didn't need to go that far to see something new and some towns we could probably get to by train on a weekend.

Waiting for the train

We hope you enjoyed our trip to the Cotswolds. It was very beautiful there and we highly suggest a visit. 

Enjoyed this post? Check out our post on "Cartagena on foot"