Went on a mini-trip this weekend to Lincolnshire. Stayed Saturday night in Stamford and visited the area on Saturday and Sunday. Beautiful area, towns made entirely from stone. They look so old and so majestic and so extremely proud. Saturday was rainy all day but Sunday turned out to be a nice day, luckily.
The B&B we stayed in was excellent. It was a few minutes out of town on a quiet street with tons of space. The house was huge and we were the only two guests. The interior decorations were spectacular. We even got to eat our Sunday breakfast in the conservatory, surrounded by plants and the bright morning sun streaming in on all sides.
Morrie. I did quite a bit of reflecting this week and I came up with a theory. I heard on the radio one morning that London has the lowest per-capita car useage than any other European city (or soemthing like that). The interesting this is that I have never heard this stat until this week, even though I've been here nearly two years. I would expect a city to be proud of this fact, but it really isn't. So I asked myself, why?
The other thing that dawned on me was the way people go about doing their shopping. In North America you can hop in the car and drive to stores. They have parking lots. Pharmacies, restaurants, movie theatres, clothes shops, Blockbuster video shops, these all have parking lots. In London, none of these have a single spot, not one. Most Londoners (I think) tend to do a lot of shopping on their "high street" (main street to North Americans). My conclusion, I guess, is that it is imperative that you live off a great high street.