I meant to do this post yesterday but we had a bit of an issue with transferring the photos from my phone to the laptop. By bit of an issue what I mean is that for a while we thought they had disappeared into the ether. This was not a happy half hour. They were finally tracked down to somewhere strange and unlikely. and moved, but by then I had lost the will to blog, so today it is!
So, we arrived on Friday, I did my dyeing retreat thing on Saturday and Sunday and on Monday we went to Ludlow. It's a really interesting and picturesque little town with lots and lots of buildings from different eras. There were also some lovely independent shops and a market. We spent a lot of our time there having a walk along the river Teme, which was rather steeper in parts and generally longer than I had anticipated, the walk not the river! but that said I did enjoy it. By an amazing coincidence the OH's brother was travelling through Ludlow by train that very day so he hopped off it and we had about 40 minutes to chat to him at the station before the next train came and he hoped back on.
There was a dearth of the usual advertising flyer things that you normally find in our self catering place but there was one for a large bookshop and coffee shop called Aardvark Books that wasn't that far away, in a 'let's have a day out' way. We went there on Tuesday, combining it with a trip to a large cross stitch shop I had fond on the web which was near Oswestry. It was a scenic drive, I'll say that much , although some of the roads were quite hair raising and I don't think poor old Evie, the car, will recover for a while. The Satnav appeared to have developed a fetish for single track roads with high hedges, sharp bends and very few passing places whihc she manifested all holiday long. Possibly she had wanted to go to Devon and was sulking because we hadn't take her there.
I found the book shop not very exciting to be honest. Can't deny it was huge, but the dog that featured heavily on the flyer was nowhere to be seen. It specialised in Art and Architecture books which should have been a slice of heaven for me, but as I hadn't got the impression that was what if did from the leaflet I wasn't prepared and there were just too many books to browse properly. I'm sure I could have found lots and lots that I would have liked to buy, and was indeed very tempted by one on Burne-Jones but it was £25 so I gave it a miss. The children's section was laughable, and the other fiction was upstairs in a way that suggested it was some sort of shameful secret that they really would have preferred to have done away with altogether. That said I came away with two hardback biographies of Agatha Christie and Charles Dickens, and a sci-fi/fantasy paperback by someone called Sheri S Tepper. I went through a phase of reading Tepper when she was really popular in the 1990s, but as sometimes happens I read a lot in a short space of time and got a bit fed up. I haven't read one for years and I hadn't even heard of this one so I bought it for the princely sum of £1.
have to say the coffee was lovely but I wouldn't rush back.
The cross stitch place was a wee bit of a disappointment too. It advertises itself as a major importer of American cross stitch charts and kits, and I can't deny there were 100s, if not 1000s of charts to browse. Kits though were in shorter supply, and the ones I saw were not American. Nevertheless we had a nice chat to the proprietor, admired many of the samples she had hanging up, I bought a skein of thread I needed for my Earthdancer's hair, picked up a couple of free charts and bought a few others. Just in case I run out of things to cross stich before I'm 110. We got introduce to the weaver upstairs who was really nice and had some gorgeous wraps and scarves for sale. She goes by Loomin' Marvellous on Facebook if you want to check her out. It was a lovely setting too for a collection of vaguely related craft workshops.
Purchases
It was a good day, but longer than anticipated, due to the aforementioned shenanigans of the satnav and we decided to stay closer to home the next day. Of which more anon ...
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