At last, I got a chance to sleep in. Eliot and Kristine’s couch was very comfortable. We took our time getting started. We had done a lot of stuff the last 3 days and we were pretty tired.
We had been warned to watch out for some of the neighborhood cats. In England, Eliot and Kristine explained to us, the rules/customs about how animals are handled are a lot different. Cats can not be de-clawed and are basically given free reign. Eliot and Kristine have a cat door for Beck their main cat. They also kind of have a second cat, “Big Cat”, they pretty sure he’s leading a double life though and has another family somewhere else. “Big cat” likes to sleep in the guest bed Heather and Elysia were sleeping in, he is shy around people he doesn’t know though and if he showed up he did not wake anyone up. I might have had to deal with “Orange Cat”, apparently “he” is rarely seen by anyone, but he likes to sleep on the short couch in the living room (I was sleeping on the long one) based on the hair that is left behind. No sign of him though, if “Orange Cat” stopped by he was not loud enough to wake me up.
Eliot made us a delicious breakfast of French toast. Kristine made us some delicious English tea.
Around noon all 5 of us headed into Cambridge (about a 45 minute drive). We started out doing a little shopping. My legs/feet were not doing well and had not been for the last couple of days. I got to ask Eliot for medical advice for the first time. He prescribed either new shoes or insoles. I was thinking about getting new shoes before I left, then after Elysia reminded me my shoes were starting to fall apart I figured we should do some shoe shopping first. We did a little shoe shopping at the mall in Cambridge, turns out my UK shoe size is 12, and it also turns out most UK shoe stores do not stock that size. We found some good insoles though, I put them in my shoes and my feet immediately started feeling better.
We also looked around the market a little bit, sampled some ostrich meat and went into “The Eagle” for a drink. Cambridge was a beautiful town. Lots of beautiful old buildings, ivy, beautiful lawns, flowers every where, a small river with a bunch of little bridges. Pretty much how one would imagine Cambridge should look.
After walking around for a while and dithering about what we wanted to eat we went to Jamie Oliver’s Italian restaurant “Jamie’s Italian”. I had a rabbit and pasta dish (I do not think I had ever had rabbit before). The waitress warned me when I ordered it that it was “free range” which means it had been shot, which meant I could find some bullets in my meat. I did not find any bullets and it was delicious. I have a lot more sympathy for Elmer Fud now. I tried some of the other dishes we had ordered. It was all very good.
Eliot and Kristine were really excited to take us to another place for dessert that served “Sticky Toffy Pudding”. They spent the whole day running up to dessert telling us how it was pretty much the best thing ever and how eating it would be life changing. I’m not a big enough foodie to say this with much confidence but they were right. After having tasted it I can not think of a dessert I would say was better.
Then we went back to to Eliot and Kristen’s house in Beck Row, chilled out for a bit and went to bed.