Friday, September 8, 2017

London to Norfolk, 31 August 2017

London to Norfolk

We leave the Airbnb place (nice location but odd, no toilet paper when we arrived, lots of food left in the refrigerator) and haul ourselves to St. Pancras station. As always, the Enterprise car rental is the least expensive, as they are always located in some odd place not at the main airport or train station (as we learned in Paris). After quite a bit of traipsing around with our luggage, we finally find it inside the parking garage by the station. The car rental guy, Hamid, is extremely helpful and spends a lot of time with Barney on the car operation and showed me the GPS. We have a BMW sedan, as there will eventually be four of us plus luggage.  We decided to stop in Cambridge for lunch, which is very much a pedestrian town with limited parking. We find a small cafĂ©, I have a chicken salad and Barney has a filled frittata, and we head out to walk around the town. You have to buy tickets to go into the actual college buildings, so we content ourselves with walking through the Medieval streets and visiting the Great St. Mary’s church, where the earliest scholars and students met for lectures, before the college buildings were erected.

Back on the road to Kings Lynn in. Or folk, where we will pick up Madeleine. She has been backpacking along Hadrian’s Wall, an 85+ mile walk she has done in about 10 days, allowing plenty of time for the many archaeological museums along the way. After some bad directions from the GPS and circling the train station three times, we finally connect with her, and are so happy to see her! There is a grocery store nearby, so we get some basics for breakfast, and head to Burnham Market. At The Hoste, we get the keys and head just outside the main square to the cottage,  3-bedroom, 3-1/2-bath place with full kitchen, dining room and living room. We settle in and go back to The Hoste for dinner, Barney had duck, I had a lobster shrimp salad (local shellfish) and Madeleine has an unfortunately dry cod. We head back to practice the song a bit, and get ready for the wedding rehearsal tomorrow.

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