Danskcolin: Friday August 5th 2022

08:00 Lois and I roll out of bed to face a familiar "touring" problem - too much time between checking out of our current hotel and being able to check in at our next hotel. The latest time we can check out of our Harrington room is 10:30 am, but we can't check into our Newmarket hotel until 3:30 pm. Damn!

While we have our breakfast we ponder some possible options. We only want something light this morning. We both went to bed with uncomfortably full stomachs after our meal last night at the pub over the road.

we opt for a light breakfast this morning, because

we both went to bed last night with uncomfortably full stomachs. Ugh !!!!

flashback to our evening meal last night at the pub across the road

- it was very nice, but we estimate it was about twice the amount

we normally have these days - oh dear

While breakfasting, we come up with our preferred solution - to spend some time at Anglesey Abbey near Newmarket, which reputedly has some nice gardens. It isn't really an abbey any more - when Henry VIII ordered Roman Catholic monasteries and institutions to be permanently closed in the 16th century, local people started "borrowing" the stones from the abbey walls for their own purposes - in the end it just became a ruin, a ruin which was demolished around 1600, and a Jacobean mansion was built on the site instead. But they kept the old name Anglesey Abbey for some reason.

"Anglesey Abbey" (1600), but it's not really an abbey - what madness!

10:30 We drive the 55 miles to the abbey - on the map it looks like it could be a nice quiet drive, but we find it's one of the main routes that lorries take to get to the ports of Felixstowe and Harwich, so we've got lorries in front of us, lorries behind us, and lorries beside us most of the time, which is a pity. Damn!

We arrive at the so-called abbey, and relax in the restaurant with a cup of tea and half a flapjack each.

Lois and I have a cup of tea and half a flapjack

each on arrival at the abbey's restaurant

We go round the gardens, and halfway round my phone starts ringing. It's a call from Sarah, our younger daughter, who lives in Perth, Australia with Francis and their 9-year-old twin daughters Lily and Jessica.

Lois and I try to keep superficially up-to-date with new technology, but we still find it scarcely believable that we can be half way round a monastery garden in the east of England, and find ourselves speaking to Sarah from a distance of 9,000 miles - what a crazy world we live in !!!!! Sarah says that Francis has found a possible house to buy when the family move back to the UK in the next few months. She gives us the address of the house so we can look at it online later.

As Lois and I walk round the gardens, we have to say that in our opinion they aren't really much to write home about. Not their fault - they've all been hit by this year's great drought. To be honest we prefer the statues to the flowers - what madness !!!!! A slight drawback is that some of the statues have genitals - not real ones, but a good likeness in stone, which we think is unnecessary. Call us stuffy old prudes if you like haha! But what would all those monks have said if they'd known what was going to be on show in their former gardens?

The identity of the people who've been represented in the statues is uncertain - we think we spotted Diana the Huntress, and possible Pan, but the jury's still out on those judgments, which are essentially just wild guesses anyway haha!

Some of the flowers are all right. These white ones have a nice scent, Lois tells me. We're not sure what they're called. Perhaps we should be told?

We see the old mill built in the 1740's. It's quite nice, and a some families of geese seem to have made the old mill stream their home, which is cute.

we see the 18th century mill, where a bunch of geese

seem to feel very much at home in the mill-stream, which is nice

After we look round the gardens we go into the restaurant again for a spot of lunch - sandwiches and a bottle of elderflower pressé. We're still trying to keep it light today.

Will this do? [That's not much of a review is it. Nobody's going to bother visiting the abbey on the basis of what you've been able to remember of it, that's for sure! -Ed]

14:00 We leave the abbey and, on the way to our final destination of Newmarket, which is only 9 miles away, we kill some time touring the charming local villages. We arrive at our hotel in Newmarket at 3:30 pm and check in.

When we check in, we're initially disappointed to find that the hotel's restaurant is closed tonight, and the bar, while being open, isn't serving food. What utter madness!

But in a way we're glad we won't have the option of another big meal, so we walk round to the local M&S Simply Food mini-restaurant and come back with a couple of BLTs plus strawberry trifles and chocolate bars. That's nice - we can stay in our room all evening, and gorge ourselves on all that yummy stuff, while we watch some nice telly! Perfect! Who wants to go out - not us, why would we, we've got everything we want right here haha!!!!!

21:00 We go to bed on an old Mr Bean - the one where he's mistaken for the real hairdresser in a barber's shop, and he makes a mess of a little boy's hair.