Day 31-33 - Cambridge

Where does one go after tripping around Europe for a month...Cambridge! We booked ourselves into Abbeyfield Guesthouse and looked forward to a weekend off catching up after the busyness of being on tour. Luckily for you all Abbeyfield had free, fast wi-fi, so the blogs were finally all updated for your enjoyment (we hope!). Lucky for us we had George Pippas the Greek, owner of fore mentioned Guesthouse.

Cambridge turned on some not so pleasant weather for the weekend which sent us delving into the corners of our bags for some warmer clothes, which was a bit of a shock to the system. Retail therapy was indulged in along with checking out some of the weekend markets. A nice young man cut us a deal we couldn’t refuse to go punting on the river so an idyllic Sunday afternoon was spent learning about the various colleges in Cambridge and having poetry quoted to us as we weaved between the rest of the Cambridge population trying their hand at punting down the river.

Josh our punter is trying to be a philosopher...currently studying philosophy at a Canadian university but due to a ‘miscalculation of student finances’ has had to come home to punt on the river for the summer break.

He was full of uselessly interesting facts such as – the ugliest building that we punted past was designed by the same man who designed the Beehive, check out the photo... and it is no surprise! There is also a replica of the Bridge of Sighs which is in Venice. This is one of 3 replicas with the others located in Oxford and most recently Las Vegas. We also went past the Wren Library which was designed by the same man who designed St Pauls and this is where a lot of original and first editions of books are found including A.A Milne, Shakespeare and Isaac Newton.

The books are housed on the first floor, the ground floor empty with wrought iron openings to allow flooding to go through without concern for the books. Another fact about Cambridge is that it is not classed as a city as its Kings college chapel was not deemed grand enough to be a Cathedral. Therefore due to English tradition Cambridge is rendered on a town with a very impressive chapel.

Church proved to be elusive on Sunday morning with the one we had searched out on the net unable to be found. So we headed down the street with the plan being to go to which ever church we struck first. St Paul’s had the honour of our presence and by just sitting down we changed the age ratio significantly...to be fair most of their parish was away on its parish weekend. Here we meet a lovely old couple who told of some sights worth seeing in York and the man jokingly warned us of the Scots, much to his wife’s embarrassment as she later told us that whenever her husband fills out forms he always makes a point of crossing out British and replacing it with English when asked of his ethnicity.