London life can get you down. Super fast paced, overcrowded, too much pollution, too many people who think it’s acceptable to do a poo on your doorstep on a Saturday night (seriously, don’t get me started, that’s 2 weeks out of 3 now – the downside to living in gritty East London I guess). Sometimes you just have to get away from it all.
I had been planning a trip to Turkey for a while, but when I say “planning” I actually mean “not planning”. There was much talk of the trip, but due to the aforementioned super fast paced life I’d not booked flights or accommodation, or even considered where I might go and we were due to leave in under a week. Turkey deserves better than that, so the decision was made to hire a car and explore some of the English countryside instead, a decision which turned out to be a good one.
I had the car in London for one night before heading off so I did something I’ve been wanting to do for a while, I rigged up a tripod in the passenger seat and fired off some long exposure shots of me behind the wheel. There’s plenty of info online about how to do this, but in a nutshell here are the settings I used for the shot below. f/22, ISO1600, 4 seconds exposure. Not sure if this is how the rest of the world does it, and I’m sure with a little experimentation I could do a better job, but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.
Next stop was the Three Choirs Vineyard near Gloucester, about 3 hours out of London. Yeah, that’s right, England has vineyards! Who knew? The place was stunning, beautiful rooms with beautiful views of beautiful vines.
A little wine tasting seemed to be in order. At first I thought a whacky chef was playing a pre-halloween prank by substiting one of the wines for vinegar, sadly this wasn’t the case, but it actually didn’t matter at all. Strange as it might sound the wine was the last reason we went there, I mean with France, Spain and Italy on your doorstep there’s never a shortage of great wine over here (sidenote – I picked up a bottle of Vevue Clicquot for £25 at the supermarket yesterday, same bottle goes for $80+ in Australia), we went to Three Choirs for the early morning strolls in crisp fresh air through rows of vines whose leaves have just turned with the seasons, we went to see cows and sheep going about thier business, and we went because we considered it highly unlikely anyone would do a poo on our door step. Oh, and the photo ops weren’t bad either.
Next up was a trip to Chepstow Castle just over the border in Wales. In my relentless pursuit to see more things you’ll never see in Australia (Kryall Castle doesn’t count) I actually forgot that I’d been to this castle before. Oops. Not to worry, it’s always great poking round an ancient structure, an a Tuesday night on the verge of winter meant the crowds were down.
Cream tea later that day followed by Bath the following day and a trip to Stonehenge on the way home rounded out a world class short break. Londoners, heed my advice and get out of town of a few days, sure, the stress of London will come right back the second you try to negitiate London traffic on your return, but a few days out of the big smoke is just magic.
