One Day Escape – Bibury & Oxford

Sometimes the city life can get a bit suffocating and the city can be noisy and overcrowded. Add all this to the tension you’re accumulating during your working hours and you will have all the reasons to flee the city during the weekend. Now, one of the reasons I love London is the location which makes travelling much easier. Being in the UK we get bank holidays that we can link to the weekend and have either a long weekend trip to one place or the chance to visit multiple places. Last year we took advantage of a bank holiday and decided to spend two days on Isle of Wight and one in Bibury and Oxford.

For those living in London, Bibury can be a breath of fresh air, an escape from the hectic life of the big city. We went there with Cristi’s uncle and his family on a Monday. Cotswolds is the go-to place for wandering around gorgeous villages, and Bibury is probably the most famous of them. After a two hour drive, we got to this typical Cotswold village which was proclaimed “the most beautiful village in England” by William Morris, an English poet and novelist among others. You can spend your entire day walking and admiring this picturesque mix of nature and honey-coloured stone cottages of Arlington Row, visit the church and the Court or just relax around the Coln river. There are countless of places to photograph, from perfectly maintained gardens, to swans gathering on the Coln river or to the little stone cottages that seem hobbit-sized.

Bibury Church, taken by Gabriel

Black Swan on Coln River

Curious Black Swan

Arlington Row

Trout Farm of Bibury

Hobbit Houses of Bibury

If you still have time, you can drive to Oxford for tea or dinner and if you get there earlier the Bodleian Library, Radcliffe Camera, Pitt River Museum and Natural History Museum are worth a visit. Actually, the whole of Oxford is a place worth visiting. If you take your time to discover it, you will be impressed by the mix of modern and ancient architecture this town has to offer.

Relaxing on the lawn of Gabriel’s university

Radcliffe Camera

Pitt Rivers Museum

Cotswolds is definitely a place that we want to discover more of. There are plenty of other places in and around the Cotswolds that can (and should) be visited and most of the time, even one day of travelling can be enough to discover a new place that doesn’t have to be a flight away, it might be right in your back yard.