Today, the weather is better. What a relief! We’re driving westbound and will spend two nights in Gloucester on the western edge of the Cotswolds, an especially beautiful area near the border with Wales.

We enjoy driving through the forests, along lush meadows with properly round sheep on them. The road takes us over hills and past gnarly trees and grey stone houses, typical for the Cotswolds. In the most famous town, busses just unloaded lots of Asian tourists. Yeah, we’ll skip that and come back later. We will still be around this area tomorrow and the day after.

At the hotel in Gloucester, we leave the baggage and continue our way to Bristol to meet Mark. He’s Gabi’s former teacher when she studied to become a translator at the University of Bristol, with whom she still works on translation projects regulary. It’s a great pleasure to see him again and also to meet his wife and young daughter. As before, we meet him at a cosy café with a nice selection of sweet and savoury food… and stay until they close at half past five. There’s just so much to talk about.

Bristol’s location is quite interesting, with some of the city at the sea, but some of it along a steep mountain that suddenly ends into a gorge, with a river deep down that has eaten his way through the mountain. There’s a suspension bridge across the gorge that we have driven over in the past, which always looks dangerous from deep down. The café is located near the top of the mountain. We now drive down to the harbour. There’s a cold wind going so we only get out quickly to have a look around the area before heading to another shopping centre.

We visit this shopping centre for the Aardman store. Aardman produces the stop-motion animation films with clay figures that we love so much – Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, Early Man, and of course the TV series featuring Shaun the sheep, or Timmy Time for younger children.

As we get a bit hungry, we agree on having a chicken burger at the Nando’s branch in the shopping centre before driving back to the hotel where we go to bed early.