Today we drive to the Cotswolds, a particularly beautiful hilly landscape in southwest England. In Oxford we recharge LucY’s battery again before we drive through dense forests and over ever smaller roads.

We make our first stop at the Rollright Stones, a stone circle from about 2500 BC, also called Kings Men. According to legend, a king had encamped his army on the hill, encouraged by a witch’s promise: if he reached the circle in seven paces and spotted the village of Long Campton in the valley, he would become King of England. It seemed simple, but the witch deceived him and made a hill to block his view. Unable to keep his end of the bargain, he and his men became stones.

Our next stop takes us to the old town of Moreton-In-Marsh, where we have lunch. The café serves a mixture of English and Japanese cuisine. I order fish and chips, Gabi a chicken burger with Katsu curry sauce, Christine a vegetarian burger, which surprisingly also has two pineapple slices in it.

The Diddly Squat Farm Shop is very close by, so we also take a little detour there. The farm shop is a meeting place for petrolheads from all over the UK. It belongs to Jeremy Clarkson, the former presenter of the car show “Top Gear”. In two seasons of “Clarkson’s Farm” so far, Amazon Prime has shown him trying to prove himself as a farmer on his own farm. This is his farm shop with products from him and neighbouring farms. And just like in the show, there are cars parked all along the road and the farm shop is totally overrun.

Instead of waiting in the queue, which is much too long, we prefer to go to the Broadway Tower. But we are too late, as we learn at the ticket office: The last admission was twenty minutes ago. But we ask the nice lady in the souvenir shop on the ground floor of the tower as advised at the ticket office, who lets us in. The three upper floors of the tower are furnished differently as a dining room, salon and study. But we are more interested in the view from the top: From the top floor of the 16.5 metre high tower with its three turrets, we can see the whole surrounding area.

Among the particularly beautiful towns with old stone houses are Upper Slaughter and Lower Slaughter, where we go next. In the latter we find a parking space and explore the place with its small stream where dogs bathe and a mill wheel splashes further back. This really is a rural idyll. But we really had to earn your way here. When we had to cross a tractor on the one-car-wide little road in between tall hedges, I was really worried.

A small river also flows through Bourton-on-the-Water – the same as before. But the village is much bigger… and even more touristy. We walk up one side of the water and down the other, and after a photo with a bush in the shape of a car (at a car museum, which of course is also already closed) we make our way to the hotel. We stay overnight in Gloucester.

On the hotel restaurant’s terrace, a group of Englishmen are probably having their umpteenth beer and are noisy. So we decide not to eat here and instead get a pizza from Dominos and eat in the hotel room.