To continue from my last post we had a wonderful early morning walk in Cambridge, right round the river to The Backs where Mark continued his trespassing tendencies. This photo was taken inside the grounds of Trinity College, in the most delightful garden full of tulips.

Trinity really does have the most exquisite buildings

Along the river, with the punts lined up ready for the day. 

So many beautiful little bridges across the river.

and some exquisite detailing on Corpus Christi College. I am obsessed with the architectural details.

At this point I might talk about our travel strategy as a few people have asked me. We don’t book accommodation much in advance, and sometimes not at all, trusting to serendipity. We did a road trip around the South West of England in 2016 relying on the internet to tell us where to go and I rather felt as though we had missed a few important sights, so this time I bought this book to help guide our travels. It has been really good and we’ve visited places that we would not have given much thought to.

The other thing we notice is that if we plug our destination into Google maps we get directed to Motorways and spat out at the other end, seeing very little along the way. This time we put all the small towns and villages we wish to visit en-route to the final destination for the day, and we are able to do detours at whim. There is also the ability to tell Google maps that motorways should be avoided but we decided against doing this as sometimes they have a useful function and a whole day of driving down little country lanes gets a bit taxing.

We used the book to guide us in our explorations around Cambridge and nearby towns and villages, and followed the map to Saffron Walden which is a 12th century market town full of half-timbered buildings and interesting architecture.

The weather was glorious but it didn’t really warm up until early afternoon, so I had to throw the Anais jacket from Stitch Diva over my Phoebe Bib and Tucker overalls from Pattern Union.

I have to say that I love the crooked buildings the best and took many photographs. I shall choose my favourites for you.

This lovely building is in Lavenham, another spot we were directed to from the book.

Lavenham is full of gorgeous buildings. It used to be the centre of the wool trade and seems to be full of leaning medieval buildings. 

Most are whitewashed but not all. We may have visited these tearooms!

I think this building was the Guild Hall.

We visited Ely to check out the cathedral, which was vast and beautiful (of course!), but I found a sewing and knitting shop, which I thoroughly enjoyed but came out empty handed. 

We had a picnic lunch in the beautiful Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds. I spent quite a lot of time trying to work out the layout of the Abbey, but couldn’t manage it in spite of a 3D model on display. 

We sat on this bench which marks the site of the world’s first internet bench. Apparently there was some sort of dial up connection under the bench and people could sit with their laptops and access the internet. Pretty amazing for 2001. Ah, those years before wireless!

Our final stop was Aldeburgh Beach, as recommended by @judithrosalind. 

It’s a very picturesque town with lots of pastel coloured houses, and of course, the shingle beach, which Mark described as a rock beach! This was the first time he’d been on a beach such as this and was quite astonished by it. Although the weather had been beautiful, by the time we got to the sea it was late in the day and the water was grey and very unappealing. There were people lolling about on the pebbles though!

This was our last day in Cambridge, and we planned to move on to York. Stay tuned to see where we finished up!