Day #4 About Those Bastards In Blandford
Up at sunrise for a last stroll to say “so long” to Much Wenlock before heading south to Blandford Forum, in Dorset.
I imagine it will be difficult to find another place like Much Wenlock with its orginial medieval motif. Feeling like a hobbit living in the shire can easliy be done here. It’s a romantic idyllic village, and its original! Not a theme park.
It took me about 3 ½ hours of mostly narrow roads, frequent near misses and beautiful scenery before arriving at my destination. Blandford is a mid size town styled in the Georgian fashion after a candler accidently set fire that completely destroyed the original town. It’s rebuilt by the town’s favorite sons who where known as a couple of Bastards. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_brothers.
Here’s my hotel, the Crown:
A well deserved bottle of merlot after an intense trip south.
The Crown just reopened after renovation. Edwardian in style and somewhat Victorian in attitude. The staff is generally pleasant but appears to be pulled in too many directions. They tell you they have Wifi. And they do. Except that it rarely works and when it does, most sites that I used couldn’t get past the firewall.
One of the staff directed me to another hotel across town that had Wifi that worked, so I packed up computer bag and hiked a mile to the Railway Hotel to write up my blog.
Wifi was free and fast. And the food, fish and chips, is excellent. Plus it is about 30% cheaper than the Crown. The down part is the music blasted so loud, I have to wear earplugs. The best time to work on your computer is between 11:00 and 5:00, after which the crowd starts .
Here’s a snapshot of the town near the Crown hotel.
Tomorrow I head to Stepleton House. This was my purpose for coming to Blandford. To visit the Chapel and the graveyard, which are on the property, and to see the house (outside) as it’s a private residence. Henry Adams visited here in 1914.
More about that later…
