Ted, Linda, Abra, Alana, Eden and Matthew from Toronto, Canada:

The House:

We very much enjoyed staying in your house. We found it very well located – only a three minute walk to Dursley town centre, easily accessible to the M5, and within an hours’ drive to most of the places that we were interested in visiting.

It was great having two bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms as well as a third full bathroom upstairs and a small bathroom on the main floor. Our two youngest children (9 and 11) particularly enjoyed the playroom. Everyone enjoyed the selection of movies and DVDs as well as the karaoke machine. The kitchen was spacious and fully equipped. Our eldest daughter enjoyed the stove and oven unit a lot, especially the griddle. It was also great having unlimited access to the Internet.

The solarium was a lovely place to sit in and read a book or just sit in and look outside at your lovely garden. The trees and flowers in the garden and grounds were beautiful and smelled lovely.  We were also very impressed with all the nicely organized information on the house and places to visit.

Activities and Excursions:

We visited Cirencester and on the way stopped at a look out area between Dursley and Stroud, which offered spectacular views of the surrounding valleys and the Severn River. Cirencester was great to walk around and had an interesting small market and a wonderful Roman museum.

We drove into Gloucester a few times and walked around the “docks” etc.

We visited Glastonbury where the ruins from the very old Abbey still stands and where King Arthur and Guinevere’s bones were originally buried.

On several occasions we visited the town of Bath. The almost completely intact Roman baths were incredible and the guided tour was very informative. We found the city itself a great city to walk around and there’s a great little pedestrian shopping area. From Bath we visited Avebury, which has standing stones similar to those of Stonehenge, but much more extensive.

Our trip to Cheddar, only an hour drive, was a highlight for the kids because of the spectacular caves and gorge and everyone enjoyed the cheese for which Cheddar is famous.

Another highlight was our trip to Berkley Castle, which was only about 20 minutes from Dursley. It must be one of the best preserved twelfth century castles we’ve seen and was where King Edward II was brutally murdered by his wife and her boyfriend. The tour here was particularly informative and created an enormous interest in the early English monarchy.

We visited Cheltenham on several occasions, and found it to be a beautiful city with another great pedestrian shopping area and some very good restaurants and shops.

Our visit to Cardiff, Wales, was under an hour’s drive and the visit to Cardiff Castle was more than worth the trip.  The castle tour was wonderful and we’ve never seen such imaginative, lavish rooms. They also have a fully intact 2nd century Roman wall underneath the current castle walls.

We went to a movie theatre complex in Gloucester. Although the seats and theatre are very nice, the popcorn was not up to North American standards as it was not freshly popped. We also enjoyed just relaxing in the house, watching many of your videos and of course some of the BBC and ITV shows.

Shopping:

We enjoyed an outing to the very large indoor mall in Bristol just off the M5. There is also a nearby Warner Bros. movie and restaurant complex.

We also went to the Clarks Village, in Street, only a few miles from Glastonbury, where we would have liked to spend more time.

Our favourite place for groceries was Tesco. We would usually find one from time to time on one of our outings. We also used the grocery store in town, the Co-Op, and the Sainsbury Store in Stroud. We particularly liked the ready made meals that most of the larger grocery stores offered. We also found groceries and restaurants a lot more expensive than in Canada.

Dinning:

Our two best meals were at the Le Petit Blanc in Cheltenham and the Egypt Mill in Nailsworth which is only about 15 minutes from Dursley and has a very old mill situated in a beautiful setting.

We ate at the Old Bell in Dursley, which was smokey but offered good food with large portions at a very reasonable price.

We also ate at the TGIF near the mall in Bristol where we found the food to be crummy. The fish and chips store on the road to the Co-Op was good, but a little on the greasy side.

We also ate at the Harry Ramsden’s fish and chips in Bristol, not far from the Warner Bros. entertainment centre.

The best Indian food we ate at Lal Jomi Pavillion Restaurant Tel: 0117 942 1640, 2 Harcourt Rd, Bristol BS6 7RG. Great Indian food at reasonable prices and only took us about 30 minutes to get home. We also ate Indian food at The Everest in Cheltenham, which turned out to have good Indian food but not as good as Lal Pavillion.

In General

We could have easily spent another week or more in Dursley and still barely scratched the surface.  There are just too many historically significant places to visit that we just didn’t make it to. Overall, the price of food, restaurants and accommodations is very expensive in England for those with Canadian dollars. The house exchange provided us with an opportunity to enjoy visiting England which if we would have had to pay for a hotel and automobile we would not have been able to afford the trip

Ted, Linda, Abra, Alana, Eden and Matthew