In Search of Bluebells

May is bluebell month here in the UK. I have been hearing about bluebells for a while, and how beautiful they are when you find a woods full of them. (We had bluebells in Boston, too, although they were different than these ones.)

Anyway, I looked up good places to go see bluebells and last week we picked up Justin's friend and his mom and went to see them. We chose to go to Woodchester Park, which turned out to be a beautiful place about an hour drive away. We did see some bluebells, but the dominant flower was instead a wild white one which we couldn't identify. Later my friend told me it was wild garlic.

They also had an adventure trail for kids, with swings, zip lines, and other things for kids to play on as they hiked. The kids liked that. Justin, having inherited his father's and great-great-grandfather's love for climbing things, also enjoyed running up a steep hill. Going downhill and flat he complained the whole time, but as soon as the slope got steep (in the upwards direction) he got a big smile and literally started running up the hill. I did not keep up. In fact, I was not even close enough to take a picture. You'll just have to take my word for it.


Here he is happy at the top. It was a really steep hill, and he wasn't even winded a bit. I'm thinking hiking with him (and his father) is going to be quite a project in the coming years...Good thing I've started working out again!


Here are the kids enjoying various parts of the adventure hike:




And here are the pretty white flowers (anyone know if they are, indeed, wild garlic?)



More swinging and adventuring...



See those bluebells hiding in there amongst all the white below? They are pretty, but there weren't too many here.


It was a good day, even if the bluebells weren't as bluebell-y as I had hoped. A few days later the kids and I set out from our place to explore a new part of our village footpaths. We entered a wooded area after going through a beautiful valley, and saw a huge field of bluebells. The time from our front door was approximately ten minutes on foot. The kids have not stopped teasing me about our hour-long drive in search of bluebells when it turns out we live among them! I have not had the camera any time we've one through our own bluebell woods, so you will have to imagine how pretty they are.

Comments

  1. Anonymous22 May 2018 at 11:56

    Hopefully this comment won’t show up three times. I accidentally signed out of my account and can’t figure out how to sign back in.
    In any case, what I wrote, three times, was, sounds like a pretty and fun place, and that Jim also likes going up long steep hills, especially on his bike. I have good stamina for long uphill stretches but prefer a bit less steep than I used to.
    And, I said, I’m glad it seems you’ve found a way to both work out and blog!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Rachel23 May 2018 at 09:19

      Just showed up once! I don't mind going up hills myself, but I am not as fast as my boys, and I get winded! I haven't found a way to do both...I didn't work out Monday and Tuesday, and today I'm blogging while cooking dinner, which is probably not a long-term solution...But as my mom always says, "Where there's a will there's a way," so I'll figure it out somehow!

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Day in Our Life

Image
I'm joining in the Homeschool Day in Our Life link up at Simple Homeschool today. Since we just moved to England from New England, got sick, got sick some more, and then had the Epic Family Flu Experience, we haven't had very many days that have come anywhere close to normal recently. In fact, this day I'm documenting is the first relatively normal day we've had in months, as luck would have it (with an emphasis on the "relatively"--we still have more boxes to unpack!) So, while this day has gone smoothly and has been blessedly filled with routine, had I written this post just a week ago, it would have involved me curled up feverish on the couch with the kids recovering and using their iPads pretty much all day, and Eric cooking bacon and eggs for dinner (again). Just for full disclosure. But now we're finally healthy, so here is our day: 7-7:45 am: We all wake up at about the same time. In my ideal world, I'd wake up before everyone to write ...
Read more

Laundry

Image
I know this is a topic you've all been waiting for with bated breath: dirty laundry!! When we moved here, our house had a washing machine but no dryer. This is very common for houses here--even in our very affluent village we frequently see wash hanging out to dry (and, to be fair, sometimes getting rained on.) I think moving here as a home-manager and mother has made me notice more the habits and norms. When we lived in Syria Eric and I didn't have kids and I didn't spend much time thinking about running our home (to be honest, mostly because we had cockroaches and there were worms in our shower--I just sort of survived our home that year....) Anyway, coming here as a homemaker has made me think about things like laundry. And that means you lucky readers get a whole post on it! Our washing machine that came with our cottage was on its last legs, and so we replaced it with a washer-dryer combination. But since we don't have a vent we had to get a condenser...
Read more

Our Neighbors the Romans

Image
One of my very favorite things about living in England is the old stuff. I liked that about New England when we moved there from California, too, because in comparison there are older and better preserved houses in New England (with the exception of some cool adobe ruins in a park I used to play in when I was growing up...) But England really beats both California and Massachusetts hands down in the cool-historical-places-and-buildings game!  Pretty much anywhere you drive, you see old things (and old people, too, come to think of it, but that's a post for a different day...) Our little village has lots of history, people having lived here in settlements for two thousand years. And since people have lived here for so long, there are layers of history almost everywhere. Rumor has it, for example, that somewhere around Naunton are the ruins of the last standing round house, that was modeled on the old tribal construction techniques that existed before th...
Read more