England Adventures: Cambridgeshire

These posts are now coming from back home (in Seattle), as our trip got pretty hectic on the last few days! (We also took our precious down time to recover from colds and spend quality time with Matt’s family.)

One day was spent driving through a few different areas in Cambridgeshire. We had lovely weather, beautiful sun and some great cloud formations, so the pictures came out wonderfully. The first stop was a village very near Cambridge along the River Cam called Grantchester, of which my favorite fact is that it’s “said to have the world’s highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners.” It boasts some lovely sprawling meadows, a quaint little tea/food spot called The Orchard, and Byron’s Pool, where according to local lore Byron swam while he was at school in Cambridge.

After enjoying a light brunch and some coffee at The Orchard (which I have to imagine is a fantastic spot in warmer weather - it really is largely an orchard, with little clumps of chairs and tables throughout the trees where you can take your tea or food to enjoy), we left Grantchester for Ely, with a stop on the way at the Cambridge American Cemetery.

So the Cambridge American Cemetery is a memorial to lives lost in World War II, largely those involved in the Battle of the Atlantic and the air bombardment of Axis Europe. And I have to be honest, it’s really a moving place to spend some time. The monumental sacrifice during that war truly is brought home through the visitor’s center exhibits and just walking through the cemetery itself - there’s nearly 4,000 graves there, and over 5,000 more names are listed on the Tablets of the Missing to commemorate those lost and never found.

After that stop, we headed to Ely to see Matt’s grandparents and enjoy some proper afternoon tea. As this was a new experience for me, we went all out and ordered “The Full Monty”, which was basically a meal! Four finger sandwiches (that seemed pretty generously sized for finger sandwiches!), two scones with jam and clotted cream, and one very generously sized slice of cake. Not to mention the tea, of course. Needless to say, there’s no way I could do that every afternoon! But it was delicious, and the teahouse was right on the river, so I snapped a few shots in the gorgeous late afternoon light before heading back to Cambridge.