Travelogue: Oxford, Belfast and Socks

 I grew up always wondering was Oxford was like. I knew it as a place for scholars... in high school, I'd often heard of scholarships for students to attend Oxford University. As time has passed, it lived in my mind as a place with a lot of old stuff... very olde Englande, a place well outside my realm of experience.

And then last year, I started watching Endeavour, which is all about the young Inspector Morse, and was immediately transfixed by the city of Oxford and thought it would be an interesting place to visit.

So, after our time in London, we boarded a train to Oxford:

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It rained most of that day. It was actually the only really rainy day of our entire trip. We arrived at the train station, trudged over to our hotel and relaxed for the afternoon. Later on, we decided to get some dinner at a Lebanese restaurant called Comptoir Libanais. It was a very not-olde-Englande place, but the food and the restaurant itself was amazing just the same:

We spent the next couple of days just walking and exploring Oxford. Just outside our hotel was just next to the Castle Mill Stream, which feeds off the Thames:

And just across the way was Oxford Castle. There's really nothing more olde-Englandey than that:

I was delighted to see so many of the places that I had seen the young Inspector Morse visit. I kept expecting to see him drive by in his jaguar and step out to interview a person on the street:

I thought it would be nice to see if I could find a yarn shop, so one morning we set off on a walk to the northern part of the city. I had very little idea of what we would find when we got there, and I was pleasantly surprised to find the yarn shop on a sweet little lane just off the main road:

And what do you call a yarn store in Oxford?

If I visit a yarn shop while on holiday, I always try to buy something I wouldn't normally get at home. This yarn is from The Fibre Co. and it's called Amble, which is made from yarn from sheep in Cumbria in the Lake District. I was originally only going to get one skein of this yarn, but there was a lady who was spending a lot of time asking questions at the till, so that naturally meant that two more skeins had a chance to bewitch me into taking them home:

After that, we walked through the nearby University Parks:

We kept finding books stashed away in the crooks of tree branches and on park benches. I thought about opening this one, but I looked at the title and thought better of it:

On the way back to the hotel, we stumbled across the Ashmolean Museum, which is the University of Oxford’s museum of art and archaeology, founded in 1683:

We didn't stay long as I was nursing a budding headache, but it confirmed for me that there is no better example of British Imperialism than a visit to one of their museums:

The next day, we headed off for a week in Belfast. I'm afraid I didn't take many photos while we were there, as it was a week full of visiting and catching up with family and friends that we hadn't seen in almost three years. I did manage to take one photo of a pub I hadn't seen before while I was out on a quick shopping trip:

I was grateful that we had beautiful weather and were able to get out each day for a walk to enjoy the spring blooms:

It was really an all-too-brief visit this time, and my heart ached to leave it. We are planning to go back again in September, and hopefully, that trip will be less of a whirlwind:

And yeah... through it all I was knitting. I actually finished my first pair of socks, and I am quite pleased with them. The pattern is Rye Light by Tin Can Knits, and it was a great pattern for a beginner sock knitter. The only problem I had was trying to take photos of the final result. How the heck do you take photos of socks that don't make you look like Godzilla with socks on?

I finally figured out that sitting in butterfly pose on the recliner was the best way to go:

My brain was still pretty tired after arriving back home that I decided the easiest thing to do was knit another pair of socks. This time, I'm doing them from the toe up to see if I like that method better. And I also decided that I'd try knitting two at the same time, because Second Sock Syndrome is a real thing:

So, that concludes my blogs about my trip. Thanks for sticking around for the sock finale. I've been working on a few more projects in the meantime which I am looking forward to sharing with you in the next post. I hope you have a great week!