Call me Sir Francis Drake

As Amanda has told you, we made it to BRISTOL!  We’ve now had three days of wondering the city to try to get our bearings.  We’ve generally left the temporary apartment around 10in the morning and walked towards City Center and Harborside / residential areas. The River Avon wraps around the center of the city to the south and provides several nice walks around town.  The girls are going to love it when they get here.  We’ve already noted many areas that we think their noses will really enjoy exploring.

A few blocks from our current apartment is the Old City and Queen’s Square. (As a side note, you can’t go more than a few blocks without coming across something named “Queen” “King” or “Princess”).  Queen’s Square was particularly nice with a large open park gravel paths that emanate from the center of the park out towards a square path that constitutes the outer border of the park. As we meandered through the park, we watched the seagulls search for picnic scraps and observed the locals relaxing on a bright warm (for this part of the world) spring mornings.

Just outside of Queen’s Square is Pero’s Bridge which spans a small harbor where some of the local ferry’s dock to unload their passengers and take on new fairs as well as a housing a few dining barges which seem to be rather popular around town. It’s on our list to try one, but Amanda wanted to wait until she was over the jetlag, because as she has stated, jetlag and seasickness are not a good combination when trying to eat. Several times through our meandering, we have been walking on a road only to find out we’re not at all on the street we thought we were on.  It seems Bristol, and possible the entire UK, don’t find the use of street signs necessary. Instead, they post the street name on buildings throughout town however since the buildings are different throughout the city the location of the street name is not the same place on all the buildings. It has taken  us several wrong turns along the way to figure this out and there several times when we were unable to locate a street name anywhere. Driving will be difficult.

However, this little misstep has led us to some fabulous photo ops. Just outside the Bristol Choir Church is a row of trees and in the first of those trees you can find pairs of shoes hanging from the limbs. We weren’t able to determine which local custom this harkens back to but we decided to keep our shoes with us. The Cathedral Choir Church is also quite impressive although we were so confused by the shoes that we almost neglected to get a photo of the church.  In addition, I have located my hamburger competition.  Once we eat at the Gourmet Burger Kitchen, I’ll provide a full report.

Also as Amanda mentioned, something we never heard about before coming we discovered quickly on day one: Bristol has hills! For awhile the first morning, we were reasonably happy with the walk. It wasn’t very strenuous and the weather was absolutely amazing with the temperature in the Low 70’s. Boy, did that change!  We wanted to look at some of the flats we’d seen online. So we decided to walk to one, then down to Amanda’s office then to the other.  We turned north when we reached the western end of Brandon Hill Park looking for Constitution Hill Rd which would take us to the first property on York Place. The closer we got to Constitution the steeper the walk began to get. After hiking about a half mile up the hill we found a post man walking his route and asked how to get to York Place since we hadn’t seen Constitution Hill. He pointed a little further up the road and told us that was Constitution Hill and that it was a “killer” to walk up.  We thanked the postman for his assistance and walked towards Constitution Hill. When we got to the street we looked up! This is about the time we realized that walking Bristol on a daily basis might be a little more difficult than we initially thought…especially in the rain…and snow…and ice.  We made it up the hill and were able to see the outside of the property.  I think we could like it, if only we could see the inside of it.

Speaking of seeing the inside of houses, we’ve had a setback.  The relocation company who was supposed to take us around to view properties canceled on us late Thursday afternoon.  The agent said that several of the properties that she had set up for us to view had been let (rented) Wednesday and Thursday, so she was going to have reschedule. At this point we don’t have a date rescheduled yet and since Amanda’s first week at work starts Monday, we’re not exactly sure when we will get a chance to view properties, but hopefully soon.

After walking around looking at areas we might like to live, provided any properties come available, we strolled down to Amanda’s new office. After she took a photo of the exterior of her new office building (she says to point out that they have not updated to the new logo yet), we entered Brandon Hill Park which is directly across the street from her new office. It’s a nice hilly park with a medieval tower perched at the top and the views to the south are incredible.



One of our more interesting people watching spots was @Bristol. This is a large open area that has fountains and reflecting pools surrounded by café’s and shops. We took a break while we sat there watching the kids play in the reflecting pools we saw that most of the children, little girls included, were topless or completely nude. Now I don’t surprise at people’s activities very easily, mostly because of my time working in an extremely rough area of Ft. Worth known as Stop Six, but seeing this was quite a shock. If I had to guess the kids ranged in age from one to four and their parents certainly weren’t all that concerned.

As this is getting to be novel length, I’ll just tell you about one of the restaurants we have found so far. Just off of Queen’s Square is a small pub called Shakespeare’s Tavern. It’s in an old row building from the 1700’s and has retained much of the charm associated with the centuries gone by. The food was good, I had a dish called Hunters Chicken which is grilled chicken wrapped in English style bacon and topped with bar-b-que sauce and English cheddar cheese. Amanda had a jacket potato (baked potato) with cheese and we spent our evening playing tri-minoes and visiting with the waiter and bar keep who were wondering why two Americans had come to invade their cozy little establishment and were more than willing to dole out advice on were to live and what areas to avoid. It has been the best place to eat we have found so far.