Cotswolds: Roman Villa to Northleach

May 21: We were picked up by a taxi and driven to the nearby Roman Villa excavations. After an interesting tour and a sighting of a pheasant on the grounds, we set out through the countryside for an eventual return to the Wheatsheaf Inn in Northleach: 10 miles, 22,000 steps! It was a beautiful, if tiring walk, sunny with dramatic clouds, bright copper beech trees, colorful walls and flowers, green and yellow fields, old churches, and lambs in the fields with their mothers.

Walking in the Cotswolds

May 20: With our friends Susan and Philip Nix, we took a car from London to Northleach, a town that is the first stop on our walking tour of the Cotswolds. For tonight and tomorrow we are staying at the Wheatsheaf Inn, where we have comfortable rooms, a very good restaurant, and pleasant staff.

The first day was a relatively easy stroll around Northleach, starting with lunch at the Black Cat Community Cafe, continuing to the "Cathedral of the Cotswolds", an old church largely paid for by wealthy sheep farmers over the centuries. We continued with a stroll through the pretty countryside, enjoying lovely weather, before returning to the Wheatsheaf Inn in time for a nap and dinner.

Van Gogh and Britain

May 19: The other museum exhibition we went to on this Sunday was the very extensive and interesting "Van Gogh and Britain" at the Tate Britain museum. As I often do in museums, I took photos of the spectators involved with the art - or perhaps other activities near the art.

Inspired by Rembrandt

May 19: We walked and took the Underground from our hotel to the British Museum, which had an interesting small exhibit entitled "Rembrandt: Thinking on Paper". It showed, by comparison of different stages of engraving a given image, how Rembrandt altered the impacts of a given scene. It struck me as very similar to what a black-and-white photographer does by burning and dodging a print.

I tried a very crude version of this by reducing the exposure of successive photos of the gallery in which the exhibit was mounted, by one stop at a time, from 0 to -4. Nothing artistic here, but perhaps of mild interest (at least to me).

London Scenes

May 19: After our hiking trip through the boot of Italy, we flew from Reggio Calabria through Rome to London, where we stayed for a couple of days before heading for a week's walk in the Cotswalds. Here are some pictures from the streets of London on which we walked while heading to the British Museum and Tate Britain (for which posts will follow shortly). A mix of new (South Bank) and old (North Bank) London.

To Reggio Calabria

May 17: The last day of our trip, heading from Camigliatello to Reggio Calabria, at the very toe of Italy. First, three views across the Straits of Messina from a hilltop above the city of Palmi: down toward Palmi, toward snow-topped Mount Etna, and of a pretty plant overlooking the sea.

Grass in front of a painted concrete barrier near the restaurant where we ate lunch.

Woman taking a selfie with one of the bronze Greek warriors in the Reggio Calabria museum

Looking through a ferris wheel toward Sicily from the 5th floor restaurant at our hotel, where we had our farewell dinner.

Camigliatello

May 16: Perhaps the best day of a good trip. We arrived the night before at the old hunting lodge Torre di Camigliati on the OldCalabria historic estate. After a good dinner and night's sleep, we visited the Ship Museum of the grounds of the estate. Laid out like a typical transAtlantic ship, its walls were lined with posters and photos of the ills that poverty-stricken peasants from Calabria were fleeing, and their lives in America. We then hiked through the Della Sila National Park (that's Gianluca among the trees), and concluded with a delightful and delicious typical mid-day meal at Le Delizie di Marianna, a family restaurant. The last photo shows our trip leaders, JoAnn Lantz and Gianluca Canalicchio, waltzing to the accordion music of the family's son.