Oxford University and the historic town of Oxford were only about 40 minutes down the road from Buckland Manor. Like most university towns, parking was a bit of an issue. We eventually found a spot on “The Broad” — what locals call the main street through town. The location was perfectly central but the meter would only let us pay for one hour at a time, meaning that Brandon was constantly running back to pump coins into the meter. To make it even more complicated, the meters had not been updated to take the new 1 pound coins so we were running all over campus trying to exchange 1 pound coins for 50 pence pieces. This was only a problem because everyone else was doing the same thing and many places were out of change!

I mostly wanted to visit Oxford for the history. According to the university website, Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. “There is no clear date of foundation, but teaching existed at Oxford in some form in 1096 and developed rapidly from 1167, when Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris.” It’s hard to even fathom the impact this one university has had on the intellectual development of the world. So many brilliant minds have studied here, including one of my favorite authors, J.R.R. Tolkien. However, I must admit that my visit was also somewhat Harry Potter related (are you even surprised?). Many buildings in the University served as either inspiration for parts of Hogwarts or as actual filming locations.  Continue reading “UK Road Trip Part IV: Look Mom, I got into Oxford!” →

This is where we would be spending the night. Seriously. I felt like I had died and gone to Downton Abbey. And the food. Oh my god, the food! I’ll begin where we left off — The Dukes Hotel in Bath. Continue reading “UK Road Trip Part III: Playing Posh at Buckland Manor” →