Sunshine in Shropshire

Shrewsbury, Shropshire - Sunshine, crocuses, and a tourist in The Dingle.

We arrived in Shrewsbury late Saturday afternoon, after a pleasantly uneventful flight from MSP to LRH. Pleasantly uneventful, though Himself did flirt a bit with the pretty stewardess! When we landed at Heathrow the sun was shining - a first in my experience! We took the express train into London's Paddington Station, then a doubledecker (no we didn't go up on top) to Euston Station, where we had lunch. Then we got our train up to Birmingham and changed there for a little local to Shrewsbury. We walked about half a mile or so, straight uphill and down, to our little hotel, the Stanford House Hotel, checked in and then went out for supper. The hotel was a bit like the one we stayed in Tiverton in Devon (Chris & Nick you may remember that). Our room was at the top of the hotel, but the bed was great -- soft with great linens. Very welcome after a night of brokens airplane sleep. The only problem was dinner - we went to a Bangladeshi restaurant, and a) I absent mindedly ordered chicken pakora for starters (I thought I ordered vegetable pakora, but I must have been tired out-of-my-mind); and 2) when Himself ordered tandoori mix with vegetable sauce I didn't stop him. I had looked at that on the menu and thought, "Oh no, that has meat I bet." But when he ordered it I was mindlessly distracted. I'll let you imagine the problem when our meals arrived. ...!! Breakfast Sunday morning was quite ordinary - except the coffee was yäk! (That's Finnish for really gross, disgustingly yucky.) I had a Starbucks later in the morning to make up for it.

However, the morning was sunny, though cool - maybe about 40F. We started out about 9 walking along the River Severn. Lots of ducks and some swans. Lovely! We got to an area called "The Quarry" and another called "The Dingle." The Quarry wasn't very interesting, just grass covering where stone used to be quarried. But, the Dingle was cool. It was a large garden surrounded by a wall and hedges, with a pond and brooks. The grass was full of gorgeous crocuses - mostly purple, but also yellow and white. In the picture above, the tourist is standing in front of a small lawn full of crocuses.