Headed first for Sudbury which is a very pleasant market town. We found a wonderful English tea shop with a selection of different coffees and teas - full of women. I had some Mount Kenya fresh ground coffee which was not bad at all.  A quick walk around the town confirms that it is a classic Suffolk market town which was also the birthplace of the painter Gainsborough  famous for his idylic rural landscapes. There has been some encroachment from banks and the big shops however, whose mission in life seems  to be to  homogenise all towns. 

From Sudbury we headed to Long Melford - a fabulous place with a large National Trust house - Melford Hall. We didn’t stop here as cars have a life of their own - but probably should have done. From there we started to move through some fabulous villages particularly Cavendish, Clare and Stoke by Clare. We stopped properly in Clare and took some photos. All these villages have old centres with medieval houses brightly painted. Clare is the biggest with some lovely pubs and shops.

Finally to Cambridge which we know well - although not where to park! We ended up in a car park east of

Trumpingdon Street

Trumpingdon Street

the town called Queen Anne’s and proceeded to walk the wrong way into town - eventually coming in on Trumpingdon Street. The place seemed to be swarming in tourists and we couldn’t get into the first pub (some tourist trap self-proclaimed as  the most famous pub in Cambridge). Still it was raining so we went in the one next door. Cambridge is a wonderful place and would be a great place to live as you can walk or cycle to most places in the city centre. The only thing that puts me off is the intellectual snobbery of the place. Since  I didn’t actually go to Cambridge university I can’t help feeling that you could end up being excluded on the basis of elitism. Certainly you can’t walk into the Colleges without being part of that elite.

 

A wonderful end to the trip was a stationary traffic jam on the A14 back to Huntingdon. We had exactly the same problem last Friday afternoon and this implies strongly that no-one works on Friday afternoon. They all leave work at around 2-3 pm despite the recession and head home for the weekend. So we wasted about an hour fighting our way back through the traffic from Cambridge to Huntingdon.