Day 12 - Tuesday 24th May

Today we would be travelling to Oxford. Suzy and Nicky wanted to go to an outlet shopping centre at a town called Bicester which is close to Oxford. I don't like shopping and so I would travel from Bicester to Oxford to go sightseeing.

Orignally the plan was to leave Nicky's place at 8:30 and so we had breakfast at the Costa Cafe at Golders Green and then caught the bus to Nicky's. It turned out that Amelia was unsettled and had gone back to bed. We got underway at 9:30 and headed north on the motorway (in Nicky and John's BMW). It was an easy drive. We got to the shopping centre by about 11am.

I spent 5 minutes having a look at the shopping centre (which was more than enough time for me) and walked to the Bicester railway station which is about 500m away beyond the shopping complex and car parks. The station doesn't have any staff and doesn't even have a ticket machine. You are supposed to buy your ticket on the train (if there is a guard) or at your destination.

When the train arrived shortly afterwards, it was clean and modern but only consisted of two carriages. Until the next stop, I was the only person in my carriage. It only took 30 minutes to get to Oxford.

At Oxford, the first task was to find the tourist information office which is in one of the main streets about 15 minutes by foot from the railway station. Last night I had made an online booking for a walking tour of the university and the city that started at 2pm. I wasn't sure if my booking had been successful because, although they sent me a confirmation email, they said my payment hadn't been processed successfully.

The lady on the walking tours desk had a great deal of difficulty getting the computer to tell her whether I was on the tour or not. She went to ask two other people to get help. It took three of them 30 minutes to figure it out. When she concluded that the tour was full and I wasn't on it, she made numerous phone calls to someone to beg them to put me on the 2pm tour.

After she succeeded to achieve this and to take my payment, she said she could have put me on the 1:45pm tour because that wasn't full. I thought to myself that it would have been good if she had told me that 30 minutes ago but it was too late to change it. I just wanted to get away from the walking tour desk - as did the many other customers who had witnessed the whole charade.

Last night I had registered a Costa loyalty card in my name so I could use it rather than Suzy's card while she wasn't with me. I found a Costa cafe in one of the busy open-air shopping malls in the centre of the city.

The walking tour was brilliant - very informative. The guide had countless stories to tell about the university and the many famous people who have attended the university. These include many prime ministers and presidents. It is the place where Rhodes scholars (such as Bob Hawke and Bill Clinton) went. She even stopped outside the room where Bill Clinton lived and she speculated that this was probably where he smoked marijuana but didn't inhale.

The university also has links with the arts including Rowan Atkinson (Mr Bean), Harry Potter and Alice in Wonderland. Apparently Lewis Carol was the adopted name of a mathematics lecturer at the university.

She said the university is not really a single entity. Instead it is a combination of colleges that jealously guard their independence. We went past some of the colleges and inside a few.

After the the tour finished just after 4pm, I walked back to the railway station in time to catch the 4:31pm train to Paddington station in London. Once again the train consisted of just two carriages but this time it was almost full.

The journey to Paddington took only about an hour. I changed to the Circle line on the underground  and changed at Kings Cross to the Northern line for the trip to Golders Green. I was back at the B&B by about 6:30pm. By this time, my iPhone battery was flat.

Tomorrow we are due to leave the UK for Europe. Our plane trips to Barcelona and Croatia and back have a 20kg limit on checked baggage. So I sorted out the things I want to take and put the rest in my small bag to leave it at Nicky and John's while we are in Europe. When I got there at about 7:30pm, Amelia was already asleep. Suzy and I walked down to the Bull and Bush pub for dinner and then we walked back down to the B&B at Golders Green.