Buckingham; Sunday, 11 June, 2023

Given I’d had an early night I got up relatively early and had an earlier than planned breakfast before heading back to my room to pack and check out – which turned out to just be dropping the keys into a box at the bottom of the staircase as the reception was all locked up.

The plan for the day was to visit Stowe Gardens, landscaped Victorian gardens about 2 miles north of Buckingham and the original plan was to order a taxi and head out there. First problem was that none of the taxi apps appeared to be working correctly and it was impossible to add a debit or credit card to the account to make the payment so instead I had to go in search of a cash machine.

After finally managing to find a cash machine I went to make a booking and the apps were now all saying a minimum of 25 minutes before a car would be available. Not a problem I thought, I booked the cab to pick me up from the Costa Coffee and headed there to grab a drink.

Almost as soon as I’d sat down in the window with my coffee the app pinged to say that there had been an error and the booking had been cancelled. Not a problem I though I booked again with yet another 25 minute wait predicted. A few minutes after that the app again cancelled the booking and after the 3rd attempt I actually got a phone call from the taxi company saying they did want to accept the booking as the £6 fare wasn’t worth it!

So with the original plan out the window I finished my coffee, grabbed a bottle of water from the next door Tesco Express and headed out on the 2 mile walk up to the gardens.

The walk itself was pretty straight forward and thankfully virtually the whole of the way is under an avenue of trees so I was sheltered from the pretty warm sun that was beating down. About 40 minutes after leaving the centre of town I arrived at the National Trust café and decided I’d earned a reward of a piece of cake and some more liquid, plus a pit stop in the facilities before I grabbed a map and walked the additional half mile down from the café to the ticket office and entrance to the gardens.

The gardens and park are massive and to see everything would require many more miles of walking – not helped by the rolling terrain and the growing heat. I decided to follow the walking route that covered pretty much all of the sites in the garden, but to cut off a couple of corners – particularly where they required walking down into a valley to then only climb back up the other side!

I spent a couple of hours wandering round the gardens before reaching back to the main entrance and having to make a decision. I’d seen about two thirds of the gardens so I could either see the remainder by turning right, or turn left and head back to the café and then Buckingham. With a 2 mile walk from the café to look forward to and the heat becoming quite oppressive I decided it would probably be wisest to cut the visit short and head back to town.

I stopped off at the café to grab some more water and an ice cream before walking back into town, arriving a couple of minutes before the bus back to Bicester was due to leave. I had originally planned to take the bus just over a hour later, but thought as I was here I may as well go earlier. It turned out to be a good move as the bus ran on time, but in the 20 minutes back to Bicester passed two other buses coming in the opposite direction, which given it’s only an hourly service, suggested there would be delays later in the day. It also turned out to be a very good idea when I got to Bicester North train station with a couple of minutes time to spare before the train and only a couple of minutes to spare before the thunder storm that had been rolling around for a while arrived, thankfully the train getting there first.

The journey back into London was pretty slow due to earlier signalling problems we ended up behind a stopping train and crawled most of the way back into London finally arriving back 25 minutes late.