With today having been the Early May Bank Holiday, we decided to do a bit of a roadtrip with Noel and Megan up and around Oxford for the day. We started the day off fairly early by all meeting up at Tried & True for breakfast, before hopping in Noel's car and heading out of London.

It took us just over an hour to get out there, and after parking the car fairly central, we took a walk up towards Cornmarket Street, the main shopping and touristy street in the city. We negotiated whether to do a hop-on hop-off tour, and at the end decided to rather just walk around and pop into any of the colleges as we walked past. The first one we stopped in at was New College - one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford. The New College Cloisters were also used as a location in the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire film.

We looked into a few of the other colleges, grabbed lunch from the Olives cafe then headed down towards the river Cherwell alongside the Botanic Garden to eat and chill out under the trees. It really was your stereotypical picture of Oxford with the green overhanging trees, the students lazing about on the grass, the winding river with the occasional boats and punts. Picture perfect! The highlight of the afternoon was watching 'Chris' as we randomly named him try and navigate his way down the river with a very embarrassed girlfriend inside the boat. Brilliant!

After lunch and a good chill out on the grass embankment, we headed back up to the main street for the girls to do a bit of clothes and souvenir shopping and then back over to the carpark.

From Oxford we headed a bit further north to Blenheim Palace, a monumental country house situated in Woodstock, Oxfordshire and residence of the dukes of Marlborough. It is the only non-royal non-episcopal country house in England to hold the title of palace and was built between 1705 and 1724. It is unique in its combined usage as a family home, mausoleum and national monument. The palace is also notable as the birthplace and ancestral home of Sir Winston Churchill. It was somewhere the unfortunately myself and the folks never made it to when they were over, and somewhere I'd always wanted to visit. And since it's only about 15km out of Oxford, it made sense to kill two birds with one stone. Maybe because it was later in the day, but they waved us straight through without the need for any entrance fee, which was nice. I guess there were only a few hours left before it closed for the day. We didn't go into the actual Palace, just took a walk through the gardens, crossed the bridge and chilled out on the grass looking over towards the Palace.

Once the light started to fade, we made our way to the car and headed back to London, which wasn't nearly as traffic jammed as we guessed it was going to be. Noel dropped us off in Putney, and since both Uns and myself were interested in cooking dinner tonight, we decided on Strada, which is always tasty and decent. The health kick definitely starts tomorrow :)