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this trip, one nice couple from Chicago, and a nerdy fellow with an annoying voice who we take a dislike to at once, who is here with his family: a resigned-looking wife, and two daughters who he’s taking on a tour of Oxford in order to encourage them to go to English colleges. They look less than enthusiastic about the prospect.

    Thursday, August 17th— Uffington, Burford, Bourton-on-the-Water & Upper Slaughter
    Called the car-rental company this morning to see if we can drop the car off in Oxford tomorrow rather than in Heathrow as we had originally arranged. Apparently, we can. The idea is that we will take the train into London from Oxford to catch our overnight sleeper to Inverness; this will save us a 40 pound cab ride in from Heathrow, and, since we have the rail flexipasses, should actually cost us nothing at all, as far as money out of our dwindling supply of cash is concerned, anyway.
    After breakfast, drive out to see the Uffington White Horse. We park in the car park and walk up the long swell of a hill toward the White Horse, but are somewhat disappointed—because of the angle that the chalk figure is cut into the hill, it’s tilted away from our position here, and you really can’t get that good a look at it; you’d probably get a better angle on it and a better overview of it from one of the back roads in the valley below, but we don’t have the time to look for such a vantage point. Giving up on the White Horse, we drive on up into the Cotswalds, stopping at Burford. There’s a stream next to the car park, and we feed the ducks and swans the piece of toast we’ve brought all the way up from Tintagel (its companion having been carried off to an Unknown Fate by Sam the Dog), having forgotten to feed it to anything on Dartmoor the previous two days; the birds don’t seem to be particularly impressed by all the trouble we’ve gone to to import this piece of toast hundreds of miles especially for them, and devour it with neither more nor less enthusiasm than usual, although it is, by now, stale enough to be of the same consistency as sheet iron. We visit a craft’s fair in an old almshouse next to an ancient church and graveyard, then walk up the steep main street of Burford (everything here is uphill, remember?), shopping, buying presents for Ricky—a knife, that should be fun to get through customs—and for Tess, an Italianate plaster cherub for her garden.
    Get back in the car and drive to Bourton-on-the-Water, park in a car park on the outskirts of town. Long hot walk in beside the little river Windrush. Bourton-on-the-Water is absolutely packed with tourists, with a population density that puts that other world-class tourist trap, New Hope, Pennsylvania—which it otherwise reminds us of—to shame; they also have more gift shops per square foot than New Hope does, an amazing accomplishment, and one that I frankly wouldn’t have thought possible. The walkway along the river and the narrow footbridges over it are especially crowded and busy, with several naked or near-naked children wading in the ankle-deep river, splashing, throwing stones, pushing each other over. Also see lots of dogs leaping in and out of the water, happily shaking themselves dry, leaping in again to retrieve a stick or a ball. Picnickers are everywhere. We also see lots of people being wheeled along the riverside and through the town in wheelchairs; we see far more handicapped people here in fifteen minutes than we’ve seen in all of England so far, or that we will see in Scotland—why so many in this one particular town, I wonder? Susan suggests that it’s because this is one of the few places we’ve been where everything isn’t sharply uphill; perhaps it’s also because it’s within day-trip range of bigger cities such as Oxford and London.
    After lunch, which we have out under the trees in a grassy square in the center of town (Susan has a strange dish which consists of an enormous, hollowed-out Yorkshire Pudding