The airport was great, the care hire was easy enough (and yes we did make sure we brought our own insurance documents which showed we had our own insurance coverage for rentals), and yes we did do a video walk around the car (even though it only had 10 miles on it, having been just delivered)
The best part – 10 degrees, and no snow! And the lawns were GREEN, and often spouting snowdrops or crocus, with the daffodils not long behind.
Then we set off – using our phone to connect us to android auto (we picked up SIM cards in the airport), and we headed out. Just some discomfort with driving on the left, and about a million roundabouts 😊
We arrived at the cottage just in time for lunch. It was the last unit on a dead end private road, so it feels like you are out in the countryside! The motorway is quite close, but there is a boundary with trees so you really don’t see anything, you can just hear it in the background.
The cottage was built in 1750, with wooden beams and lower ceilings, and a massive fireplace. The walls are considered very thick, so you don’t hear a peep from the occupants of the other half of the building (which would be called a semi-detached home in Canada), but the windows are mostly single pane glass, with a few retro-fitted with storm windows on the inside. You can hear the birds singing just outside the kitchen window in the morning as if you are out there with them! Considering the bird feeder open dish is maybe 4 feet away from the window and the birds are dashing back and forth to it all day, that isn’t a big surprise!
The back yard is deep! It feels like it runs back 150 feet, and there is just woods on the one side, with what looks like a farmer’s pasture out the back. We were instructed to keep the garden gate closed, to keep the deer from coming in and eating up all the plants! She showed us a photo she had just recently taken of a family of 3 deer moving along the front yard trimming up all the hedges.
Now, picture Bill Murray from Caddyshack going on and on about the gophers on the golf course. There will be these mounds of fresh soil suddenly appearing in the middle of the lawns, or through the fields, or along the roadways. They are everywhere!
We haven’t actually seen any of the animals making them, but they clearly are at home here. Moles? Badgers? There was a fox digging at one of the spots (likely chasing the animal that dug the hole), and our pet owner said that one day one of the kitties came back in with her tail puffed up like a toilet brush, and was afraid to go back out for a while. So I would say it was something with big pointy teeth!
