Road trip! To the Cotswolds

The Cotswolds are an easy two-ish hour drive from London, though we did get off to a stressful start due to a huge f---up on the part of Europcar. Will not bore you with the details but be very careful with them! 

Jerry Seinfeld has some thoughts on the matter

In any case, we got off to a late, stressful start that was all the more inauspicious when I knocked the mirror off a parked car mere seconds after pulling out of the rental car driveway.

We decided on a road trip for our second vacation with FDR because we assumed we could just throw everything in the car and not have to worry about clever packing. The only issue was our Bugaboo, which as mentioned previously, is not well suited for travel - it doesn't exactly fold up, so it took up about half of our trunk space.

There are tons of great-looking B&Bs in the various charming towns of the Cotswolds. Unfortunately, other people had the same bright idea that we had to go over the three day bank holiday weekend, so we decided to go for a hotel.

Ellenborough Park is lovely, an old country manor that has been very nicely remodelled. Our room had a beautiful four-poster bed, and I guess FDR got used to it because he refused to sleep in the hotel crib and insisted he sleep with us.

Amazingly, since they knew we were traveling with a baby, the hotel supplied a diaper genie (well, the British kind) in our bathroom! Bonus points for that, for sure. The food at the hotel was great too.

I would definitely recommend an overnight trip from London to the Cotswolds. The area is littered with charming towns with names like "Stow-on-Wold" and "Chipping Norton". We stumbled across a bank holiday festival of some kind in "Bourton on the Water", which as you can see, Tom and FDR are enjoying (the Water, that is). It's the kind of place where you drive for half an hour, stop off in a small town to feed or change the little one (or feed yourself), and then keep going.