Punting on the River Cam

It turns out that this is going to be harder than I thought - blogging our last few weeks in England. It's making me a little sad looking back through the photos, knowing now that they are just memories. Even some of the emotions I felt during our last few weeks have started flooding back instantly (will talk more about that in later posts though).

On Boxing day we packed the car up (for maybe the last time) and headed to Cambridge to stay with Girish and Pranjali. It was quite a long drive, which took about 4 hours but everyone coped well, especially the kids because they had their Christmas presents to play with!

Cambridgeshire nearly had a white Christmas (which is very very rare). They got heaps of snow about a week before Christmas but it had pretty much all melted by Christmas day. We saw patches of snow along the roadside and tried to imagine what it must have looked like just a few days earlier. It was late afternoon when we arrived at Girish's place so we stayed in and Pranjali cooked us the best Indian Curry ever! The girls had a lovely play together and thought it was fantastic sleeping over at Priya's house. (It took them about 2 hours to get to sleep though - they were giggling and telling stories and would be in a different bed every time we would go in to them!!)

The next day we walked into the city of Cambridge to see what Cambridge is most famous for - the University of Cambridge, including King's College Chapel. There was light rain about and it was pretty cold, but we toured on!

{The University of Cambridge - it was huge!}

Kings College Chapel was closed so we didn't get to take an inside tour but there was more than enough to see from the outside. It took 74 years to build and has some of the finest windows in the world for its era. Pretty amazing architecture for the 1400's.

We got to see the best parts of Cambridge in 45 minutes on a punt ride, it was definitely worthwhile and quite relaxing. Our local guide told us all sorts of interesting facts and funny stories about the history of Cambridge - mainly about the University.

Some of the best views of Cambridge come from the backs of Cambridge University. We saw Mathematical Bridge and the Wren Library at Trinity College, St. Johns College and Queens College and the campus that housed Prince Charles. Apparently Prince Charles wanted to be treated the same as any other student while studying at the University - although he conveniently forgot about this request when organising his accommodation which consisted of the entire top floor of one of the most prestigous campus buildings (which is usually awarded to several different students with the highest grades)!!!

Punting is apparently a lot harder than it looks. Our punter certainly did it with ease and he was quite entertaining at times. He obviously knows the river well and it was interesting to see how deep and shallow it got at different times. His stick was nearly all under at one stage and he had to duck down quite low to get under some of the bridges (there were about 8).