In Shakespeare’s Richard III, when Richard cries out, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” I suspect he may have been familiar with some of England’s narrow back lanes and the challenges of getting a car down them in one piece. But that is a little later on.

I had no urgent time demands today, so Mer and I slept in, getting a rather needed ten hours of sleep. I wanted to go to the Cotswolds, an area of cute little villages west of London. We’re staying two days in the area, with a goal of just leisurely wandering around mellow little towns.

On our drive through a couple of these towns on the way to our first destination of the day, Mer declared that a single town must be “a Cotswold,” since the region name is plural. So, we got to out first Cotswold of the trip, Bourton-on-the-Water. I wanted to get to Bourton especially since it has a very shallow river running through it with a bunch of small pedestrian bridges over the river – it seemed like a mini English Venice. I wasn’t disappointed.

Being in a cute English village, the car park was on the edge of the town, which is fine, given how small the village is. But, given how there are stone walls and hedges and houses everywhere and no high landmarks, it was surprisingly hard to navigate our way into the town. What isn’t surprising is that I led us almost exactly the wrong way. The happy part of the detour is that we got to see a Cotswold kitty, who started flopping around in a look-at-me sort of way while her human kept trying to call her inside. Good kitty.

Bourton is mostly one street that parallels the river, although there are a few back lanes with shops and paths. The private homes do go back a few blocks, as our little scenic wander had already shown us. The village along the river was about four or five city blocks long, and we took our time. We ate some pastries on a bench looking at the water. And, since I am the son of a water-loving mother, I had to wade in the river. It was cold. Make-your-feet-ache cold. But Mom will be proud, cementing my status as Favorite Child.

We walked the river down and back, taking time on the way back to sit on a bench again. We poked down one back lane and took a footpath a couple hundred yards until it left the houses. Finally, we checked out the tourist-gauntlet main street, before going back to the car by a pedestrian direct route.

One of the challenges of driving in England is that the English rarely use street numbers for addresses. That can make programming a GPS challenging. I put in the town name for our B and B, and figured we would just see it. The GPS took us to Cheltenham, a small city of almost 120,000 people. These are not the Cotswolds I am looking for. Somehow, some city planner thought it was a good thing to erect a twenty-story building in a city that otherwise has no tall buildings. It is a bit of an eyesore in an otherwise decent, if overly busy, town. Our B and B wasn’t to be seen.

Starting with our March Ireland trip, I started carrying a smart phone on trips for situations like this. The phone showed us that there was a chain hotel near our B and B, and my GPS had that in it, so we got that far. On a whim, I tried typing our inn’s name in the GPS. It was in there, and I hadn’t bothered to check. That little detour cost us about a half hour. Happily, the inn is back in the Costwold area, and so it is quite pretty.

Having dumped the bags, we got back in the car and headed north to Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace and home of Shakespeare. You have to know how to kiss up to your English-loving wife. I had never been there before, and Mer hadn’t been since she was seven, so it was a good place to go and see. Except we made the mistake of ordering calzones for supper. We had two hours to see the town, and dinner took an hour and a half. Oops. We had seen the site of Shakespeare’s later-in-life home (which now seems to be a gated park which was closed), and had seen some cool timbered houses as well before supper. Afterwards, we just had time to walk down to the river next to the home of the RSC’s theater.

Oh – our welcome to the highbrow home of the Bard? A group of thirteen-year-old boys rode by on their bikes, and we overheard in a delightful accent, “‘Ee’s a looky maan – she ‘as some buns.” We held off laughing for as long as we could to lessen the chance they heard us.

We were tight on time because, as a surprise to Mer, I had 7:15 tickets to see Richard III. Mer knows my obsession with being on time so well that she was confused at supper. I kept checking my watch, and Mer thought it was odd because if I had to be somewhere at 7:00, she knew I’d be freaking out. If we had to be there at 7:30, she thought I’d be mellower. She said she should have known it was actually 7:15.

We got to the theater early. The theater wasn’t open yet.

We did spend some time happily browsing the gift shop. It was Shakespeare-nerd heaven., but we managed to get out with the credit card unscathed.

The RSC theater was renovated in 2011, and the seating is very intimate. We had seats in the front row of the first balcony, but there are no seats more than about fifty feet away from some part of the stage. The stage set was very minimal – there was one large stone monolith (like a memorial) toward the back of the stage, and that was it. While the actors would bring a few set pieces on (like a bed or table or such), it was a minimalist production.

The play was excellent, especially seeing how difficult Shakespeare can be – the Regional Stratford Community theater really nailed it. That was my best guess for what RSC stood for.

Richard was brilliant, but I’m a bit ashamed to say he was distracting for the first few minutes. The actor is a qualified actor with a solid career in movies and TV, but he is also disabled in that his right arm is missing a radius bone and so is shortened, and his hand is bent and smaller, missing the thumb. It was a great choice to cast a man with a withered hand to play Richard (who was humpbacked and had a withered arm), but both Mer and I spent a little time trying to figure out if the arm was prosthetic, made by the costume department. It wasn’t, and our confusion only lasted a few minutes.

The play was mostly cast as traditional, with armor and swords and such, but oddly the director chose to broadcast the rally-the-troops speeches given by Richard and Richmond at the end of the play, using an on-stage camera to project a larger-than-life image on the monument block. Modern technology in a traditional play felt jarring.

Right before the final battle, Richard has a dream in which all his victims come on stage to curse him. They physically interacted with him, then later formed the troops against whom Richard had to fight (by himself), and lastly formed his “horse” that dumps him to the ground, where he is finally killed by Richmond. That all worked very well.

So I scored huge wife-points today. The downside was we got back close to midnight. Oddly, on the way TO the theater, my GPS picked every dinky one-lane road it could find. On the way back, it got me on major highways for all but the last four or five miles. I guess I don’t need to trade out my kingdom quite yet.