The Highwayman Hotel CL, Kidlington, Oxfordshire.

Well we found this CL in the Caravan Club sites book,and despite some dubious reviews decided to give it a go. It was on a small piece of grass adjacent to the hotel. In the car park of the hotel were a motor home and  a caravan.On the grass area were two more caravans, all being occupied full time. However the site was clean and tidy. The hotel had an excellent bar and served good food.  The site was bordered by a canal, a main road and a railway, so not the quietest of places. However as we were not going to be sitting outside the noise was not going to be an issue for us.
Whilst we were there the site did get delisted by the Caravan Club, due to non return of paper work regarding proof of insurance.

Don't be deceived.  This was the only good view.

Our main reason for choosing this site was that we wanted to visit Oxford, and also to pop down to Reading to see James, Jade, Jack and the new grand daughter Josephine.




When we arrived on site the heating decided it was not going to work. As it was only 1 degree outside we got our emergency fan heater out to start warming the caravan up.  I then called Chipping Sodbury Caravans as we are still under warranty.  The Lovely Heather was soon on the case and arranged for a local mobile engineer to come. He arrived after 30 minutes, and admitted that despite being a Truma Agent he had never seen our sort of heater before. He was soon on the phone to Truma and following instructions from them got it going! Faulty heater blower that had jammed.  He even explained to me how to get it going again if it stopped.  That saw me on to screwfix to purchase a set of security screwdriver bits so that I can remove the cover if I need to.

On the Friday we popped down to Reading for lunch and to see the 4 J's. Jack handed me his remote controlled Thomas engine for Pops to repair,which I dutifully did on the Saturday

We visited the Hotel for dinner on the Saturday night, and were pleasantly surprised at the quality of the food and the prices.The beer was also of a very good quality and was reasonably priced, so a few pints were sampled

We popped into Oxford on Sunday and parked right outside the Ashmolean.  Spent a pleasant couple of hours wandering around and also looking at various colleges.
We enjoyed visiting the Ashmolean so i have put the link here.  www.ashmolean.org   This tells you more about it than I can in my blog.

Monday entailed another trip to Reading to visit the J's and lunch out again. These Grandchildren get to be expensive!

We decided on another day in Oxford on the Tuesday and again parked very easily.We spent more time wandering around before visiting the Pitts Rivers museum.  This is a huge collection of things collected from around the world.  It is absolutely crammed with exhibits and was also full of school parties.  Again I put the web site for you.  www.prm.ox.ac.uk  Again it is free to visit and is well worth doing.

When we got back to the camp site, I decided that in view of the weather forecast that the awning was coming down.  So glad I did as we had torrential rain over night.  And I mean torrential.  When i got up the following morning their was a lake in front of the caravan that was some 2 inches deep.  I decided to visit the hotel for breakfast.  It was possibly the biggest breakfast I have ever been served with, and was really scrummy.

Notshown are the dish of Baked Beans and the rack of toast.

I returned to the caravan and Liz was up so we cleared up.  It was still raining so I set the Freelander 2 in grass mode and gingerly reversed to the caravan and hitched up. Fortunately all was well as we moved forward and making a large gentle arc drove out of the field without incident.

We left the site and headed towards our next destination.  Burrs Country Park CC site for the East Lancs Railway Steam Gala.

Thoroughly enjoyed the Highwayman hotel, and will probably return in the future.