Gloucester and Cheltenham

Our first little adventure of 2024 was a Saturday spent in the cities of Gloucester and Cheltenham. I wanted to go to Gloucester to visit the cathedral, which was used as parts of Hogwarts in the Harry Potter movies. And as Cheltenham is such an elegant city (or town, technically) and is only a 10-minute train ride from Gloucester, it made sense to go there too.

I had been to Gloucester Cathedral once before, when I was about 5 or 6 years old, but obviously I don't remember very much of that trip! So going there was like visiting a new destination for both me and Claudio.

The cathedral is a really beautiful and imposing building to see from the outside.

After entering, we headed straight for the cloisters, which is where parts of Harry Potter were filmed! I'm a big fan of the Harry Potter books, so it was exciting to be inside "Hogwarts", even though I'm not so keen on the movies.

 

The rest of the cathedral also has loads to explore! It's actually where Edward II was buried, and you can visit his tomb, which I found very interesting to see, as I'd enjoyed studying that particular period of history at sixth form college.

We also had fun making our own gargoyles!

Afterwards, we had a little walk around the docks, which is quite an attractive area.

We stopped for a coffee and then headed back to the train station. Unfortunately, the next train was cancelled, which meant we had to spend about 40 minutes waiting. I was a bit annoyed about that, as I'm quite an impatient person and hate waiting, but at least we were able to sit in a reasonably warm waiting room. Eventually, I decided to make the most of the wait by getting some planning done for our next big trip...

Finally, the train arrived, and after a 10-minute journey and a short bus ride, we were in the centre of Cheltenham. I was really excited to show Claudio Cheltenham, as we weren't able to go there the last time he came to the UK, and I knew it was the sort of place he would like. The architecture is so uniform and elegant, and is reminiscent of other cities Claudio likes, such as Bath, certain areas of London, and even Paris. It also has a few Italian touches, including the Neptune Fountain and the Imperial Fountain, which really add to the classic, European vibe of the town.

I didn't take many photos during this trip, as I've already done a couple of posts on this blog about the sights of Cheltenham. But as expected, Claudio really enjoyed the visit, and especially liked the fact that there were so many fancy cars there!

We couldn't resist choosing to have a late lunch at the Ask Italian, because its exterior is just so beautiful!

It's a chain restaurant, so I wasn't expecting the food to be incredible, but the spaghetti pomodoro I had was actually the best pasta I've eaten in a long time, and our puddings were also delicious. Our meal there definitely got us even more excited about our upcoming trip to Italy!

We decided to use the 45 minutes to an hour that we had left before our train to walk back to the station (which is quite far from the town centre). It was a good opportunity to see more nice houses (and cars!) before going back home.

Overall, it was a lovely day out, though we think in hindsight, it would have been better to have spent the whole day in Cheltenham, which would have given us enough time to walk to Pittville Park, which still remains on my "to see" list! Although we enjoyed visiting Gloucester Cathedral, the rest of the city isn't that special, so we're not that bothered about going back there. But hopefully, we'll be back in Cheltenham sometime soon!

This has been the only bit of travel we've done so far this year that's been worthy of an entire blog post, so I'm now completely up to date with my posts, having spent the last seven weeks catching up with all the trips and other things I wanted to write about. Because of this, I'll be taking a break from writing on the blog for probably a couple of weeks. I'll use the time away to focus a bit on my Pinterest page, which I've really neglected for the last couple of months, as well as other tasks in my life that need attention, such as wedding planning!

I'll see you back here very soon! 😊