Exhausted in Oxford

I am not sure if it’s due to a lack of proper sleep or a lack of proper nutrition (or both) but as I began walking around Oxford I realized I was giddy.

Internally (gosh, I hope it was internally) I was saying “Whee, I’m in Oxford!” and had to suppress a little giggle.  - I hadn’t expected Oxford to have that effect on me – I know really very little about it (other than what most people know); it’s one of the two main university towns in Brittan, big rivalry between it and Cambridge, VERY prestigious, and many TV shows (Morse, Lewis, to name a couple) and some Movies (Hogwart’s Library and Main Hall are both housed in buildings in Oxford). So being giddy took me by surprise.

If I was going to be giddy at any point on the trip I would have thought it would be at Stonehenge or at the Giant’s Causeway – but Oxford?

Maybe it was the lack of sleep & food.

I’d like to think I have a good sense of direction – I’d like to think that, but I’m starting to think that I might not. Since my first order of business (after getting off the bus back from the ‘burbs where my B&B is located) was to find the tourist information centre and get a decent map of Oxford and some suggestions as to what I should look do while here.  I had a semi-diagrammatical map (which I got from the City Tour Bus kiosk at the train station – along with great instructions on where my B&B was, how to get there and which bus to take).  I don’t think the map is to blame for me taking twice as long as I should have to get to the Information Centre.  I think the real problem lies in my failure to read them properly and/or frequently enough.

EVENTUALLY, I found the TI Centre – discovered, as I had suspected, my map was as good as any tourist map they had, bought a little brochure on the attractions in Oxford (which included which Colleges are open to the public and when (along with a map of central Oxford) and lists of museums and other things of interest in Oxford.

So armed with maps and information, I turned on my MP3 player and started to walk,  setting out on my first of three walking tours of Oxford (a series of MP3 files and a PDF maps which I had downloaded before leaving home).  After having missed a turn and having to back track for five minutes I grudgingly took out the walking tour map and set out again.

Oxford, the University, is comprised of several Colleges (the oldest of which was founded in he 1300s) – each having their own series of buildings set around a central courtyards and closed off with large gates, some colleges open up part of their grounds to the general public (this seemed to be mid to late afternoon).  Although comprised of many Colleges, set all over the City of Oxford, it is still all one University.

I did two of the three tours and then thought I had better try to deal with my computer issues (which had been weighing heavily on me – since the laptop had been in my day pack all day) so I set off on what turned out to be about an hours walk (round trip) to a PC store situated in the ‘Burbs of Oxford.  They poked at it, wandered off with it, came back with it, proved it worked, didn’t tell me in any amount of detail what they did – though I asked, and then sent me on my way – free of  charge, so I can’t complain.

Back in the core of Oxford, with energy flagging after having spent the previous four hours  walking I splurged on the City Bus Tour and rode about on the upper level of a double-decker bus – getting a view, with commentary,  of Oxford.

After a brief detour to Sainsbury’s (a local grocery store) to pick up some dinner fixings (as I have found it more expedient and thrifty to eat dinner in my room, theoretically allowing me more time to blog, I walked back to my B&B.  I should have known better (don’t you love it when you read a sentence that starts off that way), having had developed a pain in my small right toe but thinking “meh, it’s just a little blister” I walked the 20 minute walk to the B&B on an ever increasingly sore toe and arrived back at the B&B and immediately removed the Band-Aid on the toe (since I had blistered and lanced and covered it in a Band-Aid a few days earlier) to discover a giant blister on the bottom and inner side of my small right toe that more than doubled the side of the toe!!!  I dealt with it the only way I knew how – ewwww, OUCH, ‘nuff said.

Today I wandered all over again, and did a tour of the Bodleian Library (the set of Hogwart’s Library).  Though I was rather pissed off when I discovered that I wasn’t allowed to take pictures in the library.  They can shoot a movie there, but I can’t take one stinking picture!?!?!

An evening train to Birmingham for a very brief overnight stay in preparation of my 7AM flight to Glasgow to meet up with my first pair of travelling companions for my 9 days in Scotland.