Opening at 3 pm, the Queen’s Arms is not a good choice for a lunch run but the last day before a vacation when you decide to bag the afternoon worth of work for a run it is a good enough choice to have an early IPA. Not far from the Didcot Station and the [...]

“God knows what you’ve unleashed on the unsuspecting South. It’ll be wine, women, and song all the way with Ringo when he gets the taste for it.”  –  Norm in A Hard Day’s Night (1964) To trace the wine saga for 2012 backwards, start here with the most recent previous post (Ideas, things, and…Wine for [...]

I had luck with the Yates’s on the way to the supermarket, so I tried out the Revolution on my way back past.  It was a little more like the chain-bar experience I expected (prefabricated set-up, soulless) but the back garden was pleasant enough and the menu looks good if standard (I had some pasta [...]

I generally swear off the chains (All Bar One, for instance) but I go to any Wetherspoons I have never been into before so I decided to suck it up on my way to the grocery shop Sunday and give the Yates’s a shot, or rather to get a shot in the Yates’s.  Nice house, [...]

If you haven’t been in a headshop in 10 years let me assure you they haven’t changed in the last 40.  And, if you’ve never explored one outside your hometown, county, district, state, etc I can also assure you that they are the same the world over. That said, The Lazy Frog is a pleasant [...]

Sunday with seven and a half miles, three pints (one, two, three) and a can, really required some nourishment and I felt lucky to find a kebab shop.  The doner was tasty and seemed to be more meat than connective tissue and the chips started out fantastic.  But, either the chilli sauce (again, spectacular for [...]

I hate to end a run with a dead-pub memorial (see the rules, here) but the landlady at the White Hart says the King George is being converted to a pizza place.  Calne is not saturated with pubs and this beautiful old house of Cotswold stone shouldn’t have seen the last of its good days [...]

What is with the folks on this run?  Everyone is so nice today…almost like they are as relieved as I was to get two days of sun after 6 weeks of rain.  The White Hart was lovely and quite an old inn run by a lovely couple that took an interest in my day and [...]

From the Soho, I headed to the Bowood Golf Course and looped around toward the hotel.  The trails I WANTED to take still exist but are now gated off as a conservation area so I headed across the sheep fields south toward the ponds and then, eventually, up a steep, wooded  hill arriving shortly in [...]

I went out to the Bowood House and Gardens for a run because the day was splendid and the grounds are hilly and covered with 17th century farm structures.  My bus dropped me at the Soho, so how could I pass up that opportunity?  Inside it was crowded with Sunday diners and the staff were [...]