So I know we’ve just returned from our actual honeymoon to Florida and NY state, but it turns out this whole pregnancy thing somewhat disrupted the minimoon posts I was halfway through sharing from all the way back in May! Just like our wedding posts, these will still be continuing, and I plan to get these done before I start on my honeymoon posts – I’ll catch up one day, I promise!
And I swear not every day is getting 3 parts like this! It just turned out that we did a lot of stuff on Day 2 of our minimoon and everywhere we visited was just so photogenic that I had to share pictures of everything – these are a severely trimmed down edit of our whole photo collection too! Anyway, on with the show! We’re jumping back a day here as I posted my day 3 spa review before I’d finished day 2…
Broadway
After leaving Snowshill Manor, we were hungry and ready for lunch so stopped in the nearby town of Broadway. It wasn’t somewhere we had a planned stop, but as we drove through, the pretty honey coloured limestone cottages and quaint high street caught our eye. The area is home to Broadway Tower, but we didn’t make a visit there this time.
Often referred to as the “Jewel of the Cotswolds”, Broadway is featured in the Domesday book but has evidence of habitation going back to Roman times, and even potentially further back, with mesolithic flints found there dating back to hunter-gatherer times over 5000 years ago. Once upon a time, the town was located on the main road between Worcester and London, and its name comes from the “broad way” – the wide grassy stretch down the centre of the ridgeway.
We spent a little while exploring the tourist-focused shops along the main street, and spent a particularly long time at Broadway Deli, where Ben discovered the chillies you can see him posing with above! To appease our rumbling tummies, a fish and chip shop – a fancy one though! – caught my attention and we enjoyed these sitting on the green.
Blockley (& Father Brown!)
One of the big parts I planned for this trip was stopping at a variety of Father Brown filming locations. For those of you that aren’t as big murder mystery nerds as Ben and I are, Father Brown is a very quintessentially British whodunnit set in the early 1950s featuring a Catholic priest who solves murders – yes, it’s just as good as it sound and we’re a little bit obsessed.
Blockley is only a small village with tiny streets and a great lack of parking spaces – as tiny English countryside villages are wont to have! But its big claim to fame is the pretty church at its centre where Father Brown is filmed, along with the nearby rectory.
As such, we had to pay this little village a visit, and we were very pleasantly rewarded for doing so. As we drove past the church, we noticed a number of vans and vehicles set up outside it, some trailing wires. “I think they’re filming!!” I wailed, but Ben wasn’t so sure – to be fair, he was driving and trying to negotiate the winding street and parked cars. Once we’d found our own space, we wandered back down to the church to find it positively overflowing with wires, lighting and filming equipment – they really were filming!
We approached tentatively, not wanting to disturb anything, but it soon became apparent that the filming was on a break for a lunch and a crew member had been stationed at the entrance of the church. After a quick wander around the church during which we passed the crew member twice, he took pity on us and asked if we wanted a look in the church – of course, we agreed! He was super lovely and gave us a few fun facts about filming inside the church, letting us take as long as we wanted in there where we spotted the confessional and Father Brown’s collar and hat.
There was a small village shop and cafe at the exit of the churchyard, so we stopped in to buy a drink and, wait a minute! Was that Bunty I spotted through the window? It was indeed, all dressed up in her 50s finery! Since it looked like they were finishing up their break, we decided to wait with our drink on a nearby churchyard bench to see if we could see anything exciting happening.
After a short wait, a couple of vans pulled up, then I spotted two ladies in 50s clothing coming down the hill – one I later realised was Emer Kenny, who plays Bunty, that I’d just seen through a window and didn’t quite connect it! I was so taken with admiring their clothes that when Ben said in a very friendly voice “Hello!”, I thought he’d seen a friend. But no! All of a sudden, Father Brown, played by Mark Williams, was walking past me! I managed to mumble a “Hnnnggghh!” in place of “hello” – yes, I’m that cool – before he continued on his way.
So yep, that was a pretty exciting day for me. I definitely did not declare to Ben afterwards that it was “the best day of my life”, only a matter of days after our wedding ;D