A week in Cambridge // Weekly Reflect #71
If you keep up with me on Instagram or Twitter then you may know that for most of the past week, I was in Cambridge so this week's Weekly Reflect has a travel theme. Here's what I got up to!
This week . . .
. . . began with a lovely Sunday lunch with some of my English family. Because they live over the pond I don't get to see them very often so it was great to catch up and have a huge roast dinner & an ice cream sundae too in Hungry Horse, Cambridge. The last time I saw my littlest cousin was when she'd just turned 1 so it was cool to see her a wee bit more grown up & able to do a lot more now she's 3! After most of us parted ways, my cousin, my sister & I had a look round a retail park closeby. We tried on a whole bunch of funky sunglasses in TK Maxx and went to Homesense & Hobbycraft for the first time. Both of which were amazing, I could have spent a whole day in each!
On Monday morning my sister and I got up bright & early to explore the city. As she's been living there for nearly 3 years now, she acted as my unofficial tour guide. It was great to have her knowledge of the place alongside my curiosity so we could discover new places she hadn't been to before as well! Oliver Bonas is an amazing shop. We started out with a walk around the market (which was annoyingly kinda bare), then the colleges and their gardens. It was a bit grey & rainy that day but that didn't dampen our spirits!
We visited Hardy's sweet shop, aka one of the coolest places EVER. The entire shop was packed wall to wall with unique, exciting chocolates & sweets of all kinds, a whole two floors of them. Yup, TWO FLOORS. I probably would have ended up buying a lot more than I did if I didn't have my sister to calm me down!
Bag of sweets in hand, we searched for somewhere to have lunch. It was quite the hunt because there was so much choice! We ended up going to Bill's, a restaurant I'd heard good things about but had never tried before. I can safely say it's one of my favourite places I've ever eaten - everything about it was just wonderful; the interior, the service, the food . . . the food. I had the kale, quinoa & avocado salad followed by warm cinnamon donuts with chocolate dipping sauce and I've been raving about them ever since. Incredible. With full bellies we marched around the shops and I got a few things from MAC which I'll blog about soon!
Then on Tuesday I met up with Liam for tea & cake in Costa. He's one of the nicest people I've got to know through blogging and it was so cool to meet in person and find out he's just as friendly & chatty as he is online!
For the rest of the day I chilled at my sister's place, then that evening some of her friends came over for dinner and played Cranium. If you haven't played it before, it's kind of a mixture of a few board games and can be absolutely hilarious - we were cracking up the whole time!
Wednesday was the day we went to Grantchester! It's a small village close to Cambridge which lends it's name & scenery to one of my favourite TV shows. It's also (apparently) home to the highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners so overall it's a pretty cool place. We sat inside The Orchard tea rooms for lunch, overlooking the beautiful gardens which is what a lot of famous & prestigious people have also done over the years. (You can see the list here, I think it's pretty interesting!) Once we were done we took a walk around, up to the church and onto the land overlooking the river. The views were so beautiful and it was so worth the trek to get there. Photos can't do it justice.
Then that night one of my other uncles picked us up and we had dinner with some more family in a place called Jolly Postie in Royston. It's a restaurant that used to be a post office and they've really gone to town with keeping the decor 'post' themed. There were huge mocked up postcards hanging from the ceiling, post boxes dotted around and even an old post van which you could sit and eat in if you wanted to! Aside from all of that, it was a super cosy place to eat and the food & company were both lovely. It was the best way to spend my last night of the trip!
The next day, I made the journey from Cambridge to London to Belfast on my own. Stressful, but I managed to keep my anxiety under control and I'm proud of myself for that! I'm also proud of all I managed to do while I was in Cambridge - it's taken a toll on my illness but I feel so fortunate to have been able to do it at all. Since I've been home I've just been resting & recuperating, catching up with my family & cat who I missed loads and I received my blogger pen pal letter from Megan, which I'm sure I'll talk about more in another post. There's also been some snow here & a fox appeared at the top of our garden on Friday!
There's a saying that travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer and I certainly feel richer, refreshed, motivated & really excited to improve my life and work hard on my 2016 blogging resolutions.
On Monday morning my sister and I got up bright & early to explore the city. As she's been living there for nearly 3 years now, she acted as my unofficial tour guide. It was great to have her knowledge of the place alongside my curiosity so we could discover new places she hadn't been to before as well! Oliver Bonas is an amazing shop. We started out with a walk around the market (which was annoyingly kinda bare), then the colleges and their gardens. It was a bit grey & rainy that day but that didn't dampen our spirits!
We visited Hardy's sweet shop, aka one of the coolest places EVER. The entire shop was packed wall to wall with unique, exciting chocolates & sweets of all kinds, a whole two floors of them. Yup, TWO FLOORS. I probably would have ended up buying a lot more than I did if I didn't have my sister to calm me down!
Bag of sweets in hand, we searched for somewhere to have lunch. It was quite the hunt because there was so much choice! We ended up going to Bill's, a restaurant I'd heard good things about but had never tried before. I can safely say it's one of my favourite places I've ever eaten - everything about it was just wonderful; the interior, the service, the food . . . the food. I had the kale, quinoa & avocado salad followed by warm cinnamon donuts with chocolate dipping sauce and I've been raving about them ever since. Incredible. With full bellies we marched around the shops and I got a few things from MAC which I'll blog about soon!
Then on Tuesday I met up with Liam for tea & cake in Costa. He's one of the nicest people I've got to know through blogging and it was so cool to meet in person and find out he's just as friendly & chatty as he is online!
For the rest of the day I chilled at my sister's place, then that evening some of her friends came over for dinner and played Cranium. If you haven't played it before, it's kind of a mixture of a few board games and can be absolutely hilarious - we were cracking up the whole time!
Wednesday was the day we went to Grantchester! It's a small village close to Cambridge which lends it's name & scenery to one of my favourite TV shows. It's also (apparently) home to the highest concentration of Nobel Prize winners so overall it's a pretty cool place. We sat inside The Orchard tea rooms for lunch, overlooking the beautiful gardens which is what a lot of famous & prestigious people have also done over the years. (You can see the list here, I think it's pretty interesting!) Once we were done we took a walk around, up to the church and onto the land overlooking the river. The views were so beautiful and it was so worth the trek to get there. Photos can't do it justice.
Then that night one of my other uncles picked us up and we had dinner with some more family in a place called Jolly Postie in Royston. It's a restaurant that used to be a post office and they've really gone to town with keeping the decor 'post' themed. There were huge mocked up postcards hanging from the ceiling, post boxes dotted around and even an old post van which you could sit and eat in if you wanted to! Aside from all of that, it was a super cosy place to eat and the food & company were both lovely. It was the best way to spend my last night of the trip!
There's a saying that travel is the only thing you can buy that makes you richer and I certainly feel richer, refreshed, motivated & really excited to improve my life and work hard on my 2016 blogging resolutions.
So that was my week! Now I want you to get involved in the comments below and let me know what you got up to.
How was your week?
Thanks for reading,
Maeve
x
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