Saturday, June 2, 2007

Rural Suffolk...

Today was the first real glorious summer day - James and I puttered around this morning and rode in to town on our bicycles. It's kind of a tricky ride- the bike paths up in the housing estate are really good and well-laid out,and then you suddenly get dumped on to a main road with a really narrow sidewalk with lots of overhanging branches. And then there are intermittent bike paths in the town, none of which lead anywhere. I'm not quite confident enough of James' riding to let him ride in the road with cars - people go REALLY fast and he can be kind of oblivious and wobbly some times. Mostly he's fine, but he randomly swerves. Edward and I basically grew up on our bikes, especially in Holland and when we lived in Peterborough, so I don't think mom and dad ever really worried about us wobbling too much.

Anyway, in the afternoon we went to the Alder Carr Farm in Needham Market. I suggested that we take the back way there - it was this gloriously winding country lane that went through two towns - Creeting St. Peter and Creeting St. Mary. I love the names...and the houses along the road were SO pretty.

It's also the perfect distance to go on a bike ride - it's about 3 miles each way and a little hilly but not too bad. We're going to save our pennies and see about getting some bikes - my parents have Gazelle bikes from Holland that are beautiful and run forever but they're WAAAAY out of our price range. They have some really funny tandem ones, although I think I'm too much of a control freak to let John steer...we'd crash before we made it to the end of our street.

Anyway, the farm was incredible- they had homemade ice cream (YUM!), strawberries (PYO and in baskets) that smelled amazing, and various other little shops. One of them was an earthy-crunchy eco-friendly shop (that sells mooncups!), so we bought some enviro-friendly laundry soap and toilet cleaner. The laundry soap is cool - we can take the empty jug back and they'll refill it at a discount. Oh, the thrill.

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