In which Oxford is explored

I had my first holiday of the year this last weekend and it was utterly wonderful. We took the Easter weekend to go away to Oxford, a city we've both only visited for conferences. Now I'm home I've definitely got that proper post-break feeling of refreshment.

I have been needing the time away from everything. I'd become bored of the Internet: Tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, and all the emails. So many emails. I'm sorry but I'd kind of had enough and all I wanted were river-side walks and some alone time with my husband. So we switched it all off. Didn't use my phone or computer (ok, so we watched a few episodes of Fairy Tail one evening but that hardly counts!)

Instead we managed to cram in everything we had been recommended to see in Oxford in just three days. We went to the covered markets, the Ashmolean (Britain's oldest museum), The Natural History Museum (Dinosaurs!), and the Pitt Rivers Museum (a big jumble of art), the canal, the river, the board games cafe, the theatre, and lots of nice food. And saw a Stradivarius guitar and violin which blew my mind.

I wanted to share a huge variety of pictures but it turns out despite coming back with 400 pictures, most of them are of skeletons (Natural History Museum) or of me (for soon to come outfit posts)!

 We visited a board game cafe called The Thirsty Meeples. You may have picked up a vibe from this blog that I quite like gaming. I am a member of a local board games club and have a fairly hefty mountain of games in the living room. This place has 1500 games in the cafe to choose from to play whilst you are there!
We took the game 'Fantastiqa' from the two-player section and did that with our lunch on the first day!

All the game pieces for this game were from famous works of art.

 

Oxford Castle at sunset

 On the first evening we found this free table tennis game in an open courtyard. The bats and ball were in little free to use pockets and we spent a good half an hour of me thrashing Andy at the game.

Pink lemonade floats

Hot Cross Bun bread and butter pudding, and the best cheesecake we've ever tasted.

 So probably the thing I was keenest to go to was to see all the dinosaur skeletons at the Natural History Museum. It is everything a picture book museum should be. Full of kids running round and staring at the giant t-rex, glass cases full of dead beetles and displays of historically important rocks.

T-rex!

We liked this statue of Newton having a little nap here.

Crazy ancestor of the elephant called the Deinotherium (which is not an easy name to remember). They had downward facing tusks, and in the sketches of how they might have looked, seem utterly terrifying.

This fairy normal looking rock is one of the oldest things on the planet. 3.5 billion years old!

Dinosaurs!

The inspiration for Lewis Caroll's Dodo in Through the Looking Glass

Unitkitty and Snail enjoying the canal side walk

So that was my Easter break! It was just really nice to have some exploring time with my husband. It was the first time we had been away with just the two of us since the honeymoon so it was good to relive that kind of peaceful joy together.

What did you do with Easter? Hope you had a good time too!