Day Trip to the Country

This morning, Alex and Tom and I awoke at an ungodly - for a Saturday - hour so that we could make the two-hour drive south to Glyndebourne in time to hit the box office at 10am.  You see, today was the day that the £30 <30 tickets were released, and Alex knows from bitter experience that if you try to call you'll get a busy signal until you finally get through to discover that all the tickets are gone.  (£30 <30 is the programme through which, if you're under 30 years of age, you can buy a ticket for £30 to a specially designated performance.)

So we set off at 8am, drove through rolling hills to Glynde, and arrived at the estate at 9:45, ensuring that we were in the front of the line for tickets.  I snagged a seat in the middle of the fourth row of the stalls to see Don Giovanni in May.  Woop!

We then wandered the grounds for a while - see photos below - before heading to Lewes, a neighboring picture-perfect English town, to meander the high street.  (Seriously, this place was a postcard: it had its own medieval castle, a lawn upon which old men were playing bowls, winding cobblestones streets, and tiny stone houses with colorful doors.  Cue sighs of American happiness.)

While in Lewes we rifled through Alex's Good Pub Guide, and after settling on The Huntsman in a town that really only included a train station we set off back north; conveniently, the pub was on the way back to London.  Oh man.  Let me tell you.  If you ever happen to find yourself in Eridge Station, make your way there.  They had an incredible wine list, and the food was absolutely delish.  (I had a baked brie to start and chicken with mash as my main.  Nom.)  We proved, after lunch, that we secretly are old women - in case our manic race to purchase opera tickets wasn't enough of a hint - by playing gin rummy by the fire and vaguely dozing off.

We made it back to London for 6:30pm, and concluded that it was a lovely day out of the city.  As much as I love London, it's nice to stretch your legs sometimes, you know?