September 24: the day I finally decided to get behind the wheel of a British car!
I only drove a little ways… we checked out the local auction area. They have an auction every Saturday. We found some interesting items there (we were more interested in the antiques than the modern things), but we haven’t been back to participate in an auction yet.
I made Andrew drive to Bury St. Edmunds. I was NOT ready for that! It wasn’t really the driving there that worried me, it was entering the town and navigating the roundabouts. Our main reason for going was to check out the outdoor market area. Most of the towns here have outdoor markets at least once a week, even small towns! The best part (to us) is the local produce. The prices are pretty good, and if you go at the end of the day, you can get really good deals on items that the vendors just don’t want to pack up.
We went to Harriet’s, a tea room designed to look like an old tearoom from the early 1900s.
Even the servers dressed in old-fashioned outfits! The food was very good, and we tried a new type of tea: smoked. It definitely had a smoky taste to it, and I didn’t particularly like it. It just wasn’t refreshing or anything to me.
We perused a few more areas before heading home. I had very sore feet (I always seem to value cuteness over comfort), so I was a little crabby. I wanted to rest my feet back at the hotel for awhile, but by then it was about dinnertime. We were pretty sick of eating on base, so I found a restaurant in Icklingham to check out.
The restaurant we planned to go to turned out to be closed until further notice. Darn it! But we had driven past another restaurant that looked good called The Red Lion.
This is a very old building that has been around for hundreds of years. Now it’s a family-run restaurant. The family lives above the restaurant.
We had to wait for a table since we hadn’t made a reservation. It sounds like they are staffed for the number of reservations made in a night. Lucky for us, one of the parties didn’t show up, so we were seated before 8pm. We didn’t mind waiting: we were just going to drink pints of beer until we got seated! 🙂
Our food ended up being amazing! Andrew & I both ordered salads before our main courses. His had apples and walnuts, and mine had black pudding and goat cheese. So good! My main course was bacon-wrapped chicken in a tasty whole grain mustard sauce. Andrew had seafood crepes. We then shared raspberry sorbet in sugar-spun bowls.
What a delicious meal! We still need to go back sometime, and I’m sure our next meal will be as good as our first!
On An Even Kiel 