Bury St Edmunds

We've found a house! Well...sort of.
We have a lovely little temporary house in Bury St. Edmunds (about 20 minutes Southeast of the base) which will do very nicely until we find the house of our dreams (and budget) to buy. We have a short lease on the current little home; we're hoping to find The House and close on it in the next 3-4 months. In the meantime, we'll be in lovely Bury!
I haven't any pictures of the house yet--we won't move in until the 31st--but we did go to view the house and check out the town and the commute again, so I did get a few shots of our day out. We started out the day at the Abbey Gardens--where there are beautiful ruins of a very very old cathedral scattered about the modern park. The interesting thing about the park is that unlike American historical monuments, people can climb about on the crumbling old bits of building. There are no little ropes or barriers or signs telling tourists not to let their children use the remaining rock formations as a jungle gym! People take their children and pets and picnics and it's altogether a very pleasant place.

The gardens themselves are very well-maintained, and there is now a "modern"* Abbey, playgorounds, duck pond, walking trails, all with little stone ruin-clumps scattered througout(*by which I mean post 7th-century!)
For more details on the park/gardens, click here: http://www.stedmundsbury.gov.uk/sebc/play/abbeygardens.cfm

After reading on a parkbench for a while and watching lovely British families push their prams and scold their children, we decided that sitting in the sun had taken a lot out of us. We knew it was time for some food.

We headed up about a block to the town square, where we found a very agreeable little French restaurant where I promptly ordered a latte to help me survive until we could look at a menu. It arrived with little sugar-clumps and made me very happy.
When we tried to order lunch from the very nice little French woman--with a VERY thick French accent--she informed us that she was so sorry, but she was not serving lunch; the restaurant serves only breakfast until noon on weekdays. This enamoured us to the town and to the restaurant and to this particular watiress forever.

We ordered the "Petit Dejeuner Anglais" with scrambled eggs, mushrooms, grilled tomatoes, bacon, seasoned sausages, and beans...and with a side of French crusty bread and toast.
We sat and ate, looking out the window at all the shoppers walking by...it was altogether a lovely meal.

We viewed the house, decided to let it for the time being, and returned to the base, happy and full.
Now, we must get to work finding a car--we can't keep renting at L50 per week!