Can anyone recommend a tour company for day trips, or overnight stays, in the Cotswolds? We would prefer to stay in London and be picked up & dropped off there, but it seems fairly easy to take a train to and from and pick up the tour somewhere in the Cotswolds.
I'm aware that we can see only a small part of the Cotswolds in a day, but we'd like to visit there and get a sense of what the place is like.
Driving is not an option for us in England.
Thanks for any help.
Take a look at Cotswold Villages by Becky--may have to Google. You can take the train to Moreton in Marsh. Becky takes you in a Mercedes van with a group of eight people to the most popular villages and tea is served at her cottage after the excursion.
Thank you. Have you taken this tour? It is very highly rated and you can see more details about it here:
http://www.cotswoldtourismtours.co.uk/tour-information/
Viator also offers tours online, but I have no idea about the reliability of that company. Has anyone used them? They also offer a tour of Versailles (round trip from Paris) that sounds great, but I'd like to know more about the company.
I speak about Viator in your other thread.
You could also take the train or National Express coach to Bath, and connect with Mad Max Tours, as they have some tours that cover parts of the Cotswolds.
Evan Evans does daytrips to the Cotswolds. We took a tour with them and absolutely loved it. Unfortunately, it was only for the day. We know a couple who had a private driver for 10 days, in the Cotswolds. Everyday the driver would pick them up at their individual hotels and drive them around. They loved it.
I did a one day tour with Absolute Touring out of Oxford, I took the train into Oxford and the driver met me at the station. We picked up the only other person on the tour that day but it is a great tour and they cover a lot in a day, even give a hand out of where we are going and what we are seeing, the driver was very nice and any place we wanted to stop he would. We hit all the towns and small out of the way places (Asthall home of the Mitford sisters) was well worth the money.
Barbara, we visited Asthall - it is fantastic!
There isn't any need to pay a tour company, you could easily do it on your own. You could take train out in morning, visit two villages that day, spend the night, visit another village then take train back into London that afternoon.
Many thanks to everyone who responded to my question. This helps a lot. I would like to do the Cotswold Villages by Becky tour after reading about. We would have a problem doing this entirely on our own as we cannot drive in England; I do not feel confident enough to drive on the left in a car where the driver sits on the right and shifts with his/her left hand. That's presents too many chances of a calamity.
Thus, we'd have to have an alternative way to travel from one village to the other, but would like to cover as many as possible in a day or two without feeling rushed.
I'm really not sure, but I think some of these villages are used as settings for "Midsomer Murders", or are similar to the villages where that show is filmed. Not that we really need to go to film locations at all, but one of the things that attracted us to these villages are the settings of that show.
I also would like to visit and tour Oxford.
We took the train to Bath last time and loved the town. We ran out of time before we were able to visit Stonehenge and the surrounding ancient ruins, but I would really like to do that as well. I understand that visitors are no longer allowed to actually walk among the stones at Stonehenge, although I've heard there are special night time tours that do permit that.
Bath might be a great central location for us to stay in and then take day trips to these other areas.
