Easter in Stroud
The great thing about Stroud is that it forces you to relax. It’s a tiny town where you can go for walks as everywhere you turn, you see have beautiful views of the Cotswold hills all around you.
The only other thing you need to decide is where to go for a coffee (or a drink) and which restaurant you are going to eat at tonight. Another reason it wins is that it has a train station which makes it very easy to get to (with one change) from Birmingham. It didn’t matter to us that a lot of the attractions are outside of town and accessible only by car.
It’s my first stay in the region and I suspect Stroud’s population of 30,000 is swelled considerably by other tourists and the second homers from all over the Cotswolds. To this end, there are a couple of the chain coffee shops although really the town is known for it’s local shops and plentiful cafes. We knew the chains would come in handy as we went over the Easter break and some of the coffee shops we’d have loved to have visited were closed for the Bank Holiday.
We found a Sunday roast lunch at the Ale House, a proper pub that welcomes, dogs, kids and cyclists. They only had lamb at this time, a meat I refrain from eating, so it was the vegetarian option for me. I was grateful to find this though as small town pubs tend to serve roasts only at lunchtime, and we just made it to this one around 2pm.
The Socialight is a good coffee stop and we would have had breakfast there if weren’t already full from the one at the hotel. As some of the local coffee shops were closed, we popped in for a relaxing hour nursing a cold brew during a warm afternoon at a comfy branch of the South West coffee chain Number One
As alternative to the many restaurants, Stroud is a good place for picnics, especially as there is a huge Waitrose in town.
Unless you are driving, it’s good to stay in a comfortable hotel with all mod cons and we were grateful to the good old Premier Inn for looking after us incredibly well.
