C.S. Lewis walking tour

Day 8:
We took a bus from London to Oxford the next morning and got to see some of the English countryside along the way. Ryan had downloaded a self-guided walking tour of the significant C.S. Lewis landmarks in Oxford so we set about to see as much of them as we could. We started with lunch at the White Horse, where Lewis often met with his friends for a beer. We made our way past the house on Mansfield Road where Lewis spent his very first night in Oxford in December 1916. The best part about this tour is that in between each notable place was streets filled with the "fabled cluster of spires and towers". We arrived at Magdalen College and while we were deciding if we should pay the entrance fee, we watched the punts along the River Cherwell and walked through the Botanic Gardens. We made up our minds that it was worth the admission price and were absolutely blown away by what we saw inside. The campus was like no college we had ever seen, with stunning architecture everywhere you looked. We walked a ways on Addison's Walk and watched the deer frolic in the protected reserve, but probably our very favorite was seeing the windows of the room where Lewis resided while he worked as a Fellow there; the very room he speaks of in the following excerpt:

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.” -C.S. Lewis

We finished the day strolling along Longwall Street and High Street, where we saw the Eastgate Hotel, a favorite meeting spot for Lewis and Tolkien.We found an organic restaurant called The Rose and when we finished supper, we were forced to take an overpriced, but quintessentially English, cab ride home when we realized the buses were no longer running.