When I was in my late teens I happened to be walking past a street artist at an art festival who had on display photographs or lithographs of the Cotswolds. I stopped and talked to this man for about an hour, mostly discussions about his style of capturing art, and a little about the time he lived in the region. He was an American, and I ended up buying four framed pictures at fifteen US dollars a piece of the most beautiful cottages and street scenes I have ever seen since my days of marveling over perfectly bound European children’s fairytale books. Since then I told myself I would someday go to  ‘Cotswolds’, thinking it was a town. Until this year when I got serious about traveling through the English countryside did I learn that the Cotswolds is not a specific town but rather a number of counties in south central England, in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. That the beauty of the area is its rolling hills, medieval villages, churches and homes built of region specific yellow …