So back to August for a whirwind tour of an area of England west of London. It wasn't my favorite trip for many reasons including rain, a long car ride to a castle that was closed, different people with different agendas for the trip, and oh yeah, I forgot to bring coffee. Bad for all involved. But we did manage to have some fun and see some amazing sights! Our first stop was Strafford-upon-Avon. Yes, of Shakespeare fame. I'm not a huge fan of the bard, so a lot of it was lost on me. It was however, a really cute town set upon a beautiful river (the Avon... go figure) so it was really pleasant to spend the afternoon wandering around in.
Here are the boys in front of Shakespeare's birthplace. Ohhhh, ahhhh.
The highlight of Stratford was probably this really cool manual lock. E actually got to help them open the lock so a boat could go through. What is really interesting is the shape of both the lock and the boat. All the boats on this river are really long and skinny... and thus the locks are too. Here is E putting his muscles into it, making sure the lock remains closed as the water drains out.
Our next stop was the Berkeley Castle... with obvious significance for our family. But it was closed. Boooo. After a long ride in the car, and with no other sightseeing nearby, this made for some very cranky people in the van.
We decided to go instead to the nearby town of Gloucester to see the Cathedral there. (By the way, it's said Glouschter... they swallow the middle syllable.) The town was definitely nothing to write home about, and the cathedral was, well, a cathedral. By this point we're sort of becoming cathedral snobs. It has to be pretty darn impressive to wow us anymore. There is just so much amazing architecture around here that it's just so easy to become immune to it! However, some of the first two Harry Potter films were filmed in the cloisters here... but we didn't know that until after we visited, so it was all lost on us. Alas.
The next day, we woke up and behold, the sun was actually shining! We let the boys play on the playground at the hotel (which was in an amazing part of the country... the Cotswalds. Sheep and stone walls everywhere you could look.) And I searched for some coffee. Luckily some friends of ours were staying there too, and they were on their way out, so they loaned me theirs for the rest of the trip. Thank goodness for friends, that was a close one!
Then we headed to Bath, which was definitely my favorite part of the trip and somewhere I would love to visit again. The only down side was that half of England was trying to get to Bath too... so there was a lot of sitting in the car waiting on traffic. But once we got there we had lunch in this amazing garden down by the river. The boys had fun trying to get in and out of these lounge chairs! You can see e is stuck in his.
There were also these pigs trimmed into the shrubbery. What's not for a kid to love?
Then we went to see the Roman Baths themselves. These ancient hot springs were used in the first century, and there was a whole bath complex and temple built around them. A lot of the ruins are still here, and are old even by European standards. There is a really detailed (too detailed for me and my two year old) tour through the sight. But to see the baths themselves as they were laid out two thousand years ago is pretty darn cool.
Notice the audio guide around N's neck. The kid is obsessed with these things. Whenever we go to a sight that has audio guides, he insists on listening to every bit of the commentary... and this one had a lot of commentary, so we were trying to hide the numbers from him by the end!
After touring the baths, we wandered around the town for a while. It is an amazingly beautiful town, with hills all around it which just add to the scenery. We stopped here for a break. Personally I didn't think sitting on the steep concrete wall that slopes sharply down to the river was such a great idea... but as you see, I was overruled.
Our last stop in town was this amazing building called the Royal Crescent. It is a row of Georgian town homes built in an amazingly huge crescent shape in the 1700s. The park space out in front made for great playing for e. (N slept through it in the stroller... all that audio guiding wore him out!) Here is e taking a picture of his aunt in front of the building. Too cute!
The last day of our trip it was raining again. (Surprise, surprise) Actually, we had a really dry summer, so I really shouldn't be complaining. But we went to Stonehenge anyway. Everything I had heard about Stonehenge was that it wasn't all that impressive. That it's just a pile of rocks up on a hill, and that it's always windy and cold out there. Well, windy, cold, and rainy it was, but that is still one impressive pile of rocks! They are massive, and what I thought was really impressive is that some of them are notched, so you can see how they fit together like a puzzle in their mysterious circles.
Here we in front of this amazing sight. Notice again the audio guides. "Where did the rocks come from? How did they get them here? What were they for?" There was a lot of conjecture but not a lot of answers. But you can bet that mister N wanted to listen to each and every bit anyway... well, at least until he started getting rained on!
Our last stop was a very rainy and wet Salisbury to see the cathedral there. It's a pretty big one! Again, Salisbury itself wasn't all that exciting, but the cathedral is impressive. They also have one of the original copies of the Magna Carta there, and that was neat to see. There was a lot of construction work on the outside of the cathedral, and that combined with the rain didn't mean good exterior photos. But we did get this one beautiful picture of the nave. Doesn't really do it justice though.
