An Adventure to Hampton Court

Today a couple classmates and I decided to utilize our memberships to the Historic Palaces and visit the biggest one in the London Area: Hampton Court. This was the home of Henry VIII and his wives, as well as William and Mary. It was huge and gorgeous!

We took a train to Hampton, our first train of the trip! I will admit that trains are only fun with a group of friends, and for less than an hour. As this one was only 30 minutes and there were 5 of us, it was definitely an adventure!

Like I said above, the house was gorgeous and huge, Here are some pictures of our adventure:

Henry VIII! Or, an actor at least :)

The William and Mary addition to Hampton Court

William and Mary addition

We got to write our names with a quill pen!

I just found this so funny. If you can't read it, it says
"The Queen, like a natural woman, made much lamentation"

We got to see a facsimile of Henry VIII’s crown (it was a recreation, because the first was destroyed by Oliver Cromwell.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures of the crown, but I will just say that it seemed like a little too much!

My favorite part of Hampton Court, by far, was the gardens. They were magnificent!  I would love to live in a house with gardens such as these ones!  There is a maze within the gardens that is supposed to take the average visitor 20 minutes to get to the center.  We made it in about 7 minutes!  There was a funny plaque in the center that mentioned a man who was stuck in the maze for hours, until someone finally came to the rescue.

After the maze, we wandered the gardens for a while and I took tons of pictures for my dad (and all you lovely readers!)  Here are some now:

Dover Castle and Canterbury Cathedral

Today was the second day of group tours around England. The British Studies program set up these tours for us to see more of the country than just London and our few day trips.  We visited Dover Castle and Canterbury on this trip. The day started out cold, windy, and rainy, and of course I didn't bring a rain coat with me to London.

Dover Castle was amazing. It is a medieval castle, and is the largest castle in England. We were given a guide of what we could explore while at the castle, and a few of us decided to venture into the medieval tunnels for a look. They were just as creepy as it sounds!  There were also some tunnels used during World War II as an air raid shelter and a command center.

Next we headed to Canterbury and to the Cathedral.  The Canterbury Cathedral is absolutely breathtaking. We only had a few hours in Canterbury so a group of us decided to tour the cathedral first, and then the rest of the town second.  Here are some of the pictures I took of the cathedral:

Here was the door to the library.
as library students, we were all devastated we couldn't visit!

After the cathedral, we walked around the actual town of Canterbury for a little bit, but I did not take any pictures of the town itself. It was a very adorable and quaint little town, mainly pedestrian, and the roads were very much the iconic cobblestone that most people picture when picturing English towns! We ended up finding a place to eat a late lunch before heading back to the bus to go back to London. We stumbled upon a little pub called The Seven Stars.

I ended up having a burger, and it was probably one of the best that I've had in a long time. I've noticed about the food in England, they don't have as many chemicals and preservatives in their food as we do in the US, so it all seems to taste different and, most of the time, better!

Windsor, Bath, and Stonehenge

Happy 4th of July!

While you celebrate with fireworks and hot dogs, I will be celebrating by visiting castles and rocks.

A few classmates and I took a bus tour around England to see Windsor Castle, which is one of the Queen's residences, the city of Bath, which inspired many of Jane Austen's novels, and Stonehenge. The tour was fun, but very much a whirlwind. We didn't get to see everything that we wanted to see in the time we were allowed, but the bits we did see were amazing!

Windsor:

Bath:

When we stopped in Bath, all but the 4 of us had tickets to see the actual Roman Baths, so we spent the time wandering around the town. It was a beautiful place, but we did not get to see any of the sites that I so much wanted to see.  We did stop into the Bath Central Library while there. It was a very nice, modern library situated above a grocery store; how convenient!

Stonehenge:

I will admit, I wasn't all that excited to see a bunch of rocks with a ton of other people, but it was surprisingly very cool to see something that has been around for so long. Our guide gave us a tip on taking good pictures of Stonehenge: he said to lie on the ground to get a better angle. Let me know what you think!