Windsor Castle
I had an AMAZING time this weekend. These blogs will be broken up into the three days. Friday was Windsor and Stonehenge, Saturday was Bath, and Sunday was the village of Lacock and Oxford. Here is Friday...
We were set to leave at 8:30 in the morning, so I woke up at around 7 to finish packing and get ready. It was so early for me! We were split onto two different buses to leave from Augustine House. It was almost 2 hours to Windsor, so naturally everyone fell asleep. We woke up just in time to pull into a coach car park. There we met our tour guide for the weekend. His name was Andrew and we got to be in his group all weekend. I didn't know until later, but I was really lucky because he was the best. He will be there for our trip to the Christmas markets in December, so I am even more excited about that now.
We split the groups, and our group walked toward the Thames River. When we got there, we were met by a group of birds. Ducks, swans, and seagulls were all mingling in the water, and they swam right up to us. They even jumped out of the water and walked up right next to us. I'm sure they thought we had food for them. Once we walked down a little further, we came upon a huge group of them. I had never seen so many swans in one place before!
We walked a little more and came to a bridge that led to Eton College. Eton College is one of the oldest and most prestigious boys' schools in England. Most notably, both Prince William and Prince Harry went to school there. (We could have gone there during lunch, but we were really hungry, so we ate instead.)
Next, we headed toward Windsor Castle. As we walked up, we caught the very end of a guard change parade. We weren't going to be able to go in the Castle, so that was kind of a bummer, but it was good to look at from the outside. We walked around to the gate and saw the "Long Walk" which is a three-mile long road that the royal family would use for horse riding. When looking through the gate toward the castle, I finally got a glimpse of a real royal guard. He had the red suit and fuzzy hat and everything! After that, we had a break for lunch so naturally we went for fish and chips :)
After lunch, we had a little time, so we went into a few gift shops. I didn't plan on getting anything in Windsor, so I was just looking around when Will told me to come look at something. When I looked at what he was pointing at I freaked out a little bit because it had the Mind the Gap sign on it. It took me a second to realize it was a thong with the sign on it. I was tempted to get it because I have been looking everywhere for something that says Mind the Gap, but it was 7 pounds, so I decided not to. After that, we met up with the group, got back on the bus, and headed for Stonehenge.
The drive was pretty long, so again, everyone fell asleep. They woke us up when we got close so we could get a first look at it from the bus. In reality, there is a road that goes directly next to Stonehenge, so people really don't have to pay money to see it close. They could just take a picture from the road. Andrew gave us the whole history and background of the monument, so when we were offered audio guides at the site, we didn't take them. Everyone from ISU brought our study abroad shirts to take a picture with and send back to the International Studies Office. We all decided Stonehenge would be a good place for a picture so we all took off our jackets and took pictures in the freezing cold in our very obvious American shirts. It was the most "touristy" I have felt the entire time I have been here. The pictures did turn out pretty good though, so I'm happy we did it. Hopefully we end up on an International Studies poster or something :)
As for the monument...it was a little underwhelming. I understand there is a lot of history behind it and everything. It's a really famous place that I have seen pictures of, so it was cool to get my picture with it. In the end, though, it is really just a group of rocks. All there was to do was walk around and take pictures from different angles. Still, no matter what the angle, they were still a bunch of rocks. We walked around, took a bunch of pictures, and headed to the gift shop. For a really famous landmark, their gift shop was super tiny, and when we all crammed in there, it was packed. I decided not to get anything there, and we just headed back to the bus.
We headed to our hotel (asleep for the ride of course) and got there in the evening. Sam and I were one of the first ones to get our room key, so we headed up to our room. We were really excited to sleep in different beds for a couple nights. When we got in the room, we had one minor issue - we couldn't turn the lights on. We had a little box for our card key where the light switch was, so we tried putting the key in a few different ways, but nothing was working. Finally, after giving up and asking Will what to do, we realized we hadn't pushed the key in far enough. We had to leave the key in the lights whenever we wanted them on.
The rooms were really nice, but the hotel was in the middle of nowhere really. There was one restaurant, a McDonalds, and a Sainsbury's (like Wal-Mart). We went to dinner at the restaurant then headed to Sainsbury's for drinks and snacks. After that, Sam and I spent the rest of the night watching British television in our room. We were pretty exhausted, so hanging out in pajamas and watching TV was great. British TV is pretty awesome. We found a channel with a lot of game shows that were really fun. We were trying to decide when to go to bed when the announcer said the next show was about Mumford and Sons. That made our decision for us because there was no way we were going to miss that. (Seriously, if you haven't checked them out yet, you NEED to. They are absolutely amazing.) Once that was over, we realized how early we had to get up the next day, so we crashed.
Well, that's Friday. Hopefully tomorrow I can get up a blog about our Saturday in the beautiful city of Bath!
Night!
~Taylor
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