Dover

*I'm a little behind in blogging...we're house hunting and it's taking it out of me!

June 7 - We hopped on the train and headed to Dover with the Petts and Beth, a friend from Rob's program at work. After surviving a long train ride we arrived and it was beautiful. It was forecasted to rain, but thankfully, it was just a nice cool beautiful day!

 A beautiful door we passed on our walk to the castle.

Our plan was to take a bus to a lighthouse that it farther away than the castle, but we had a little misunderstanding with the bus driver and only made it to the castle where we promptly got a little lost trying to find our way to the white cliffs that it's so famous for. It was a beautiful path that we were lost in though!

 

 That path went to where Louis Bleriot took off to make the first cross-channel flight to France. I was really excited about it because we rowed a book about it called The Glorious Flight this year for school. It is so cool to experience the history that we read about!

 After sorting our mistake and finding our way back, we found the proper entrance to the castle. It was amazing and really extensive.

 Look how thick these castle walls were!

 Waiting in line for a tour of these WWII tunnels. The tour was really neat and was all about the rescue of troops from France when they were cornered by Hitler's forces. They expected to be able to only get 75,000 troops out before Hitler's forces were upon them, but thanks to some civilian fishermen who helped rescue troops under fire, they were able to rescue more than 250,000! It was a really well done and touching story. (No pictures were allowed)

After the castle we got back on the bus to go to the lighthouse Beth had wanted to see. Here I am pushing the buggy down the narrowest sidewalk ever. You can't really tell here, but the grass drops off steeply to the road. It ended up being the wrong way, so we had to back back up the way because there was no place to turn the buggy around!

 Finally we got on our way and ran/hiked/sweated to the lighthouse and back so we could catch our train, which ended up not even being a train we could board without paying more. It was just kind of a comedy of errors.

 At the top of the cliffs

 

The lighthouse