Winchester

 Saturday we hopped on a train (or two) and headed down to the town of Winchester. The weather was spectacular and we had a fantastic day. Too bad everyone else in London (it seemed) also thought it would be a good idea to head down there. The trains were packed so we had to stand or sit on the floor the whole ride. It was crazy! Winchester used to be the capital of London.

We started out at the Great Hall. It was part of a greater castle built for William the Conqueror in 1067! Most of the castle was demolished so ti wouldn't pose a threat to the English throne, but the Great Hall is still standing and amazingly preserved. It was built in the Arthurian style since the kings who lived there admired the legend of King Arthur and until recently (in the past 50 years) it was thought to be where Camelot was.

 A ruin of the castle just outside the Great Hall

A statue of Queen Victoria made for her diamond jubilee is in the Great Hall.

  These wrought steel gates were installed in 1983 to commemorate the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. If you look closely you can see their initials and 1981 on the top of the gates. On the wall around those gates is a sort of ruling family tree with names of the English rulers throughout the years.

There was a lovely little garden outside that the girls loved to run around in.

 Close-up of one of the stained glass windows. Each panel depicted a different monarch.

 

 In front of the Great Hall.

 There was so much history and neat architecture throughout the city.

 

 

 The Winchester Museum had a bunch of kid dress up clothes. Here's Grace modeling them. Ruby was busy coloring and not interested in dressing up for pictures :)

 Winchester Cathedral

 Jane Austen lived the last few months in Winchester after she got sick. She is buried in one of the aisles of the Cathedral. I was horrified when Rob told me to look down and I realized I was standing on her grave! When she died she was unknown and so has a very simple grave marker that doesn't mention her writing. Years later after her writing had gained popularity, this brass window was put in the Cathedral near her grave.

 Walking through the alleys near the cathedral we found this random archaeological (burial?) site and a really beautiful little secret garden.

 Winchester was so charming!

Jane Austen's residence. It's a private house, so we couldn't go in, but it was neat to see!

The longest ice cream truck wait e.v.e.r. The guy made each cone like a work of art, putting some soft serve on then looking at it and adding some, then dipping in sprinkles just right and adding the chocolate flake just right. Seriously each cone took him at least 2 minutes. From the time this picture was taken it was 1/2 hour before the girlies had ice cream cones in their sticky hands.

Grace and Colton are buddies!

England has had some massive flooding recently due to the wettest winter in 250 years! Thankfully the weather has been nice so it's been drying up a bit, but as you can see the towpath here was still closed due to flooding up onto the walk. The restaurant we were going to eat at was closed because of the flooding too.

  

Grace and the Hampshire Hog. There were hogs everywhere in Winchester.

We loved Winchester and had a fab day exploring it!

At dinner all the kids got balloons on sticks and Ben was the happiest kid alive. We didn't get the camera out in time to capture the first stages of balloon rapture, but let me tell you, he was so happy!!

St. Paul's Cathedral

 It was another rainy day on Saturday, so we decided to stay in town and head to check out St. Paul's Cathedral. We ate in the basement surrounded by lots of sculptures. It was cool. After lunch we headed up to check out the church. It's the cathedral where Princess Diana and Charles were married and where Winston Churchill's funeral was held. It was really beautiful inside with lots of amazing mosaics and sculpture and paintings. It was a really interesting mix of secular and religious. My favorite thing were the amazing mosaics of the creation over the quire.

By far, though, the most spectacular part was the climb up to the lantern at the very top. It's 530 steps up (I'm still really sore!) with 3 landings. Rob is the real superhero of the day and carried Ruby all the way to the top! It was super windy, but a spectacular 360 degree view of the city.

 

In the picture below of Grace and the cathedral, you can see the lantern sitting atop the larger dome - that's where those 530 steps took us!

The Isle of Wight

SouthWest Trains is currently running a promo wherein we can get return tickets for 10 GBP, anywhere they run. So we got our explorer hats on and figured out that in combination with a hoovercraft, we could get to the Isle of Wight pretty cheaply, so we were off on our Saturday adventure! It's quite a journey to get there, so we took the 7:58 am train. It was a lovely ride for an hour and a half into Southampton (where Titanic set sail from). In Southhampton we caught a bus down to the harbor and caught the hi-speed passenger hoover craft to East Cowes. Then we caught a couple of buses to the center of the island as close to Carisbrooke Castle as we could get, then walked the rest of the way. One cool thing about castles is that they have amazing views because they're built up on hilltops to prevent surprise invaders. One un-cool thing about castles is that they're built on hill tops, so when you're a tourist you sometimes have to hike up the hilltop :) The view to the surrounding lands was beautiful! I can only imagine how spectacular it will be in the Spring!

They have the oldest and deepest well on the island that was dug hundreds of years ago. It is still used today to measure the water in the island's reserves and is where the council checks to see if they will be on restricted water usage or not. Back in the day, it used to be powered by slaves, but more recently they use donkeys. Here's Jack showing us how the donkey powered well works. So cool!

 Jack and Ben liked each other.

 

We were pretty excited about it not raining like the forecast said it would, but it was blustery and very cold on high up on that hill so we headed out to our next stop. Unfortunately, we missed the bus just as it started to rain, instead of standing in the rain, waiting 20 minutes for the next bus, we decided to walk the 20 minutes to the bus station. And for that 20 minutes, was the only rain of the day with a little snow/slush thrown in for good measure. Go figure. From the station, we caught a bus to Osbourne House the summer home of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. When they bought it, it was too small (only 18 bedrooms!), so they tore it down and Albert designed a new one. They really did need more space because V&A had 9 kids! Plus all the servants and ladies in waiting. V&A also bought up all the nearby land and had their own private beach. Albert even designed the garden so that only from Victoria's rooms could you have a straight shot view to the shore - he lined trees in an arrow formation so the shore view from most other rooms was blocked. Now that's love right? Sadly, we couldn't take pictures inside, but it was beautiful and since they were the only monarchs to live there it has been preserved almost identically to the way it still is today.

I love Victoria and Albert. Victoria was the Queen and Prince Albert the Prince Regent and as such, tradition is that he always walks (in public) 10 paces behind the Queen to show his role as supporter and not equal to her. Well, Victoria thought that was rubbish and thought of him as her equal partner. She even had a second door built in to the wall leading from their sitting room to the room where she met with her Prime Ministers so that she and Albert could enter the room at the exact same time - and unprecedented move at that time. 

Albert was really involved as I said with the construction of the house and he was quite afraid of fire, so there is no wood at all used in the structure of the building. Also, there is a gap between the exterior and interior walls that was filled with sea shells as another fire-damper.

 A razorback at Osbourne House - Arkansas represent for Brian and Eila!

After Osbourne House, we hopped back on the bus to the West Cowes ferry terminal to catch it home. We didn't realize that with it being a vehicle ferry, it took an hour instead of 20 minutes! It was tight catching our train, but we barely did (it was in the station when we came running in like gang busters).

 

We finally got home around 8 that night. Rob thought we looked a little bedraggled and kindly documented it for us on (digital) film. It was a really fun day, albeit, a cold one. I wish that we would have more time to visit when it's warm, but we'll see - there's just so much to do!