Final days in London

Its been a few days since my last blog, so I will be posting a couple of blogs tonight to update anyone who is actually reading this drivel. This blog will be about our last couple of days in London, from memory the last one I wrote was about the tower of London and St Pauls. So following that we did a day tour on Friday the 3rd to Bath, Windsor castle and Stonehenge. All were amazing places in their own right.

Windsor castle was the first stop on the trip. It was originally built to guard the one of the roads into the city of London, so hence its location. Huge place with stunning rooms. Unfortunately like a lot of the places we saw (mostly religious buildings and royal buildings) you cant actually take photos of the inside. One of the rooms in the palace is actually dedicated to Queen Mary's doll house. To give you an idea of the size the house took up an entire room itself. Quite amazing and any girls dream really.
We were at Windsor on a Friday and apparently the Queen goes to Windsor in the afternoon to spend the weekend. We happened to get a glimpse of one of her corgis being exercised in the private gardens.

Other than that Windsor was much like other royal buildings we are seeing on our trip, ostentatious, huge, with impractically high ceilings. As an aside you can also see Eton college from Windsor castle where both the princes (Harry and Williams) were educated. The fees are in the realms of 30,000 pounds a year or something to that extent according to the guide.

Bath was the second stop on the trip. Stunning white stone buildings. Apparently Bath was bombed during the war like a lot of London was and some of the buildings they re did in the 50's and 60's were down right ugly. So they have gone ahead and demolished a lot of those buildings and built new ones in the same style as the rest of the city.

Bath was well, really old. What you can see in the photo is pretty much it apart from the museum and a few side rooms with more old rocks. It was more the architecture of the city as a whole which was stunning. An area of Bath known as the circus was particularly amazing.

The actor Nicholas Cage used to own one of these apartments up until a year ago when he got in some financial trouble.

Stonehenge was the final stop on the trip. It literally is a lot of very old rocks in a field. What's fascinating is how on earth they got them there. They think that the rocks come from two main places, Wales and somewhere about 20kms from the stones. The circle was build in two stages, about 200 years apart about 5000 years ago. There is also the remains of an even earlier circle being there before that. The history of the place really is quite interesting to read up on.

So that's all for that tour. The next day (Saturday) we visited Richards great aunt and uncle in Littlehampton, south of London. We then went over to Brighton, and left very soon after getting there. Brighton was very hot and there were masses and masses of people there. It just was not nice at all. London is busy but in a very organised way. Its quite an impressive city with the efficiency of the tube (except on Sunday when some of the lines weren't operating) and the impressive way that they herd thousands of tourists around attractions with precision and skill. I could spend a lot more time exploring the city, but I don't think I could live there!