Alnwick Castle, That Much Awesome

On our way home from Scotland, we made a stop to Alnwick to visit the castle.  It was on of the castles that was used in the filming of Harry Potter.  In particular, the most memorable scene was when Harry learned to fly on his broomstick!

We got there around lunch time.  The courtyard had venders, quite similar I imagine to where the market would have been.

After lunch we went to the Knight training area.  And if you look at the pictures below you will see that costumes were available!

My little Knights!

We went on the knight training and then afterward we went around the courtyard doing a few other activities.  Here are my oldest two playing a game of chess!

My youngest two took a turn in the stockage.  They also went and made soap!

Then we took a little tour of the rest of the castle.  Here is the courtyard where Harry learned to fly!

Alnwick had an unusual dungeon, it was a large chamber in the ground.  This was the entrance.  

So, they had broom flying lessons for the kids.  Of course we signed them all up.  It was a lot of hilarious fun.  I laughed so much!  

This was the last photo that Sean was able to get as the camera he used died.  I have a ton of other photos on my other camera that I can't download right now.  This one of the 'flying' instructors. He is trying to get the participants to get into a STRAIGHT line.  I think that it took at least 5 minutes for it to happen. 

We also looked at the state rooms.  The castle is owned by the Duke and Duchess of Northumberland, Ralph Percy.  It has belonged to the Percy family since the 700's.  The current Duke has inhabited the castle since the 1990's.  It was evident that this castle, unlike many of the others that we had seen was actually inhabited by people.  They had family pictures scattered around the home and the library, which was beautiful, had a foozeball table and a big screen TV in it.  The library was so awesome that my oldest son and I had library envy.  We want one!

We loved Alnwick so much that as we left we thought we should try and make a trip back up when they are having a Harry Potter weekend.  It was seriously that much awesome.

Points North and Scotland

To finish our trip up north...

We left the cottage and took a few pictures...  this was along the little road that we traveled on each day.  Keswick was to the right in the picture below...

Just missing my husband in this beautiful picture.

Here we are on the Ashness Bridge.  Very cute, old, and very narrow!

Then we headed to Carlisle and visited the castle.

I am related to Henry I, he is my 31st or 32nd great grandfather! Sadly, since my family decided to emigrate, we have lost all rights to the crown.  Plus, we are related to the royal family through Henry I's oldest illegitimate son, Robert FitzRoy.  Robert wouldn't take the throne, our family surely can't!

Here are my sons, playing with the canons!

Carlisle had proper dungeons!  I say that because we have visited many castles that did not have a proper dungeon.

When we arrived in Carlisle, we spied the McVite factory!  McVite's are really good tea biscuits.  The chocolate and carmel ones are our favorites!

After we explored the castle we crossed the border into Scotland.  We spent a few days wandering around.  The first day we went to Rosslyn Chapel.  It was the chapel featured in The Da'Vinci Code.  Pictures were not allowed inside, so I don't have any to share here.  The second day was rainy and we spent it wandering around Edinburgh.  We visited Hollyrood Castle and walked the Royal Mile.  It was a day that not many pictures were taken either.

The one thing that we did not do was find my 9 year old some good lamb to eat.  He really likes lamb and we thought that it would be easy to find.  We had extremely bad luck in our wanderings though and we did not find any!  

Pinching Myself

Everyday that I get into my little car, as I drive down the road, I have to pinch myself.  I tell myself that I am indeed a lucky person and remind myself that we really are living in England.

I know that it may seem a bit silly to know that I really do that, but I assure you that I have done it everyday, until yesterday.

Yesterday, I realised with sadness that our stay here will be ending soon.

It has been a beautiful, wonderful year that I will always treasure in my heart of hearts.  We have had some fantastic experiences and made some good friends.  We may have not seen or  done everything that we wanted to, but we have lots of reasons to come back for a visit.

I have to admit that I am feeling a bit robbed.  I never made it out of the first stage.  Not that it matters...

Now that I have stopped pinching myself I guess that I can start dealing with the list of tasks that it is going to take to get us home.

Sticky Toffee Pudding

Sticky Toffee Pudding is Sean's favorite dessert.  While we were in the Watendlath we discovered that originated from the Lake District.  In reading a local magazine that was left in the cottage I found a place that made sticky toffee puddings!  So, we piled into the car on a bright, sunny, cool morning and headed out!

On our way our, we stopped by the side of the road to take this picture by the tarn.  Keswick is to the left, you just can't see it as it out of the picture.

When we were done we headed to a stone circle that was close.  

As you can see, the scenery was beautiful.  As we were leaving the stone circle we heard jets.  We looked up and saw two of them flying around the fells to the right of this picture.  I talked to a local potter about it and she said that they are always out on clear days.  She also told me that if you are hiking on the fells it can be quite disconcerting to look down and see the jets below you!

After a bit of driving we arrived in the village where the bakery was located.  We parked and headed up to the small cafe for some lunch.

Here is a little river that ran though the village, very pretty and green!

While walking trough the village we saw this, horse in your backyard anyone?

After lunch and grabbing our some more of the Cartmel sticky toffee pudding to take with us, we headed back to the cottage.  It was a gorgeous afternoon, so we headed out for a hike.

We headed over a few of the smaller fells and found this lovely valley.

Here we are walking back, see the sheep on the trail!  They are the rare Herdwick breed.

Walking back to Watendlath.

My husband is standing on the packhorse bridge taking the picture.

We headed back for some dinner and to pack, the next morning we were leaving for Scotland.

Keswick in the Rain

Ok, Keswick is actually pronounced kez-ick with the accent on the first syllable.  I know, you have to be asking why do they have the stupid 'w' in the word then.  Who knows?  The Queen's English is not easy for the American visitor is all that I can tell you.  Thankfully the British are polite and tolerant or American mispronunciations....

So, on our second day, it was rainy and windy.  We woke up and had a little breakfast and decided to head to Keswick to do a little shopping.  In particular we were on a mission to find sheepskin.  We have a 'minor' addiction in our home.

Unfortunately, we did not find any sheepskin in our wanderings.  We did find a candy shop (we always find those) and I had an interesting conversation with the shop keeper.  He was asking about why we were there and where we were headed.  I gladly chatted with him while the rest of my family wandered the shop looking at the many jars trying to decide what they wanted.  He had a very distinctive accent that I had to listen very hard to to understand what he was saying.  It was very comical to me when he was telling me that as we went north into Scotland, that the accent would get harder to understand.  I did not want to tell him that I was struggling to understand him that way that it was.  Even funnier was Sean could barely understand him at all!

Shopping in Keswick proved to be very dog friendly.  Here were three dogs owned by different owners.  They are looking up toward to where their owners are, eating in a cafe!  They are so cute and so well behaved.  Chip will never achieve this kind of good behavior, ever.

I did find some very lovely hand crocheted fingerless gloves made from hand spun local wool.  I was very happy!  After a good long wander, we found a pub to eat in as we were all looking forward to having some soup and a cheese toasty (they call them cheese toasties in England not grilled cheese).  Now, I am a cheese toastie girl.

Eating at the pub. Waiting for our soup and cheese toasties!

When we were done we headed to Barrow Rock, it was a huge rock that broke off a fell/mountain.

Looking at the fells through the rain.

The huge rock!

Mark climbing the stairs to the top of the rock.  Note the special color effects that Sean used!

Holding up the rock.  It landed in a very unusual way, on the point of the stone.

Walking back in the rain.  Again note the special color effects!

We ended the night back at the cottage, eating a dinner of warmed lentil soup that I picked up in a little store in Keswick.  

Watendlath

Watendlath.  Don't even ask me how to pronounce it.  I tried over and over again, and I managed to get it wrong every time.

So, Sean took a week off, it was the last week before school started.  So, after some deliberation, we headed to the Lake District and then on to Edinburgh, Scotland.

We left Monday morning and we drove north to the Lake District.  It started out sunny and then as we traveled north we found some rain.  As we wound into Cumbria the terrain, the tarns and the fells are beautiful.  We arrived in Keswick and our cottage was very close in Watendlath.  We were lucky because the rain tapered off and stopped when we arrived at our cottage.

Our cottage was named Fold Head Farm.  It was inhabitated by Sir Hugh Walpole used the home as the home for his fictional character Judith Paris in a series of books that he wrote.  The cottage has a slate sign with her name on it.  After a through look though the cottage, we also discovered that Prince Charles had visited Watendlath during the '90's.

Watendlath has been inhabited since at least the 14th century.  It was owned by an abby and the sheep were tended by the local farmer.  The abby dissolved and the farmers continued to tend their sheep.  During the 16th century the small valley reached it's peak residents when 16 families lived there.  The small hamlet was eventually owned by Queen Victoria's daughter Louise.  She gifted the land to the National Trust in memory if her brother King Edward VII.  It is currently rented out to the farmer by the National Trust.  Herdwick sheep are kept by the farmer and owned by the trust.  The Herdwick sheep are a rare breed of sheep.

Here you can see the tarn aka lake.  

Walking up the path.

We found Lodore Falls, a famous set of falls that has been visited since the Victorian era.  

Note that Chip now has wellies on as well.  His are made of MUD!

We were on a little crest.  We took a little rest and this is looking back the way that we came.

This was looking into the valley.  

This is a stone packhorse bridge.  You can see the tarn to the right.

The countryside in the Lake District is so beautiful!  We only visited a few days.  I can see the pull of wanting to go back again and again to see the beautiful terrain and to hike.  Hiking in the Lakes District is a true British past time.  There are books devoted to the picturesque walks.  There is also a monthly magazine that features a different hike in every issue along with pictures of things to see. 

 

Pink or Red?

Taking a break from our UK adventures for a moment.... please bear with me dear readers!

So, this whole thing started for me when those Facebook notes were circling around a few years ago.  You know, fill out the questions and then tag people on them that might want to see them?

One of the questions was pink or red?  I was stumped.  Yeah, you must be thinking, what?  Why would a question like that bother you?  At the time I wrote both and time rolled on.  

I noticed that other friends had a preference and I wondered what the heck was wrong with me.  Why didn't I have a preference?  So, I started to pay attention to the question of pink or red?  At the time I was decorating my house.  I had just repainted and I was buying accessories to go into the space.  I realized that I did like to accent our home with red.  At the same time I had been totally drawn to pink clothes and I seemed to have an explosion in the color pink.  Then I really looked at my wardrobe and realized that I did not own a lot of red at all.  Hmmmm.... so I apparently liked to decorate in reds and wear pinks.  Interesting and it really seemed that my answer as both was pretty spot on.

Then I moved to the UK, had lots of crazy things happen... and still over time I have pondered this question.  Why?  Why does this question bother me so much?  It was when my mother in law was here during her last visit that I finally figured it out.  

When I was little, I was a girly-girl.  I loved all things pink and I loved to wear dresses.  My poor mom was horrified.  She is not a girly-girl.  She hated dresses as a little girl.  She never wanted to wear them, her mom MADE her and she hated it.  So, these things filtered down onto me.  Which has nothing to do with pink, yet.

I was about 6 and I needed a winter coat so, my mother sent my grandmother out to take me shopping for one.  I found the most beautiful PINK puffy coat.  I LOVED it.  It was BEAUTIFUL.  I bet that you might have a guess where this is going?  My mom detested it.  Hated it.  I was a devastated.   

As many of you know my parents were divorced when I was little.  A family of 3 that became a family of two.  Just me and my mom against the world.  So, I had spent some of the time dealing with that by pairing us together, I was pink (my favorite color) and my mom was blue.  I did it with our favorite candies, and anything else that I could.  So, when she hated my coat.  I tried to be a pink hater.... not always very successfully either ;)  But that messed up my pink and blue color thing, because my mom disliked pink so much, and her favorite color was blue.  I changed my favorite color to blue too.  

So, fast forward to now.  It has made me realize that I want my children to choose their own style and get the things that they want.  I took my oldest son shoe shopping and he loved a pair of denim high tops.  I was surprised.  It was not what I would have picked out for him and then I said too much and he decided that he did not want to get them anymore.  He knows about the pink coat story and I reminded him to not make this a "pink coat".  I want him to find his own style.

I realized that what happened years ago had made me try and be a pink hater. I don't want my actions or words to inadvertently affect my children as my mother's had inadvertently affected me.  I have been letting go of hating pink unconsciously the last few years and it has been exploding around me.  I think that having only boys, has intensified my need for pink.  I have watched my wardrobe, which was mostly made up of neutrals explode with PINK (purples, too).  Now that I know why I have been reluctant to buy pinks, I have let it go and embraced it.  What can I say?  I love PINK!  

I will say that not all pinks appeal to me (Pepto Bismol).  I will NEVER get a pink car and there is such a thing as too much pink.  I would love to have a beautiful RED Volkswagon Beetle or a cute Red BMW or even a little red Audi TT!   Hey, a girl can dream, right?  :)