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This morning we woke up at 9:00 am and had a delightful breakfast in the Mansion building here at Coworth Park. It was provide free with our booking on American Express Platinum which also gave us about 85 pounds to spend on site. Yesterday, on our final descent into Heathrow we flew right over Windsor Castle so we knew that it was pretty close by. Our friend Judy (see below) told us that this was a must-see tour and, while Dale had seen it before we decided it would be something good to see together. So, off we went. Fortunately, we hit it on a slow tourist day and so had virtually no wait lines. After a nice 20 minute cab ride to the castle we did a quick self-guided tour using the provided headsets. When we entered Queen Mary’s Doll House and the Royal Apartments area the guard watching the queue told us that some days the wait is 4 hours! We waited about 10 minutes! The short queues and the reasonably cool weather made the experience quite enjoyable. While they didn’t allow you to take pictures Dale managed to click a shot and we put it in the gallery below.
Like most things in the UK the history is incredible. This castle dates back to the early 1,000 AD time frame and has been occupied by Royals since then and including up to this morning! The Queen departed just before we arrived — she spends most of her weekends at Windsor and was leaving about the time we arrived, going off to see her husband, Philip, who is in the hospital with an infection.
After returning to Coworth Park in a modern version of the old-style UK cab, we had a nice lunch and took it easy by resting up for our special dinner with our friends, Judy and Franco. They live on their estate about 3 hours outside of London. They had asked us to come visit when we are in the area but we ended up not getting to go to their beautiful home, because it turns out that they were going on a Regent cruise starting in Iceland and then going to the Baltic! Because they had to get to Heathrow early in the morning they decided to stay at Coworth Park the night before which meant we could have dinner with them. While we were sad not to get to spend more time with them, we were excited to spend an evening catching up. Judy and Franco were part of the “Machu Picchu Survivors” — who we met on our 2010 Circle South America adventure.
A great time was had by all and we even managed to get to sleep by half past midnight — good and bad given we are 8 hours later than home, but sometimes you need to mix things up to get on the right time zone. One of the funny things we found out at dinner is that despite Judy living in the UK her entire life she has never been to Windsor Castle! What’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander? Well, as you can see, we didn’t see any geese but we did have some ducks and swans with their babies.
Tomorrow we embark the Oceania Marina — with a drive-by of “the pile of rocks” (otherwise known as Stonehedge).
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