Lots have gone on within the last week but only enough time to blog about what went on this very day. We had a jam packed day starting our all day tour at 9am and ending at 8pm–yep, 11 hours! We visited Windsor Castle, City of Bath and Stonehenge. Since most of the day consisted of traveling from one location to the next, we were able to rest our feet and eyes in between tours. We were even able to leave a lot of our belongings on the bus so it was less cargo to lug around at the various sites which helped a lot with our actual tour experience. When we visited places in the other cities we had to lug around everything all the time. It would quickly drain our energy and made for the actual experience less enjoyable. You can’t imagine the amount of things we need to bring along for a child let alone for ourselves for an all day out. Thank goodness for this last day of touring to be a lot less painful.
Windsor Castle is actually actively in use by Queen Elizabeth and is probably the largest inhabited castle in the world. She visits mostly on weekends and hosts large events there. We were able to experience the castle setting up for an event and even got up close to one of the famous guards.
City of Bath was quite interesting with its well preserved Roman Baths. I’m actually impressed with their water pumping advancements so early on over 2,000 years ago.
Noly and his daddy, videotaping from above.
Nolan encountered a lady bug and was not scared at all. He was more intrigued than anything.
Stonehenge was a bit eerie, but great to see and mark off my bucket list. It’s in such a rural area and so daunting of a task to create that it makes you wonder its true purpose. During our 45 minutes there the weather changed drastically from overcast, windy and cold to warm + sunny the next.
This would have been a great photo if Nolan wasn’t so cranky about it.
This one also would have been great if the old lady wasn’t in it.
You can see that it was overcast in this image versus the previous 3 which were nice and sunny.
Nolan’s showing off his 2 front buck teeth.
You can see from this barrier that we were not allowed to get up close. Over the years people would vandalize or chip away at the stones so now it’s off limits.
Isn’t it an awesome site to see??
This was our very last day in Europe and we were glad to be heading home. I was starting to get really stressed, frustrated and near a nervous breakdown with all that we had to go thru to have Nolan along on the trip. Every night I would have to pre-plan what to pack for the day (# of diapers, meals, snacks, water, etc), what he’d wear, what I’d wear, admission tickets, how to get there, what time to get up, what’s for breakfast, etc. My mind was running at such an alarming speed every day trying to plan everything that I was really in for the breakdown at the end. It was hard at times to slow down and enjoy the moment. I relinquished a lot of photographing during our site seeing just because I was so drained from everything. For future trips they will be a lot less than 3 weeks–I’m thinking no more than 7/8 days, closer destinations to home and possibly a helping hand to come along. This momma wants to enjoy trips too so it will need to be planned a lot better.
All of our belongings (5 of us) before heading to Heathrow for our final flight home.
