Some of the faces of Australian tourism... Steve Irwin, Paul Hogan, ‘Where the Bloody Hell Are Ya’ Lara Bingle and , maybe the choir kids that ran around the outback singing for the QANTAS ad.
Well, someone needs to tell England to get behind Diane.
Diane was the guide for the Windsor Castle, Stonehenge and Bath tour that Tucky, Jeremy and I took and she went above and beyond the call of duty. She was very informative, but I think someone forgot to tell her in training that she didn’t have to speak at ALL times.
But Diane powered through and when she ran out of interesting historical titbits for us she would come up with things like this: “Ooh yes, and as you can see all the rubbish bins outside the houses, lots of them there aren’t there. Yes, well it is bin day today. You can see the different colours, black is for recycling, blue is for....” Thanks Diane.
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| The Kids |
Like kids on the school bus we took prime position on the backseats for our drive around England. I think Tucky may have been a little worried at my bus sleeping ability as we had a nine hour bus drive in a couple of days and, as it was my idea, I had promised to stay awake for entertainment purposes.
Windsor Castle is the Queen’s weekend residency and as luck would have it she was home when we arrived, unfortunately we were not asked to tea. But we wandered around the grounds, the beautifully decorated rooms and the chapel. We even caught the changing of the guard and then proceeded to run to the gate because Diane had told us to be out at strictly 11.15am and if we didn’t beat the guards out we may be locked in for a while.
Windsor Castle titbits according to Diane:
The Queen is the only person without a passport.
On her luggage, she just writes ‘The Queen’.
She doesn’t have a drivers licence yet she does like to give the buggy a burl around the castle gardens.
Whenever she arrives anywhere the first thing she asks for is the horse racing guide, Her Majesty doesn’t mind a bit of a flutter.
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| Windsor Castle and moat, with obvious lack of water. |
Stonehenge was our next stop and although it looks the same as what you see on the films, the ambience is a little different. It is a bit strange having something so grand and although manmade, seemingly natural, right next to a car park with a roped walkway around it and sprinklers set up. I think the mystery surrounding it does add to its charm. It’s at least 5000 years old and they know that it came from the south of Wales and that each stone block could have taken up to 600 men to move it one inch. No wonder people have been trying to figure out its significance and how and why they would move it there. One thing they do know is that throughout the year the sun between the stones act as a sort of Calendar.
Stonehenge titbit according to Diane:
The holes seen in some of the stones were not put there deliberately by the creators or an act of nature or anything else we guessed. They’re actually the result of the RAF’s target practice around the time of WW2... they decided to Heritage list it not long after that.
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| Stonehenge |
We stopped in the town of Lacock for lunch at a 14th century pub which was also the backdrop for a lot of the scenes in the Harry Potter films. I would expand on that but have no interest in Harry Potter whatsoever (Sorry, I know that statement hurt a few people back home)... My fish and chips were nice though.
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| 5 stars... |
We spent the last of the afternoon walking around Bath, with the noble mission of finding Tucky ice cream because “ice cream makes me happy”. It was a nice place with old buildings, a river, lots of shops and a nice park that you had to pay to use. We didn’t. But we did find ice cream.
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| yep, they're the happy faces. |
I also had an awkward conversation with an old English gentleman about how I was a long way from home. We got a fair way through the conversation before he said, “Yes, yes, I have been to Belfast before, you think there is not a lot there, but is a lovely place, yes just lovely”.
I had to explain that the lovely twang in my accent was in fact Australian and not Northern Irish...He still didn’t quite believe me.
It was a great day to spend with some good friends and there were a lot of laughs, and Diane did point out all the best chandelier shops on the way home.
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