Warwick Castle, Stratford-upon-Avon, the Cotswolds and Oxford

I hadn't actually wanted to do this particular tour, since it included Warwick Castle and I thought that would be too much, but they assured me the time in Oxford would be the same for both.

We had to get up even earlier on this day, because our bus was picking us up at 7.15am. Sounds good and all, but this was just a 'feeder' bus to take us to Victoria station where we had to wait until 8.30 for the tour to actually start. Also, there would be no service to take us back to our hotel after the tour. Oh well.

The day started off overcast, and the weather deteriorated from there. Very sad. Taking photos in the rain, with camera in one hand and umbrella in the other really is no fun!

Anyway: first stop, after 2 hours, was Warwick Castle. It reminded me somewhat of Windsor castle in its style and everything - though it is much smaller of course:

The castle is owned by Madame Tussauds, so the interior was furnished and had wax statues in period costume etc, which was very nice. Their wax figures are fantastically realistic - so realistic that my mother-in-law thought they were the real thing!:

It was fortunate that this place had a lot of 'inside' to explore, since it was pouring down rain outside. It would have been nice to be able to explore the outside more - the ramparts etc, but the time was limited anyway and  there was no way we were going to do that in the rain.

After about 1 1/2 hours we were bundled back on the bus and it was onwards to the Cotswolds. Not that we stopped there - we just drove past and the guide told us a little about them. We had to be in Stratford-upon-Avon for 12pm lunch, after all. I would have liked the opportunity to at least take a photo or two, but there was no point taking them out of the window with the rain on it.

So next stop was Stratford-upon-Avon, where William Shakespeare was born and later retired. Cute little town, but not that interesting:

We went straight to lunch, for which we had 45 minutes, including time required to get to the meeting place, which was the Shakespeare birthplace house. At our table was a nice american gentleman, who was travelling alone and 83 years old. I was impressed with all the traveling he's done - he'd just come from a trip to Russia and was leaving for Scotland a couple of days after this tour.

The restaurant was quite pretty inside:

The lunch consisted of fish and chips (of course), which were not very nice, being all dried out and wrinkly. Yuck. It was supposed to include ice cream and coffee for dessert, but there simply wasn't enough time to wait for it to be served, so we left immediately after eating, to backtrack a little to go and photograph the school Shakespeare had attended:

Then it was a mad rush to get to the meeting place so we could get into the Shakespeare house:

It was not that interesting, unfortunately, though the building and the gardens out the back were pretty enough:

We had a look through here, and then wandered around outside until we had to meet to get back on the bus.

Here we ran into a delay thanks to the nice gentleman at our table. He didn't turn up at the Shakespeare house and no one had seen him since lunch. Apparently he'd decided to get the ice-cream. We waited and then drove around and the tour guide went back to the restaurant etc looking for him but he was nowhere to be found.  After 20 minutes of looking in vain, the tour continued towards Oxford.

Yay Oxford! Of course it was pouring down rain, but we were finally here!!!! And it was beautiful! We were there about 2 hours altogether, and I took 100 photos. :-) Here's a few of them:

You may have noticed some of these places look familiar if you've seen the Harry Potter movies, or watched Morse or Lewis (British cop shows). I would love to go back here with several more hours, or even days to spend just wandering around - especially with better weather and fewer tourists. How I envy people who studied there!

Now it was a two hour or so trip back to London, where we were just dropped off near Hyde Park to make our own way back to our hotel. We decided to go and check out Harrods instead of going straight home. That shop is so pretty on the onside with all its tiles in the food areas and fancy decorations in the other rooms. Of course it's also way out of our price-range. The store seemed to be full of arabic people, whose league this evidently was in!

We'd thought to eat here but couldn't be bothered in the end and just went back to the hotel, with the intention of exploring this part of town the following day, after we'd done Buckingham Palace and the parks.