Wednesday, April 2, 2008

4/2/08

Today we started off by getting up at 6 am for breakfast and heading out the door by 7:30 to catch the bus for our final and last away trip around England! It was a really sad thought and we all tried to not think about it.

Our first stop was at Blenheim Palace where the duke of Blenheim still lives! Crazy huh, he lives in the far left side of the palace where they obviously didnt do tours there. But we got there around 9:30am and our tour didnt start until 10:30 so we had an hour to walk around the gardens and the cemetery. There was a really pretty lake with a monument on a hill side. We still dont know what the monument was for but it was still a really neat thing to see.

During the tour of the palace we learned alot of really neat things about Consuelo Vanderbilt, she married Charles the 9th duke of Blenheim who was completely broke at the time and if it werent for her money the Blenheim palace would not be in existence. She was forced into her marriage and was in love with some one else way before she even married Charles, but her mother threatened her that if she ever married the man that she was in love with that she would find him and kill him. She really Consuelo Vanderbilt had no choice but to be forced into a marriage. She had two children with Charles and there is a tapestry that hangs in the drawing room in the palace with the family sewn on it. She was a really pretty woman and I wish I could read more about her life, she seemed so interesting to me.



After our tour we headed back out to the bus to go to Cotswald village. It was about an hour away. There was a little path way that we had to take to get to the main town and my professor said that the main part of town reminded him of Disneyland on main street. There were a bunch of people and alot of tourist shops. So my professor took us on a path way through the country side to this place called "Lower Slaughter." The is the complete opposite of what the place is actually like. As you can tell by the picture it is alot quieter then the main town and the houses are alot older and more picturesque. There were little streams with ducks swimming in them and we went passed the old mill where we bought some really good ice cream. The weather was perfect all day! The wind didnt blow at all and the sun came out every once in a while but it was never cold and we enjoyed every minute of it.

On the drive home most of us slept. My friend Anna fell asleep with her mouth open and I decided that it would be funny to take pictures of her with her mouth open. We were all laughing so hard.

When we got home our professors had pre ordered gourmet burgers for us from this place by our flat and they were amazing! I got this cranberry chicken burger and they were huge, most of us could only eat half because they were so big. But our fridge has been broken the past few days so its not like we could save our food and put it in the fridge. Hopefully that gets fixed soon, but the day went great and I am so sad that it was our last trip!

1 comment:

Janet said...

Poor Anna caught sleeping in a most sad pose!