Hampton Court

Hello there and welcome to Feb! Wow, how time flies, especially when one loves their job!

I've spend the last 1.5 weeks working out of our Dublin office. Dublin is a great city...much more modern than I thought...and some FANTASTIC food. My coworker is also a foodie, so we went out way too much and I must say my attempts to stay with a good diet was set aside! Its so great to travel for work, its spoiling me for personal travel. I was staying at the Westin downtown, which is a stone's through from Trinity College, and 10 mins walk to work. Totally spoiled. I wont say too much about Dublin because Scott and I are going there next weekend (Feb 9-10) and I saved all the sightseeing for that!

Today we headed out for some more sightseeing. Sat have become our sightseeing day, and Sundays are for cleaning, laundry, meeting up with friends for drinks etc. So today we headed out again with London Walks. This time we headed for something close to home, Hampton Court - the home of Henry VIII (yes the one with 6 wives) and William III and Queen Mary.

We arrived at Waterloo station to meet our guide around 9:30. We were thrilled to find out there would only be 4 of us, plus the guide, on our tour. The guide was Hilary, who also did the Peak District and St Albans tour. She is fantastic. So the 5 of us headed out on the trains to Hampton Court. Interestingly, the reason the train goes out to Hampton Court is due to Queen Victoria seeing the monetary value of having Hampton Court as a tourist attraction. Its about 30 mins from Waterloo.

We spent the day with Hilary, going through the Tudor palace that Henry and his many wives inhabited, the lovely gardens (which would be fantastic during spring/summer) and the Baroque palace of King William III and Queen Mary. To Scott's delight they had a special demonstration today...the Tudor kitchens were filled with people making real Tudor foods. This included a guy hand stuffing pig intestine's with beef...making sausages. Yuck. They also roasted venison in one of the HUGE fireplaces.

We both agreed that we loved the Tudor side, and while the other parts were beautiful, we like the older styles better. But all round it was fantastic. Hilary spent so much time with us, she was great. We would both highly recommend this day trip if anyone is interested in this part of England's history. You can check out some pics below.

Tomorrow we plan to head back out to Greenwich to take some pics of our new place and the surrounding area...so stay tuned!