A Castle, a Palace and some Legos

I'm trying to get caught up on posts here, so before I write about our weekend in Scotland I need to cover the previous weekend. Saturday we drove out towards London again, this time to see the Windsor Castle. This was a really neat castle and I guess the Queen likes to stay here on weekends a lot (she wasn't there this weekend though.) and she holds a lot of state events and dinners here as well. A lot of the time we spent here was spent in line waiting to see Queen Mary's Doll house. I was a little skeptical at first, thinking it would be a waste of time, but it was actually pretty cool. They wouldn't allow us to take any pictures, but this thing was huge and it had all these rooms like they had in the palace with tiny furniture and accessories that artists of the day created and donated to this doll house. It was really neat to see the tiny little things in each room. They even had things like a vacuum cleaner in the maid's room, a huge dining room table with real silver dishes; it was even supposed to have running water, but didn't see that. It was pretty neat to see. We saw the state rooms, and walked around the grounds also. The church there, St. George's Chapel, was really neat to see too. King Henry VIII was buried there along with his wife Jane Seymore.


Windsor Castle

The Courtyard at Windsor Castle

St. George's Chapel

After that, we hurried over to see Hampton Court Palace before it closed for the day. I think this one was my favorite place so far. The outside of the palace was absolutely beautiful and it didn't seem like they "renovated" this one as much. It almost seemed older like it may have looked back in the 1500's. This palace was one that Henry VIII lived in a lot of the time, so they had a lot of exhibits about him and his first wife Katharine of Aragon. They also had the kitchens set up to be how they would have looked during that time period and had people in costume making food from that era. It was pretty cool. In one of the rooms, they had the costumes that were worn in the film, "The Other Boleyn Girl." Those were cool to see. The courtyard was amazing--I'll include a picture of it, along with the many beautiful gardens.

Hampton Court Palace

Inside the palace (even though we weren't

supposed to take pictures)

Costumes from the movie "The Other Boleyn Girl"

The fountain courtyard

The fountain courtyard

Us with Henry

The beautiful gardens

The beautiful girls in the gardens

Hampton Court Palace

The next day, we thought we'd do something fun that the girls would enjoy so we took them to Legoland. The weather was supposed to be nice that day so we were all in shorts and flip-flops, but it ended up raining the whole day and was kind of chilly. Besides that though, it was really fun. It was really cool because most everything there was made of Legos. They had fun rides for the kids and they also had entire towns made out of Legos. Like they had all the major buildings from downtown London there with trains and cars that really moved. They also had places from Paris and Switzerland and a bunch of other places. It was pretty amazing. So, that was a fun day. The girls were really glad to have a break from the boring castles and all the walking. :)

Maggie on the merry-go-round

Big Ben and the London Eye

Riding on the swings

A Castle at Legoland

Lydia on the merry-go-round

Riding on Thomas the train

This is a video of Lydia and Paige driving their Lego cars. Paige doesn't quite know how to steer, so she's all over the road. They even got little driver's licences to take home with them.