Royal Farewell - Windsor, United Kingdom
Windsor, United Kingdom
I've still got a scar, albeit a mental one, from the last time I tried to do a touring day with my family after getting off a Disney Cruise. Some caustic combination of crushing reality and exhaustion at having stayed up for 40+ hours to absorb as much Disney as possible, means they're best left to sulk uninterrupted for those first few hours. This is the reason for us going straight home today rather than packing any more adventures into the tail of our trip. Unfortunately the cheapest flights out of Heathrow are in the evening, a full 12 hours after Mickey kicked us ashore. I had no choice but to plan something :)
Somehow Dover luggage collection was more disorganised than the Spanish, so we were stuck on board for an extra hour until our bags were ashore and and ready for us. Sitting in the D-Lounge waiting for our bags to be ready we received a FB post from the Beard family. They're in their Dover hotel all excited to be boarding the Magic in a few hours - the morose mood crushed harder.
So to my plans for the day, Stonehenge I thought. Almost all the way to Bath, driving from sea to almost sea suddenly seems like a silly idea. We picked up a Sangyyong with no aircon, happily the British weather looked after us though with a grey cool morning. Our first stop for the day was just a few kilometers down the road at the memorial to the Battle of Britain. Even Boo stopped in her tracks at the sight of the pilot statue sat cross legged looking out to the continent stewing across the channel.
I've noticed UK gents of a certain age seem obsessed with how to optimise motorway routes. I found out why - something happened in or around the tunnel causing a complete shutdown of all lorries heading in the opposite direction to us. I've never seen 10 solid kilometers bumper to bumper lorries - ouch. I smugly continued along until Google started updating our Stonehenge arrival time with 10 minute, 30 minute, 1 hour delays! We appeared to have our own crisis on the road ahead of us. The Traffic radio option that does nothing in European cars in Australia suddenly burst to life telling us their was a major incident ahead and to find an alternate route - clever.
Google's re-routing had us cut around the gridlock and half an hour later we were on the other side. A few nights ago Ed tried to tell us the story of the day he visited Hampton Court Palace and fell into a Henry VIII role play. I say he tried because for a good hour, first at dinner then later at drinks, whenever he commenced the story something, first circumstantial and later by design, interrupted his flow. Suddenly there's the Hampton Court Palace turn off, I couldn't resist a visit now.
A chance for a real cream tea in the Tilt (jousting practice yards) and a stroll around the Palace was all we allowed - Stonehenge you know. Back on the road an hour later Stonehenge now had an ETA of 3:30. Then another sign popped up for Ascot Racecourse. With Dad's invigorated GG fascination rubbing off a little on me I couldn't resist a selfie out the front of such hallowed grounds. Sans tickets and with Stonehenge beckoning the gates was as far as we could go.
Not thirty seconds later we realise that graphic of a castle we've been looking at on the road signs is Windsor Castle. Could you resist? We plug it into the GPS and start on our way. We're winding through the postcard English country lanes all thoroughly enchanted. We bump into the Thames and a few minutes later we're crossing her before finding ourselves in a more built up area. Miles from the city but still the streets look like those scenes of Semi rows from 70s English TV. I'm so mesmerised by it all I don't notice the aquaduck heading towards us. At the last minute I yell out to everyone to check it out, I do too, then POP.
My slight pull to the left to avoid the aquaduck allowed my passenger wing mirror to get suddenly intimate with it's peer on a stationary trady van, oops. Remember the aircon is busted in this thing, so all the windows are down. That POP was the sound of the mirror glass exploding all through the cabin, all over Fid. At least it woke him up :) The intention was to find somewhere to pull over, but we were in front of Windsor Castle well before we found anywhere. Consumed by the castle and the flag flying above it (someone is in residence!) we parked the car, cleaned up and headed back up the hill to explore the castle. We've implicitly given up on Stonehenge by now.
We stroll around the town, and press on to the gates of the Castle. Even the kids are excited as Gab explains that this is the first Palace or Castle we've visited on this trip that has royalty inside. They didn't come out to greet us though, so we headed back down the hill to contemplate lunch. Those grey skies finally let out their burden, suddenly everyone had the same idea as us. We were too late for an indoor table at any of the pubs that looked interesting. But I had another idea. Just down the road was Bray, home to the Fat Duck (currently a construction site) and it's little brother Heston Blumenthal's gastro-pub the Hinds Head.
The kitchen a the Hinds Head closed ten minutes before we arrived, they couldn't be talked into re-opening just for us. A proper tiny English country pub, we took a table in the dim back corner and tried a pint of the recommended Ale and crisps. With the drive back to Heathrow in front of me I stopped myself at the one, though the idea of saying "I'll have a half" in a pub like this almost had me.
Selfies of the construction site that is the Fat Duck is as close as I'm ever likely to get. We're at Crown later this year but can't get a table at the Fat Duck's temporary digs in Melbourne either :( We were heading back to Heathrow now, with just one more stop on the way - Eton.
I'd be a smug ******* if I went to School in an environment like this. A whole town dedicated to the School, a beautiful cathedral, picturesque playing fields, lakes, streets - the whole thing is straight out of some Edwardian fantasy. Just a minute on the street and I recognise the Etonian "Yaah" from the kid passing us ranting into his phone. We happen to pull up in front of a uniform shop. Proper school boy stuff, I picked up a Loake shoe cleaning kit to go with the new brogues and an Eton tie. No idea what house/college I bought but it looks cool.
A few years ago we scratched the housing on Gab's wing mirror - Volvo charged just short of a grand to repair it. As we pulled into the rental return I felt this tightness in my chest as I contemplated what this was going to cost. As the agent approached Gab bounced out of the car and started laying on the charm. Somehow the guy decides we haven't really damaged the housing (result!) and just need to replace the mirror - I mentally ratchet that $1000 bill down to $500. By the time we've unloaded our caravan of luggage and got ourselves to the service office he's already made his report and has this apologetic pall over his face as he hands me a bill for 35 pound - RESULT! Well done Gab!
We're ready to check in and for the first time in nearly six weeks we're about the weigh in our bags. We've only sent the one dramatic box home from Rapallo on this trip so the bags have been growing, but Gab understands we can buy an extra bag shipment pretty cheaply. The agent weighs each of the bags and tells us it will be an additional USD$1695! The disbelief on Gab's face gave way to the charm assault pretty quickly, but this ladies clever training meant she wasn't having a bar of it. Panic was probably the next evident expression but it was working pretty hard to suppress the self-evidently justified FU trying to scream it's way out.
We spent the next half an hour trying to extract 19.3 kgs from our bags. One by one we rummaged each bag and stacked a teetering pile on the scales next to us. We eventually made it and started stuffing what we could into our carry on. Our cabin luggage was now up around the 70 kgs and two of us don't carry anything. Happily the security guys thought my newly compressed pack with all these electronic component hastily stuffed in the bottom looked like the makings of tomorrow's headlines - we spent another half an hour being processed through the detailed pack search and swab.
Through and onto the concourse I can suddenly see where I'm spending the rest of our wait time - Heston's Perfectionist Cafe! We get a Blumenthal mean afterall! So far today I've had a Disney breakfast, a cream tea at the Palace and now I can't resist the idea of Heston's Perfectionist Egg's Benedict. Christ they're good. Sous vide poached eggs mean perfectly creamy yolks, I don't even remember the Hollandaise or muffins. The only other time we ate Heston food we talked them into bringing out the Nitro ice cream cart they reserved for the private dining room, it was so good even Baroness Thatcher joined us for a cone. No nitrocart here, in the Perfectionist's Cafe they have a whole station for icecream production right out the front of the restaurant. We all had sundae's of various combinations just to ensure we crashed ******* the flight home.
Yesterday Gab dropped the great idea of stopping for showers in Singapore to make that last leg home a little less trying. By the time we got to Changi I was busting for it. Showered we headed to the Carlsberg bar where I found myself actually parting with $50 for a litre of Erdinger, best and most expensive sleeping pill I've ever had. We had the double row on the final leg home to Sydney, the one with the missing seat in the row in front. Stretched out, rugged up, freshly bathed and liquored up. I might have been asleep before take off.
It has been six weeks to the day and we're suddenly standing in front of our house. The girls have seen 11 countries, Fid and I can add Wales to that list. We finally toured the Romantic Road and got my Bavarian fix. We had a ball in tuscany and saw Siena for the first time. We saw Cinque Terre from the sea and the rest of both the Italian and French Rivieras. We got too short a time in Provence. We boiled in Paris and fell in love with Madeline. We were humbled to be welcomed so warmly in London with the lovely Wynn-Jones and Meleagros families - the kids still can't shut up about their first wedding, the hands down best part of the trip. We had a perfect Sunday Roast with the Beard family on Southbank. We got to see Copenhagen and fell absolutely in love with Stockholm thanks to Karin and Östen. We saw Helsinki in Finland and got flawed by St Petersburg and Russia. We almost missed out on the beauty of Tallinn but soaked up as much Disney Magic as we could with the charming Ed & Staci. We stumbled into the splendor of Windsor and it's surrounds. But more than any of this, we got to spend six magnificent weeks together. Six weeks of memories we'll look back on and remind ourselves of the kids before they grew up too much. Next year it's senior school for Fid and this young man and the young lady behind him couldn't be in better shape for their journey into their teens and adulthood. I just wish I knew how to stop it :(