we started out on thursday afternoon, right after i got out of class, and drove up to the north of england. not gonna lie, i slept most of the way, but what i did see of the countryside was beautiful. are you tired of me saying that yet? sorry, my descriptive abilities when it comes to landscapes are apparently pretty limited. anyway, after about three and a half hours of driving, we stopped at chatsworth house, home to the duke of devonshire. it's also the house they used for pemberley in the 2005 pride and prejudice movie. yeah. so i was totally preparing to freak out as we drove up to the house and... the entire front was covered in scaffolding. womp womp. seriously one of the most disappointing moments of my life. i didn't cry though. i'm not quite that ridiculous.
we did get to tour the inside of the house though, and it was super cool. the duke and duchess have a pretty extensive art collection, and it's displayed all throughout the house. the sculpture gallery elizabeth and her aunt and uncle walk through in the movie? totally an actual room in the house.
also, there's a huge suite of rooms on the second floor that the first duke prepared for a royal visit from the king and queen (i don't remember which ones) - though they never actually came - which is super swanky. have you ever seen tooled leather wallpaper? it sounds ridiculous and weird but it was actually really cool looking. i mean, who even comes up with the idea to do that? interior design geniuses, that's who. also, i'm pretty sure every single ceiling in that house had a mural painted on it.
insane. but so stinking cool. after touring the house, we hopped back in the car and drove another two hours to liverpool, where we checked into our hotel and fell asleep watching "america's got talent." (what country are we in again?)
friday morning we got up bright and early and drove to blackpool, about an hour away, to spend the day at pleasure beach, a giant amusement park. in case you're thinking to yourself, "that's a really weird thing to do on vacation in england," well, you're right. but you have to know that my brother is a huge roller coaster enthusiast and he is determined to ride every roller coaster in the world over the course of his life. so we went to pleasure beach to help him achieve that goal.
british amusement parks are weird. this one was actually much more normal than "gulliver's land," where we went on our last trip to england, but it was still just a little strange. it was kind of like six flags, but there was no consistent theme, and it had a little bit of that creepy carnival feel to it. also, british roller coasters are definitely inferior to american roller coasters. much more shaky and kind of painful to ride. but we had a lot of fun and jack was absolutely beaming all day, which of course made all the ride-induced bruises worth it.
on the way home, we stopped at a pub in a tiny town for dinner, and i ate my third steak and ale pie of the week. guys, i think i might have a problem. they're just so good! i don't know who started that nasty rumor that english food is bad but it is just a straight up lie. eat steak and ale pie tonight. your belly will thank you.
saturday was the best day of my entire stay in england. maybe - no, definitely - one of the best days of my life. saturday was beatles day.
first, story time: when i was two years old, my mom came home from a business trip to find me crying my eyes out and my dad trying to console me, to no avail. when she asked what on earth had happened, he told her that i'd just asked him if we could go to a beatles concert someday, and he'd had to tell me no because the band had been broken up for over 20 years (he didn't bother telling me john was dead, that could really only make things worse). i promise you this is a true story. at two years old, i was already that devoted to the beatles. they've been my favorite band since before i could talk, and i've only become a bigger fan since. so now hopefully you'll understand how big of a deal saturday was for me.
we started the day at "the beatles story," the museum that walks you through the band's entire history. it starts before they even met each other and goes all the way up to the present, highlighting all their time together and each of their solo careers. i'm not gonna lie, the end was pretty depressing (did they really have to break up? did that crazy guy really have to shoot john??) but i really enjoyed it overall and it was really informative. each room in the museum was a recreation of an important place in the band's history, like the cavern club (where they played all the time before they got famous) and abbey road studios, and of course they played beatles songs throughout. i ate it right up. and bought myself a mug to commemorate the experience. of course.
after the museum, we had to rush to catch our tour of john lennon's and paul mccartney's childhood homes. yes. their homes. we got to tour the insides of the houses they grew up in. the houses they lived in when they first met. the houses where they wrote their first songs. un. freaking. real.
we started at john lennon's house, called mendips. he lived there with his aunt "mimi" from age 5 to age 23. it's pretty tiny by american standards, but according to our tour guide, it's actually quite large for an english home.
oh, but get this - the guy who gives the tours lives in the house. weird right? i just don't think i could do that. but he obviously really loves what he does and is really serious about preserving the houses (he's caretaker of paul's house too) just as they were in the 1950s, when john and paul were growing up in them. john lived in the smallest bedroom i have ever seen, upstairs at mendips, and his house is where he and paul originally began playing together. i got to stand in his living room, where the quarrymen (john, paul, and george's band before they formed the beatles) used to practice. i'm still in utter disbelief.
from there, we went down the road a ways to paul's house, 20 forthlin road.
it was also tiny, but seemed bigger to me because instead of narrow hallways everywhere like at john's, all of the rooms just led right into each other. paul's bedroom was also unbelievably small, but i'm sure he doesn't have that problem nowadays. paul's house was where he and john did a lot of song writing in their early days - they actually wrote the song "i saw her standing there" in his living room. and i got to be there. seriously?! God is way, way too good to me.
in case you hadn't noticed, i'm not very good at articulating how experiences like this make me feel. mostly because they make me literally speechless at the time; at most, all i can usually get out is "wow." but my mom said something after we finished our tour that i think summed it up pretty perfectly: "it's always really exhillerating when you get to be somewhere where genius has been." precisely, mom. thanks for helping me out with that.
after the tour, we got back in the car and headed to york, simply for the sake of seeing another english town, i think. when we got there we checked into our hotel, which was the cutest b&b i've ever seen, and set out to find a place to eat dinner. that turned out to be a much more difficult task than we'd anticipated, and after trying three different pubs that didn't serve food after 3 pm, we finally found one with a dinner menu. phew. after enjoying dinner and a scrumptious sticky toffee pudding for dessert, we went back to our hotel and watched harry potter and the goblet of fire until we all passed out.
sunday morning we went to church at york minster, the city's giant cathedral. i've always wanted to go to a service at an ancient cathderal like that, and it was a really cool experience. first of all, you haven't realy heard a choir til you've heard one in a cathdral. wowza. it was heavenly. and then just being in that setting, with the stone carvings of saints and angels everywhere and huge stained glass windows on every side of you... it's just incredible. that's what church should feel like. also, to my family's pleasant surprise, the service was almost exactly like a lutheran service, so we didn't even feel that out of place. after church we loaded back into the car one last time and headed back to oxford. we spent a lot of time in the car this weekend, but on the bright side, i finally finished dracula! it's a terrible book, don't read it. (except everyone else in my class loves it, so maybe you shouldn't listen to me.) also, we did some pretty rad stuff this weekend, so that's an even brighter bright side.
while it was really fantastic to get to spend the weekend with my family, it also made me really homesick. i really love oxford and i really hate thinking about the fact that this is my last week here, but at the same time, there's a big part of me that's ready to go. i miss mexican food. and free refills. and my bed. and my friends. and a million other things that make texas home, that oxford just doesn't have. so it's going to be a very bittersweet ending, but i think it's coming at just the right time.
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