Stratford-upon-Avon

The early part of this week has been wonderful. Beautiful, warm, sunny weather, and a ridiculous lack of work that would prevent me from enjoying life. Of course this all had to change the day before our day trip when the storm clouds rolled in, the heavens opened up and the temperature dropped like 10 degrees C.

I really wish it had been sunny and warm when we were in Stratford. It was cute and I love Shakespeare so it had all the potential for a great trip but because the weather was awful, it just put a damper on everything.

The bus ride to Stratford was 3.5 hours, way too long, and the heat was on to the point where we were all dying. Already a poor start to the day. We first stopped in Anne Hathaway's cottage, which was adorable and the garden's were beautiful, but it was a small little house and had a small little tour in it so that only took like 20 minutes. And since it was cold and rainy, we didn't want to go play in the gardens so the remaining 20 minutes or so at the cottage was spent in the giftshop. We then made our way to the actual town of Stratford. It was exactly how you would think a Shakespearean town would look. Once we got there, we split into two groups and went on a walking tour. The tour was interesting, we saw where Shakespeare was born, where he went to school, where he died, where he's buried, the houses that his daughters owned, etc, so that was pretty cool. Although during the tour of Anne Hathaway's house and the walking tour, the guides kept telling us how all these idioms of the English language originated and while it was amusing and interesting the first couple of times, after while it kind of got to the point where I could care less how "curfew" originated. The tour was over at about 2 and we got lunch until about 3. The coach wasn't leaving until 5 so we had two hours to kill. We didn't really feel like paying what would probably be some ridiculous overpriced admission fee to go see the room where Shakespeare was born and it wasn't nice enough to go sit by the river Avon or play in the parks so we spent a lot of time wandering through shops. Although, we did find a bunch of really cool antique shops and markets that were delightful to wander in. We tried on a lot of hats or feathery hair combs. We finally went back to the coach at about 4:45 and got on and suffered through a, this time, freezing, 3 hour bus ride home.

I know this post sounds like not a lot of fun and it was interesting to see all the Shakespeare stuff but I think I would have had a much better time if the weather had been cooperating. It's a little silly how easily weather can affect your mood, but so it goes.

In other news, congratulations to my sister for graduating from college!