Today was one of those really good days, in all respects.

It didn't start out so good, because when the alarm went off at 6:30 I did the usual "goddamn, it is way too early for normal people to be awake" thing, but I got up, made it to the bus station with plenty of time to spare, and boarded the tour bus. When I got on the bus, I discovered that Andrea was on the same tour! So that was fun, because I had someone to chat with.

We arrived at Windsor Castle around 10 AM, just as they opened, and we walked through the grounds for a few minutes before touring the State Apartments. The same thing I said about Buckingham Palace applies here... it's all very lovely (especially decorated for Christmas!) and the sheer number of historical and valuable objets d'art is staggering, but royal decoration is just Not. My. Style. I tend to like a bit more simplicity in my decoration. But then again, I'm not the Queen of England.

The castle itself has been added to by nearly every monarch over the last thousand years, so you can see stonework from William the Conqueror's construction crew all the way up to the present-day restorations where the fire occurred in 1992. Somehow, it all manages to blend pretty seamlessly.

The Chapel of St. George was especially interesting, because it was built around the same time as King's College Chapel in Cambridge, so I found myself going "Hmm, this looks familiar!" a lot of the time. Even the decoration is the same, Tudor emblems everywhere and fan vaulting galore. Henry VIII's buried there along with his third wife, Jane Seymour, but no mention of the other hapless five. George III's also buried there, so I did my duty as a good American and jumped around a little on his memorial slab (not enough to attract attention or feel guilty for disrespecting dead royalty, though).

After Windsor, we had about an hour's ride or so to Stonehenge, which was, frankly, a bit of a letdown. It's a lot smaller than you imagine it to be, and you can't get close to the stones (although I do understand why they'd keep people away, considering the kind of crazies that like to go to places like that). Still, it was well worth seeing, and I got a lot of good photos.

We had a late lunch in the tiny Somerset village of Norton St. Philip, which achieved notoriety as the centre of the Monmouth Rebellion in 1645. The illegitimate son of Charles II, the Duke of Monmouth, decided he had a better claim to be king than his uncle, James II, and sat down with his buddies in the local inn to plan a rebellion. It failed, and they all got executed, but the inn's still there, and that's where we ate lunch. It's actually a fifteenth-century coaching inn, and it has really excellent food and locally brewed ale. Roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, and gravy, oh my! I left feeling like I wouldn't need to eat again for about two years, but of course I'm eating right now (although lunch was almost eight hours ago, and that's a good stretch for me).

Our final stop of the day was Bath, which we pulled into right around sunset. The Bath Abbey in the centre of town is a beautiful fifteenth-century church, and I'd have loved to go in but it was closed for a service when we got there. I settled for admiring it from the outside, which isn't hard to do. Right next to the Abbey are the Roman Baths and the Pump Room, the Georgian hangout where everyone who was anyone went to drink rotten-egg scented water and socialize. Our group had about an hour to explore the city (which isn't nearly enough, by the way) before meeting back up, and I used the time by wandering around town to take pictures and shop. Bath has a lot of little boutiques selling interesting things, including several chocolate shops. I must credit the George Inn for filling me up enough so that I actually didn't buy any chocolate!

Once we met back up with our group, we got a private after-hours tour of the Roman Baths. In case you don't know, Bath is built of a local warm-toned limestone that gives all its buildings a lovely golden honey colour, and firelight brings it out beautifully. We got to see the baths at night, with torches lit, and I have to say I wouldn't have wanted to see them any other way. It was a really interesting tour, with lots of Roman and Celtic history, and I stuck my hand in the water to see how warm it was. It's a nice hot bath temperature, and after a day in the cold and wind, I was really tempted to jump in! However, the water's untreated and the bath is lined with lead, so it wouldn't have been a good idea for lots of reasons. Too bad.

I took a load of pictures, so I don't know when I'll be able to get them all uploaded (I strongly suspect they won't all be up tonight). Check back tomorrow night, and hopefully they'll all be up.

Oh yes, and when I got back home this evening, I found an e-mail telling me I've been accepted to law school at Cornell! Really, how much nicer could today have been?