Ridgeway Trip XVII: To Windsor!

On this day we needed to split up.   One of Kim's goals for this trip was to see Windsor Castle, and I'd never been there, but Mom had.  So she decided to stay home and explore the Russell Square neighborhood, which is crammed with history.  She visited the Charles Dickens museum, collected blue plaques*, and wound up in the British Museum.

Kim and I ran off to Paddington, where we caught a train to Slough, where we transferred to a smaller train that simply goes back and forth between Slough and Windsor, ferrying tourists back and forth.  It was a very hot and sunny day in Windsor!

I really like these trains

The castle is massive, and is kept in good repair -- none of it is falling down, as has always been the case with every other castle I've visited.  It's the main residence of the royal family.  The part visitors see -- where no photography is allowed -- are the official State Rooms, which mostly Charles II put together.  So there are sitting rooms and dining rooms and bedrooms, and did anyone ever sleep in the beds ever?  Or were they just for show?  Because they don't look very comfortable or convenient.  All of these rooms are crammed with famous paintings, or else, in the case of public rooms, festooned with massive amounts of weaponry.  This is not where you see a few swords over a fireplace; this is where you see 80 swords interlaced in a column on a wall, and 90 old pistols arranged in a wreath.  However, photography is not allowed in most of the inside part, so I haven't got much to show.

Forbidden photo of the entrance hall

I didn't take this photo, 
but there's tons of this decor

After that you get to the parts about the Order of the Garter.  There's a long hall with everyone who has ever belonged to the Order written on the wall, and rooms where they get invested, and they meet, and so on.  Much of this burned in the 90s, in a fire I didn't know anything about, but was apparently part of the famous annus horriblis.  A very nice guard told us all about it.  So it's all rebuilt and new, and where the old panelling is still in place, you can see that it's smoke-damaged.

Then we went to take a peek at Queen Mary's dollhouse, which is a gigantic small-scale palace complete with everything you can think of.  Unfortunately, the lighting was mostly out of order, so it was hard to see much.  I was mainly interested in the library, which was stocked with hundreds of tiny real books, many written in by famous people of the day.  M R James wrote a ghost story for it.  Happily for me, there was a special exhibit of the books on the wall, and I got a good look at the James book and many others.  They did a sort of reboot fairly recently, with new books by current writers (some of these were fabulous), and two by Camilla.

By this time we needed ice cream.  I can recommend the Windsor Castle ice cream, it's good stuff.

Next up, St George's chapel.  This was much more my style.  Fan vaulting and random memorials!  In this case, many of them were royal -- we even passed by the room where Elizabeth and Philip are -- and were shooed forward in an irritating manner, given how much the people ahead of us dawdled, while I didn't.  Anyway it's a beautiful church, and highly royalized.  The quire seats all have these tags on them for the various members of the Order of the Garter who have sat there through history, right up to the modern day.  The current members each have a flag with their coats of arms hanging above their seats (these days you might not have one, in which case you get to design your own -- should mine have howling frogs?  Maybe a needle and thread?).  There were also some nice historical artifacts, like elaborate medieval doors, and some textile art pieces, which I'm always interested in.

Exterior of St George's Chapel, very Gothic and pointy

We walked around a bit, watched some guard changing/inspection (I sure felt sorry for those kids, wearing those huge bear hats in that heat), and Kim spent a very long time in the gift shop.  I found a nice shady bench outside the gift shop, along with many other people waiting for their shoppers, and I fell into conversation with the guy next to me.  He was a private guide; he'll take you anywhere you want to go in the UK and tell you all about it, so he knows a lot of history.  His people were enthusiastic shoppers so he had plenty of time to chat and we talked about Charles I (an idiot), history, and politics.  Somehow this eventually turned into 19th-century literature and his hatred of Thomas Hardy or at least Jude the Obscure, at which a girl near us -- a recent English grad -- heartily agreed.

We walked back through the town of Windsor, which was by now packed with people and very hot, and we needed lunch.  There is an extensive sort of shopping center right by the railway station, so we figured there had to be something in there.  We felt salads or sandwiches were the only possible thing so we bypassed the pubs in favor of a Pret a Manger.  After that, it was back on the train.

We wanted to meet my mom in the British Museum, which is at the other side of Russell Square, but finding the entrance was tricky.  First we found the front, where only ticket-holders get in.  So we trekked back around to the back, where a longer, slower line is for non-ticketed people like us.  By the time we got in, there wasn't a lot of time left in the museum, so we had to be picky.  We just went up to say hi to our favorite Saxon things, like the Sutton Hoo items and the Lewis chessmen, and then down so Kim could see the Elgin marbles and the Rosetta stone. Of course there were plenty of things to see on the way!  But just like everything else, the Museum is more crowded than ever.  It was packed and overwhelming.

After that, we looked around our home neighborhood a bit and played spot-the-blue-plaque.  We grabbed a few simple items from Tesco and called it a day.

*If you're not familiar with blue plaques -- in the UK, buildings with some historical association often have a circular blue plaque with information on it.  So on our hotel's street, there were two: one for Jerome K. Jerome, who lived down the block for a while, and one for Lenin (!), who lodged there in 1909.