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Birthday Outing
As well as some nonsense happening in in America, today is Rob's fortieth birthday, so we went out to Warwick Castle. Sad to say it was a bit of a disappointment - I'm really glad I gor half-price tickets or it would have been even more so. The castle itself was nice enough mind, but there was a distinct lack of tea (always gets a place a bad mark in Rob's book, that) and it was also rather lacking in atmosphere somehow - possibly just too commercialised, possibly that it seemed to be pretty much winding down for the winter.
The birthday boy!
A couple of shots of the castle - front ...
and rear...
Guy's Tower. I climbed all the way up to the top of there...
I thought this boathouse was really nice
And Rob liked the trebuchet.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
silly_swordsman will tell me if they're wrong :-)
After we'd climbed all round the turrets and battlements walk (500 steps! Phew!) we tootled off to have a look at Warwick itself, but that was fairly lacklustre too, we thought.
Although I liked the metal birds in the fountain outside the town hall and the old Post Office building
Birdies
After that we came home via Ryton Organic Gardens, which is always worth a visit. And they have plenty of tea :-)
The birthday boy!
A couple of shots of the castle - front ...
and rear...
Guy's Tower. I climbed all the way up to the top of there...
I thought this boathouse was really nice
And Rob liked the trebuchet.
After we'd climbed all round the turrets and battlements walk (500 steps! Phew!) we tootled off to have a look at Warwick itself, but that was fairly lacklustre too, we thought.
Although I liked the metal birds in the fountain outside the town hall and the old Post Office building
Birdies
After that we came home via Ryton Organic Gardens, which is always worth a visit. And they have plenty of tea :-)
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The tea at Ryton is expensive.
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I am crap at geography and didn't realise I was :-) Sorry though.
This is true. It is, however, very nice tea. Most tea, tastes of very little to me - the tea at Ryton tastes properly of tea. So it's better value for money than a cheaper cuppa that tastes of nowt, I reckon :-)
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We did do Hill Close Gardens which I suspect you'd love and the Royal Warwickshire Regiment Museum was a good visit too.
Glad you had fun at Ryton though. It was another place I neve got to but drove past far too many times.
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Thanks for that - Kenilworth was the backup plan if we hadn't been able to get cheap tickets for Warwick, so we'll probably give that a try sometime.
The gardens look interesting too - the website makes it sound like a soer of slightly posher allotments :-)
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That's a very good desription actually. We don't seem to have put our photos online so I can't point you at anything I'm afraid but yeah, there are a few cosy Victorian type gardens and some lovely big vegetable gardens. I think I drove Cathy slightly mad wandering around going "Ooh, beetroots!" when she was more interested in pretty flowers. Oh, and we got free parking because the pay and display machines were broken (apparently quite common) :-)
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We both like veg and flowers so shouldn't have a problem there - definitely sounds like somewhere to visit - although not for a while since they're apparently closed until Easter :-)
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If I'd've known you were going to be at Ryton I'd have walked across the road to say *Hi*
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We were? Aargh! Sorry!
The reason for this is simple - I'm an eejit.
My utter failure at geography, combined with a memory like a sieve made of swiss cheese meant that even if I'd remembered where you lived I'd've probably failed to connect it with Ryton.
Of course, if I'd mentioned where we were going in advance, you'd likely have told me. See above, re my status as an eejit...
So that's two of my friends I missed meeting yesterday. Hooteration!
I hope that you'll forgive us sufficiently that we can come and say hi next time we go to Ryton (Rob's a member so we're bound to go there sometime) if only so you can get Willow to fart at us in revenge?
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Looks as if you had a great day out.
I like the castle, especially the moat and the boathouse (wot - no boats?). The steel heron looks very stealthily menacing. I love to watch a heron slowly stalking around the edge of a lake, and now and then grabbing a tasty morsel...
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Thank you!
He's actuallty emailed the Warwick Castle people to (politely) express his disappointment. As he rightly says, they won't know if we don't tell them.
Still he had fun when we got home, playing with the itty bitty remote control ecilopter I got him. We need a bigger lounge...
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It's a pity when a lovely old monument is compromised by clashing commercial add-ons; did it have things like a Ye Olde Tower Gifte Shoppe and Eaterie, or an Interactive Audio-Visual Visitor Experience? Not being able to buy a cup of tea is a definite shortfall too.
The model colihepter sounds fun. I've seen them in various shops, and wondered just how easy they were to fly. I've often thought it'd be fun to have one with a tiny camera on, and a video link to the ground[1], so I could take my own aerial views of things.
[1]AIUI, I can set up the link legally under my amateur radio licence, and the kit to do it is available.
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I think the main problem was that it was neither fish nor fowl, as it were.
For instance there was a display about one of the Earls of Warwick, who was apparently known as "kingmaker" and how he went to battle for "King Henry" but it didn't specify, for those of us who'd forgotten our O level history (and foreign visitors and schoolkids)which of the 8 King Henrys it was [1].
I thought it was far inferior to Etal Castle in Northumbria which had none of the gift shop stuff, and wasn't as large or so intact but did have an excellent exhibition and guide book which clearly explained and evoked the history of the place. Whereas at Warwick we got "Stuff Happened Here! Wow!" with no elaboration.
Rob seemed to be struggling rather with this one, and it's not strong enough to play with outside. I'm planning on looking into how much it costs to hire a room at the local Leisure centre - they have several that might be suitable for eciloptering in.
[1] We eventually deduced it must be Henry VII, but the clues were thin on the ground.
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That's bad - whoever got the job of writing the display information either couldn't be bothered to do their research properly, or just made the text up from what little they knew. It certainly doesn't sound as if they had any interest in or enthusiasm for the subject. It reminds me of when I used to go to airshows, and heard various different commentators describing, say, a Spitfire, as it displayed. A few very good ones got their facts right; most were fairly well-informed; one or two dropped the most horrible howlers, showing appalling ignorance and lack of preparation.
That sounds much more like it; they obviously made the effort to do the job properly. I'll bet more people keep the guide books from places like Etal than they do from Warwick.
Erk. Much pomp, and no substance. It really does sound awful.
The one I've seen up close was very small indeed and weighed about two ounces; outside, I can imagine a light breeze carrying it off or worse.
I hgope you find something at a reasonable rate; you could always start a local Indoor Model Flying Club and split the cost :-)
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There wasn't much in the way of written information at all, and what there was was in a curly "medieval" script that was difficult to read, so I didn't bother - there was a brief soundtrack thingie, but it was basically useless.
A shame because the actual tableaux were very good - as you might expect from an attraction owned by Tussauds - there was just little or no explanantion :-(
The Main Hall is only £6.10 per hour on weekdays, which sounds quite good really! I think it's around school gym sort of size, so there ought to be scope for flying in there.
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Oh, good grief; a triumph of form over function, indeed.
I can well believe it; the audio equipment was probably the cheapest they could buy, and is probably well worn after thousands of playings.
That rate does sound good, for a gym-size room these days. If memory serves, when I was secretary in the early '70s, the local amateur radio club meeting room, which was roughly twenty feet wide by thirty feet long, in a small town community centre, was something like £3 per two-hour weekday evening session.