Stratford-upon-Avon and Warwick

This is the trebuchet at Warwick Castle. Pretty major slingshot!

This is a sample of what the wax figures inside the castle were like.

An outside view of the castle. We had Noah with us, so poor grandpa was the workhorse, carrying him on his back in the pack all day. It was a very entertaining castle for all of us.

We did the "ten-minute" tour of Stratford. Basically we just walked around and saw things like the outside of the Shakespeare museum, etc. It's a picturesque town on a nice river with cool looking buildings. That's about all I can tell you.

We prefer the tan and brown to the fakey black and white that you see in the above picture.

Day Two in the Cotswolds

The Cotswolds is an agricultural area that used to be the "wool" district. Now it is a place people love to visit because the villages are well preserved and the farms are so picturesque. We went on two long Cotswold walks, the last of which was about 7 miles and we went to 3 villages.

This is the lovely, quant village of Snowshill.

We stayed overnight on the spur of the moment in this B and B. This is the back yard. We just weren't quite ready to leave the area after our day at the farm and the playground.

We were walking through a field when we had this scary cow encounter. We had this huge herd of cows running toward us and we didn't quite know what to do. Luckily, we discovered that cows are mostly just curious, and not aggressive!

One of many thatched houses in the Cotswolds.

Cotswold Farm

We planned to stay in the Cotswolds for one day, but we found this fabulous farm and spent a lot of time just at the farm. Noah just loved it! This is a picture of a really hairy cow. This farm has a lot of rare breeds of animals. They also had a lot of fun things for kids, like the scooters below.

They also had great petting areas where the kids could actually get right in with the bunnies, piglets, etc. He had a great time and we actually enjoyed it as well.

England

This is one of the many pubs in Birmingham.

This is a boat in a locke in Birmingham. The boats are super narrow in order to fit in the lockes.
Robyn took us to a large pond that is close to her house. There were tons of swans. Here is a mommy with her two babies on her back.

After about 20 hours of traveling, we finally arrived! Even though we were majorly jet lagged, we stopped of at Oxford. This is part of the Oxford campus.

Flood, Faith and Favors

I know this is from, like, 5 months ago, but here it is. We kind of forgot about it, and Dad finally remembered to email it to himself from his work computer so we could post it. This is a picture of President Eyring when he came to see the damage from the flood in December. It was a really cool experience to have President Eyring and all his body guards, or whatever they were, come to our house and talk to us. We could feel the spirit, and he even said something like, "You have a very sweet spirit in your home. I'm glad I had the opportunity to meet you." Mom said to him (and the others who visited) "Sure come on in. At least we have an excuse for our house being messy!" It almost made the flood worth it (at least for that day).

Oh what a busy day!

Today was a crazy day; in the morning I played in the OIA individual tennis tournament, and then I rushed over to my Vocal Motion Heritage Festival competition. I was supposed to start my match at 8 am, but the school of the girl I was playing against was late, so they put other people on the courts first! So I didn't start playing until around 8:50 or something. Then my match took around 2 hours which is a lot longer than usual, partly because my opponent took so long in between serves and switches, and she bounced the ball like, 20 times before every serve; oh yeah, we had a lot of long rallies, and the score was pretty close too. But I lost. Anyway, by then it was like, 11:00, so I just had time to take a shower before rushing off to Windward Community College for our vocal motion competition. We did okay, but it wasn't our best, and something was wrong with the CD. Halfway through one of our songs it skipped to the next song, and we had to stand there and smile for a few minutes while they figured it out. But we still got Gold despite all of that :) It was a pretty good day, but I'm just glad this crazy week is over!