Wardour Castle

After a fantastic breakfast of potatoes, bacon and French toast unlike any French toast I'd ever had (with herbs grilled in the egg instead of drenched in syrup), we had planned to walk over to Polly's for tea but as we were walking out the door, Matt suggested we go for a drive instead. 

We ended up in Shaftesbury, about a half hour or so away from Salisbury, where we wandered a little bit before walking down to a little cafe called the Salt Cellar.  Unfortunately, although the view is stunning from their front door...

...the service was terrible.  We sat at a table for about ten minutes as the waitstaff blatantly looked the other way when Matt tried to catch their eye.  So we got up and left.  Tthe brownies at the next cafe were worth the wait, though.

On the way home we stopped off at Wardour Castle.  It's set so far off the main road you begin to wonder, more than once, as you feel sick from all the twisty roads, if you've taken a wrong turn or if there even really is a castle.  There is, though, and it was so stunning I took over a hundred photos!  Thankfully, I will only subject you to a tiny handful.  :)   

Due to the sun, I couldn't get a very good photo of the front of the castle -

 
but the back was really the photo worthy side anyway.

 

Its one thing to wander around the ruins of a castle but they have actually repaired the floors so you can explore all four floors and really imagine what it would have felt like to walk up the winding staircases, dressed in the gowns of the 14th century.

Perhaps you might even pause on your way to the hall for dinner to peer out the window at the changing leaves of fall....

If it were four hundred years later, though, I guess you might have paused to carve your name in the stone while your parents weren't looking.

 

Graffiti from the 1800s!

A little Wardour Castle point of Alan Rickman interest: I didn't know this until Matt
pointed it out (obviously, since I didn't even know the castle existed until we passed the sign and he asked if I'd like to check it out) but Wardour was used as Robin Hood's ancestral home in
Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Anyway, if you come to visit me from the states, we'll  most definitely take you to see this castle in person.  It was really amazing.

When we got home we had just enough time to get snarf a bit of frozen pizza and change before heading out to Southampton with Matt's mum to see The Sound of Music.  Really fantastic.  I've been battling a pretty terrible case of homesickness, though, for about the past twenty four hours (since we had a nice, long Skype chat with my parents) so, oddly, I was in near tears for almost all of the performance.  I have no idea why - it's not like Austria reminds me of Ohio or anything and, even though Mom and I have watched lots of musicals together, The Sound of Music was never one of them.  Anyway, all of that homesickness stuff is a post for another day - or perhaps not a post at all. 

I need some cathartic knitting, I think.  I haven't really sat down to knit in about a week so I think I'll channel my Ginny Finished her FLS jealousy in to a couple hours of knitting of my own.  Matt's at work today, it's too cold and rainy to walk anywhere and I'm getting pretty good at pushing the overwhelmed feelings away and ignoring the stacks of boxes to unpack in the conservatory....

Just a Little Note

Dear Aunt Flo,

These are the things I should be doing:

- finishing up the dishes

- cleaning the bedroom

- catching up on emails

These are the things I'm going to do instead:

- make a cup of tea

- sit on the couch with a warm cat and a book

For once I have to admit that I don't hate you as much today as I normally would.  Sometimes it's nice to have an excuse to relax even if you might not really need one. 

What do you say we bake some cookies a little later? 

Love,

Emily

x

The New Forest

I don't know if there will ever come a time when we drive through the New Forest and I don't feel a child-like thrill to see ponies, horses and cows grazing on the side of the road.  I don't mean they're grazing on the side of the road in the way those of us from the states are used to - behind fences - no, these are free to wander and graze.  So you'll often see something like this mare and her foal.

I was asking Matt if he ever actually saw pigs in the New Forest or did they hide out a bit deeper, off the road and not ten minutes later we found this trio munching acorns off to the right. 

I loved their snorty sounds and the way their giant ears covered their eyes.

The New Forest was created by William I in 1079 as a hunting ground for deer.  The commoners have since then had rights to, amongst other things, turn livestock out in to the forest.  I can't say that I understand it much past that but I did read an interesting article the other day in Country Living, I think, about how they round up the hundreds of horses in the fall for health checks and branding.  That must be something to see.

Parts of the forest landscape are hard to describe.  They're unlike anything I've seen in the states.  The best description I could come up with was what would be created if the Great Smokey Mountains and the desert decided to get together and have a baby.  Lush and green but strangely dry looking at the same time.  Impossible to describe.

 

This is a view from Ashley's Walk and is the first bit of the New Forest that I really ever saw back when I visited in November of last year.  I remember that it was amazingly windy and that I snapped a few photos of a shaggy cow not too far off the path.  A horse ambled by us at one point, too.  I was also probably insanely nervous because I think it was only my second day with Matt.  It was really nice to walk on that same path today, less than a year later, as a married couple.  The weather was perfect when I took these photos but there were no cattle or horses along the path - just a few grazing off in the distance.

We did see a tiny herd of cattle as we were pulling in the car park, though.

 

We were also lucky enough to spot a deer grazing beneath a tree on our way back up the path.  She let us get fairly close before bounding off in to the brush.

 

Another breathtaking view....

 

And another...

 

And one more...

Seriously, I don't know if I could ever come here without my camera. 

How Dogs Dress in New Orleans

Buddy along with his new pals Tallulah, my brother's girlfriend's dog, and Cooper, my brother's dog who is only a few days younger than Buddy.  From what Mom said Wednesday night, they all got on great and I wouldn't be surprised to get a photo from my parents in the not too distant future of Buddy and another miniature or standard schnauzer.  If they do get a second dog I really think they should name him Ol' Pal.

"Come here, Buddy, Ol' Pal!"

New Friends, Tea Sets and Tickets

I met up with a new friend, Squiblet, from the Sunday afternoon knitting group today.  Like I said before, I love Matt but it was really nice to hang out with a girl for a little bit.  After showing me some of the sewing/craft shops in Salisbury (yaay!), we went to a cafe I'd not been to yet called Polly's, for tea and cake and, I think, had a great time.   It's nice to have someone to ask what seem like silly questions like where are the best places to shop for clothes - although when you're in a completely new country, that's really not such a silly question. 

As if I didn't have enough tea and sweet things, I came home and had lunch and decided a good book and more tea was a good idea since I'd yet to use the tea set for grown ups that my mother-in-law gave me the other day.

Note, Ginny, the tray and mat - now that I've unpacked it, we use it almost daily!

Ugh, unfortunately now I'm feeling all full and lethargic and not at all like doing any unpacking.  We got a lot done yesterday, though.  We unwrapped the amazingly well packed (by the moving company, not us) grandfather clock and took all of our broken down boxes, packing popcorn and paper to the recycling facility.  It felt so to good to get it all out of the house and getting the giant clock out of the pile of boxes makes me feel like we've really made progress - it was huge.  Unpacking is a slow process but it's definitely starting to feel like our home around here.  

Oh, I saw someone get a ticket just a little bit ago for parking on our street which is reserved for residents only during the day.  It seems like a strange thing to blog about but I was fascinated by his thoroughness.  He wrote the ticket and then took photos of the front of the car and then a couple of the inside or possibly just the front windshield due maybe to a missing or expired parking sticker.  After all those pictures, he took one of the restriction sign which was only a few feet away.  Then he finished up the ticket, put it in an envelope with sticky tape on it, taped it to the top of the window on the drivers side, took a photo of it on the car and then wrote in his little notepad for several minutes before finally setting off in search of other villainous vehicles.  See?  Really thorough. 

Wordless Wednesday

Cider Post No. 1

Matt and I sampled a couple of ciders from Southampton Somerset (correction madedays later - cider goes straight to my head and fiddles with my fingertips) tonight after he got home from work.  A little to dry for the tastes of either of us but still incredibly drinkable. 

Did you know that Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova of Once fame have an album out/coming out?  Yet again, something I should have known about but had to hear about on Facebook.  NPR is streaming the entire thing until October 27th - I listened to two of the songs and will hopefully be picking up the album tomorrow as I think it's already been released here*.  They're coming to the O2 in London in January and I'm really looking forward to seeing them.  If you've yet to watch Once for whatever reason, I highly recommend it. 

Speaking of concerts and the O2 - as an early Christmas treat from Matt's mum, Matt, my sister-in-law Laura, and I are going to see Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra in December.  I feel like everyone should know who Bill Bailey is but I know my friends back in the states probably don't know who he is so here are some helpful links: Cockney Music, Kraftwerk, Pub Jokes, Dueling Xylophone.  All right, enough.  I'm very excited - he's hysterical.  And - yikes! - it's after one - off to bed(ish)....

*Nope, I was wrong - it's not out until the end of the month.  Argh.