More Must See Touristy on this cloudy day in the UK.

A sidebar about weather: I was told there would be rain. Lots of rain, in fact. So much so that we both packed umbrellas with us everywhere, at some personal cost in terms of weight. (When you’re marching across London, every ounce counts.)

So we were delighted to find that the weather was marvelous. Apparently it was unseasonably warm and dry. Cloudy on some days, and certainly cloudy at some point every day, but just gorgeous to this Phoenix denizen who gets all excited on the rare days we see rain at home.

Today’s Must Do is Hampton Court, famous for being Henry VIII’s main crib during his reign. We have watched hours of footage about this place and are both so psyched to see it.

As always, transportation makes a cameo appearance as Something To Talk About, this time because we manage to get there and back without Uber. Railways again, without us looking too much like rube tourists, and scoring our second use of the Palace Pass.

A sidebar about passes: I spent hours agonizing over whether to buy the London Pass, which is a pre-paid pass to see something like 80 attractions in the greater London area. Oh, did I research this, to the point of getting a prepaid pass to Crazy Town.

It (the London Pass, not the Crazy Town pass, which is way cheaper) costs at least £135 each, sometimes more if you missed the special, and when I added up everything we wanted to see we would have paid something like £215 each for admission. So on the face of it, that’s a good deal. I read the Yelp and TripAdvisor reviews and noted what people hated about it, and found that most instructive: it doesn’t give you fast pass access to most venues, and in some cases you get worse access with the LP. At Westminster Abbey, for example, the LP holders were in one line, and we (people who bought their tickets online) were in another. Online ticket holders entered first. I saw that repeated a lot.

And once you bought that London Pass, then there’s no chance you’re going to be able to change your schedule for a day and say, travel to Oxford, because then you lose a day out of your consecutive days’ usage. So it actually kills flexibility.

I wound up not buying the London Pass, but we did buy Palace Passes, which got us into the Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace. I would do that again. Good value.

Hampton Court is, in a word, amazing, so much so that I am moving on from my Edward VIII/Wallis Simpson obsession to Anne Boleyn. Or at least piling on to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor with Anne. I walk the halls of the Tudor section of Hampton Court imagining what it must have been like to be ahem, escorted, to the waiting boat, ready and waiting to deposit her at Traitor’s Gate.

And then I find out that a) she was arrested in Greenwich and b) didn’t go through Traitor’s Gate.

So much for imagination and Standing Where Important Things Happened ™.

Henry VIII’s crib isn’t amazing just because it is huge and fabulous and has amazing ceilings and tapestries. No, it is also amazing because I manage to outscore Dad, Interrupted (aka History Boy) on two points: I am right when I say that Henry had re-decorated the palace to honor his relationship with Anne Boleyn, and that it was two! two! two palaces in one! There’s Henry’s Tudor palace, crammed up against William & Mary’s baroque digs…two really big, really different homes jammed right up to each other.

I never know more history stuff than History Boy.

After a lunch of another meat pie (I’ve had several this trip, competing only with fish and chips for my attentions) we keep touring.

There’s a lot to see. Hallways? Foyers? Ballrooms? that dwarf even tall, dark, handsome History Boy.

There are tapestries everywhere. We make friends with another docent who regrets his life choices about one half hour after we start talking with him. After we drain his brain of everything he knows about tapestries, we move on, leaving him a soulless, empty husk.

We stand in the Haunted Hallway, where Catherine Howard ran and screamed for Henry when they came to take her to the Tower of London to be beheaded for treason, seeing that she married Henry when she was nineteen, proceeded to have affairs, and then was confused when he took exception to that.

It’s said that she continues to run through the hallway. We don’t see her that Tuesday.

We hear everything about the Georges I & II and their own twisted lives. We walk for miles through their baroque palace.

We walk through the gardens. This is just one.

This place is massive. Here are both ends, Tudor & Baroque:

 

 

Here’s another view, standing at one end (baroque) and peering all the way back to the entrance (Tudor):

My feet hurt like crazy after this one. We nod off on the train back to London, full of history.

© E. Stocking Evans 2018