A rainy arrrival in Windsor for a visit to the Castle.
We left the Ramada Hotel in Dover at around 9:15am and set off for Windsor Castle. All our morning starts were early, and I made a big mistake that morning by getting up an hour too early, because I had not changed my watch to GMT. However my room mate and myself carried on regardless, although after showering, we took to our beds and lay down for half an hour to pass the time away. Breakfast was excellent, with plenty of choice although no tasty, rock solid nutty wholemeal rolls were available. An attention to roughage intake is a must on a long, sitting down on the "botty" coach journey!
Windsor was crowded with tourists of course, and as our coach driver had never visited before, we had to pick our way through hundreds of tourist to find the Castle entrance and buy tickets. We all had to wear ribbon bracelets to show that we were bona fide visitors, and then we had to pass through an airport style security body and bag check. Once in, we all collected audio guides in German, and set off for a two hour visit.
A trio of singers attending to their smartphones.
The drizzle was its usual British irritating self, a continuous damp fog, that was wetter than a downpour, but we carried on regardless. I last visited the Castle about forty years ago, and although I remember the outside well, I had forgotten the magnificence of the state rooms.
A damp view of the inner bastion through dripping umbrellas.
A statue of my namesake Queen Victoria, although I was not named after her. At my birth in 1945, my father named me Victoria, in recognition of the victory over Hitler. Had I been a boy, I would have been named "Victor" and I would have hated the name!
Looking very British whilst standing in the drizzly damp.
After the visit everyone stopped for a "Cream Tea" in a local tea shop.
A song with Schnapps, which is drunk very quickly after the final chorus!
By this time I had run out of concentration on the German language, but whatever the words were, it was easy to get the gist of the song´s meaning. It must have gone something like, "Schapps, Schnapps, Schnapps, we all like drinking Schapps, Schnapps, Schnapps for ever and ever, Prost, all Schnapps down the throat" gulp! I didn´t partake, as Schnapps quickly impairs the functioning of my brains cells and makes me a bit giggly!
At around 4:30pm we set off without a hitch down the M4 for Swindon. We left at the Swindon/Devizes Junction, where I realised that the driver was on course for a visit to the "Magic Roundabout." I wondered about his reaction to this famous roundabout, having to driving his big German coach in the wrong direction on the wrong side of the road. It didn´t seem at all preturbed, and I think he drove through it without noticing its complexity.
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