So, Mom and Dad are visiting us for Holy Week.  We should have a post about Palm Sunday services in St. Paul’s Cathedral, but this post is not that post.  This post is about a bus tour.

Magdalen College Tower in Oxford

Wednesday, the four of us (me, Terran, Mom and Dad) piled into an Evan Evans Tour Company bus for a day-long tour of Oxford, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Warwick Castle.  High-density bus tours aren’t our usual mode of signtseeing — Terran and I have found that we’d actually rather see fewer places in-depth than glance at lots of them — but it seemed like this one hit places we hadn’t thought to go, and it seemed like it would be fun to see what a bus tour is like.

Courtyard of Balliol College in Oxford

Reactions are mixed.  For one thing, getting there better be half the fun because you spend half your day on the bus.  Like anything road dependent, it’s hard to know how bad traffic will be, which makes it impossible to accurately guess when you’ll get home.  We were fairly lucky this time, though.

The walking tour of Oxford was perfunctory at best and left us feeling a bit grumpy about the prospects for the rest of the day.  We were there a shorter time than it took us to get there from London by bus.  The tour took us through the streets to the fronts of some famous buildings and shared a lot of interesting tidbits from Oxford’s long history, but it didn’t include the *inside* of any buildings or even into any of the college courtyards.  Such tours were possible — we saw signs for interior tours of the Bodleian Library, in which Terran and I are very interested, and some other more in-depth walking tours as we strolled the steets.  We can go back to do these, and we’d already planned to, but my folks were stuck with a surface overview so shallow that it wasn’t clear whether it was worthwhile to have gone at all.  We took a few lovely pictures, at least.

Me, Mom, and Dad at Shakespeare's Birthplace

We boarded the bus with a lot of trepidation after Oxford and continued to Stratford-upon-Avon.  Terran and I had heard it was a pretty kitchy place with little to see, so we’d considered this stop to be of least importance.  We turned out to be wrong.  S-u-A turned out to be charming and educational.  The Shakespeare Birthplace home is authentically restored and features guides in every room to describe what daily life was like for the upper middle class of the time.  We learned a lot.  Actors in costume roamed the birthplace and the main drag of the town, breaking into spontaneous drama of scenes from random plays.  And there were flowers in the gardens blooming everywhere, which helped keep my mood high.

We also learned a lot of the known details of Shakespeare’s life that renders him far less mysterious than the collection of urban legends I had heard.  The path of his life is actually well understood and not even so insane for his day: he worked in London as a playwright for twenty years, returning about three times per year to visit his family.  His wife and children lived with his parents.  When he made enough to retire, he retired fairly young and built a comfortable manor house in S-u-A that he and his wife lived in until he died.  The retirement house was unfortunately torn down by a crotchety owner who got sick of pilgrim Shakespeare fans knocking on his door in hopes of getting a look-round.  Seems like a truly bizarre way to react — most people would have just sold the place to someone who actually wanted to run a tourist attraction.  At least, this is what the tour guide told us, and I’m sure every word is meticulously researched. :)

The tour continued through the rolling hills of the Cotswold agricultural region,

Warwick Castle

again filling us with history while we drove.  The area was lovely, and getting there started to actually be half of the fun.  Since we have no car and would rather avoid driving, we’d never have been able to see the Cotswolds in this way.

Warwick Castle was another pleasant surprise.  It’s the ancient fortress of Earl Warwick the Kingmaker, power-player of the Wars of the Roses, that was sold to the Madame Tussauds Company of wax museum fame in the 1970s to much wailing and gnashing of teeth by the locals.  The company turned it into a tourist museum with a surprising amount more taste than their wax museum chain.

Warwick Castle grounds from the battlements

Bits of it were kitchy — the grounds looked and felt very much like an SCA event — but it was overall very well done.  We toured two wax exhibits: a recreation of a weekend social party in 1898 and one on preparing for battle during the Wars of the Roses.  So, Victorian and Medieval.  Then we took a speedy and heart pumping stair-climbing tour of the battlements.  In our usual slow style, we could have spent a day there, but we had a rollicking good time in two hours.

We pulled back into the city around 6:30, tired but in good spirits, and we had enough time for a comfortable dinner and a pint at our local pub, The Salisbury.