words and wanderlusts: Stratford Trip: Part 2

THURSDAY, JUNE 2ND. DAY 37.
This day started out with an authentic english breakfast provided by our B&B hosts. It included a sunny-side-up egg, toast, rashers of bacon, sausage, and baked beans. I wouldn't really recommend most british food...it's kinda tasteless sometimes. Then we met at Shakespeare's birthplace and took a tour of that. Next we went to New Place and Hall's Croft (Shakespeare's son-in-law's house). It was a lot of time period-ish artifacts and supposed objects that might've belonged to Shakespeare...after a while it all blurs together so I am not really clear on everything I saw haha. My favorite parts are always the gardens so that what I usually make b-line for. We then ate at another pub, I had my first fish and chips in the UK...which were actually pretty good considering I do not like seafood.

Shakespeare's diggs

gardens at hall's croft or new place or both, i still don't understand what they are

this is what we do

After our meal we went to the Holy Trinity Church to view Shakespeare's grave and pay our respects to the great bard who is responsible for out being in England at all. Thank you Will, thank you. Earlier we had passed the avon (river) and had noticed row boats for rent- something I could not possibly pass up on. So into Miranda we went (our boat named after one of the main characters from The Tempest). I loved it. Simple and slow things like this always make my day. It was, me, carolyn, and patrick in the boat. Patrick who is also from Florida had never kayaked or canoed (don't know how that happened), so he had some trouble in the beginning. Eventually carolyn switched him out and he also had difficulty hahaha it was pretty amusing. So I joined Carolyn to help and we rowed Patrick about the avon whilst trying not to run into narrow boats and other row boats.

view of the trinity church from the river

view of the theatre from the river

Then we went to Moo Moo's to get milkshakes. Best decision of my life. So in Europe they have these candy bars called Buenos. They have a soft hazelnut inside and a chocolate wafer outside. Best things of my life. And this milkshake place had the option of paring them with ice cream into a cold creamy concoction of goodness in my mouth. BUENO MILKSHAKE. If you notice my face in the picture...yeah I was excited. But this place had hundreds of flavors, no joke. So great. Then we went to the "Creaky Cauldron" to get butterbeers of which we paid for completely in small change to get rid of our coins...took us a while to count it up and even longer for the cashier to haha.

After that we walked around the shops and later had a picnic dinner by the river. We also saw a trained rabbit that ran around like a dog and tripped people, most entertaining thing I've seen in a while. After that we went to the theatre to see "Macbeth". And it was incredible. They replaced the weird sisters with children which made it especially creepy, plus the special effects were very cool. And afterwards we waited at the stage door again to get autographs. We got Macbeth's autograph and Ross's. The actor who played Ross also played Antonio the night before in Merchant. His name is Scott Handy and he was also in the movie "A Knight's Tale" as the servant of Count Adhemar.