Today we had to get up bright and early and meet at the metro station at 7:50. I was super tired and took forever to get out of bed, we barely made it to the train on time. The train ride to Oxford was about an hour. Oxford is another little college town like Cambridge and it houses Blenheim Palace. We took a bus from the train station to the palace. By what I saw from the bus I think Cambridge is a cuter looking town. Oxford reminds me a lot of some of the areas in Salt Lake. Not very English if you ask me.
We got to the palace around 10 in the morning or so. And walked the longest driveway EVER just to get to the front entrance. I was pretty tired by the time we got to the palace. It was a really long walk. We took some pictures outside and then Susie told us that we had the rest of the day to ourselves. We could stay at Blenheim or head into town and hang around Oxford. I decided to stay and see Blenheim.
Blenheim Palace is the home of the Duke of Marlborough. Sir John Churchill won the battle of Blenheim in 1703, and for his reward was given the land to build a palace. He built the palace and the line of Duke has passed through father to son. Winston Churchill was the Duke of Marlborough at one point and was also born in Blenheim.
We started out in the Gardens. There are so many and they are so beautiful! I think Blenheim is my favorite palace so far. The gardens are just to die for. Versailles and the other palaces have beautiful gardens, but Blenheim's is almost like a forest, it reminds me a lot of the mountains back home and I really liked that. My favorite of the gardens was the Rose Garden. It was this little fenced off area that was covered in every color of Roses. It smelled divine! And all of the flowers were so pretty. We had a good time taking lots of pictures.
Right outside of Blenheim is the largest piece of grass I have ever seen. It stretched for miles. We took our shoes off and frolicked about on it for atleast an hour and boy was it the worlds softest grass. I tumbled on it for a little while, of course, and we took lots more pictures. Ha over all we took about 200 hundered pictures outdoors alone. It was about 1:00 or so and we finally decided to go into the house.
The palace itself is just as grand as the others. Beautiful family portraits and paintings line the walls and ceilings. We got to see the room the Winston Churchill was born in, and also a whole room dedicated just to him. That was really cool to see because he was such an important man in history. The upstairs part of the palace though is super lame. They've filled it with these dummies that try to reinact scense from the past. It's not really my favorite thing to have to sit through.
After the palace we went outside and took the train to the Pleasure Gardens. This garden had a butterfly house that was filled with beautiful butterflies and poisenous flowers. Also in this garden was a giant bush maze and a playground. There were also human sized checkers and chess boards that we played on for a good while. We headed out of Blenheim at about 6:00. It was a little later than what we wanted because the last train leaves at 7:00. So we kinda had to hurry. We walked all the way to the exit gates, and they were locked, so we had to walk all the way to the other side. We got kind of lost back to the bus stop, but we ended up making it to our train on time. The train ride back I slept, which was nice, and then came back to the flat and did homework. It was such a fun day!
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