Today we met with our next Topdeck group to start our second tour. We started the day by heading to Oxford, the home of the famous university and also the location where some of the Harry Potter movies were filmed. In particular there is a dining hall in the Oxford University that was used as the dining hall in the Harry Potter movies. Oxford had some pretty incredible libraries, one was a massive dome that currently holds all the science books and another has over 9 million books and over 170km worth of shelving.
Our next stop was Stratford-upon-Avon which was the home of Shakespeare. We visited the house where Shakespeare was born, Nash house where Shakespeare’s granddaughter lived and where his house also used to be. We also visited his grave site. We had lunch in Statford, I had a Cornish pasty from a shop that claimed to have the best Cornish pasty in the world. We also found a milkshake place that had about a hundred flavours with the concept that you choose a flavour for example Kit Kat and they then literally blend a Kit Kat with ice cream to make your milkshake and then you can also add additional toppings for the top and/or bottom of your cup. As you can imagine Shaun loved this place.
Our final location for the day was York. We arrived there late afternoon so after checking into our accommodation we went for a walking tour. We saw the York Minster which was an incredibly large gothic looking church, the remains of the York castle, a street called shambles which has buildings leaning into each other and back in the day it had 26 butchers down the street and they would literally empty the blood into the streets for it to go into the drain pipes so this meant the street is a bit wonky as it would need to be to drain the blood.
That evening we went out for dinner and ordered white bait fritters… what came out was what looked like deep fried bait fish! They were the size of our fingers. After that we went and did the original ghost walk of York, the tour was pretty good it also had an element of humour.
