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Historical Museum Train Travel

Now THAT’s a castle! Windsor

Windsor
If it were a head of hair I’d say it hadn’t a strand out of place. Windsor is a manicured spectacular! Half available for touring and half reserved for the Royals as their residence. Its scale is immense. Huge!

I’ve probably visited between 40 and 50 castles in the past five years. Often they’re an exercise in using your imagination. You know there will be a defensive outer wall, a mote, a keep, a place to live and usually you have only a vague outline of stones and a structure or two to guide you. If you’re lucky you’ll have a fairly-well restored castle where a reconstructed version of all the pieces are there to be seen. Certainly Sterling, Edinburgh, and Cardiff were excellent structures to visit but every castle I visited prior to Windsor Castle lacked heart.

Windsor Castle is the U.K.’s largest castle. It’s not only the weekend residence of the royal family but also a place where official U.K. state business is conducted. However, most important to my sentiment of it having heart is that it’s a home, it feels lived in and has been for 900 years. Windsor Castle’s scale, importance, use and lived-in status help set it apart from all other castles I’ve visited. Today I was impressed anew with castles.

From one amazing place to another.

Rick Steves claims that no other museum captures the history of world civilizations better than the British Museum and I believe him. I mention this travel author because to tour this museum I tried something new, I used the audio tour embedded in his Kindle ebook of London.

I’d image it could take weeks to thoroughly tour the British Museum and obviously I wasn’t that committed. One option would have been to wing it, speed through and hope to come away with some insight. The option I took was to have Rick Steves guide me through three civilizations focusing on just a few items of each while providing descriptive background. In less than two hours I learned a lot. His tour worked pretty well. When in was shooed out the doors at closing, I felt my visit had been time well spent.

Oh, I forgot something important. My day started with coffee, coffee with my favorite niece. OK, I only have one niece but even if she had competition she’d still be my favorite. Sarah has just accepted a position as Lecturer at University College London in their History department. “Lecturer” is equivalent to Assistant Professor in the U.S. which means she’s achieved the goal she’s had since eighth grade. She is now established in her career in academia. Bravo!

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By TravisGood

Speaker. Maker. Writer. Traveler. Father. Husband.

MakerCon Co-Chair (MakerCon.com)
Maker City San Diego Roundtable Member
San Diego Maker Faire Producer (SDMakerFaire.org)

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