Stratford

My road trip: - 
 

It started with dust. I got up early to give me time to wash my poor neglected car, to clean the dusty dirt from it's surface and to check that it's insides were up to a journey. As I would hope, having recently spent a couple of days at the garage after failing its MOT, oil; water and screen wash were all OK. There's not much else you can do under the bonnet of modern cars, so I set of for petrol and then on to collect V., L. and K.. 

Apparenlty a decision had been made to go to Stratford rather than Warwick as I'd suggested. Probably because K. and L. wanted to go to a market at an air field near Stratford, lured by the promise of cheap designer stuff. I didn't mind, I just wanted to go for a drive, but it would have been nice to have been consulted as this was the first V. and I had heard of the idea!  So we (I) drove to stratford.  Once we got there we tried to follow a map K.'s brother had drawn her and inevitablly couldnt find the place.  In the end K. rang her brother for some clafifications and he was actually on his way back from the market himself.  So we met up with him at a garage and he pointed at the right way to go.

 

We set off again and one brief wrong turn later we arrived at an outdoor market next to an airfield.  V. and I left K. and L. to slowly amble through the market while we quickly made our way though a repeating pattern of clothes stalls, in-car entertainment stalls, sweet stalls, pretend weapons stalls and burger vans.  When V. and I got to the end we had ice cream.  Despite the fact that I also had rasbery sauce with my "99 with a flake", mine cost £1 while V.'s cost £1.20.  Probably down to the fact that I was served by a cute blonde girl and he was served by an old bloke.  Either the cute girl took a liking to me and gave me a "special price", or was too blonde to work out the change propperly.  I guess I'll never know.  Eventually K. and L. caught up with us and we made our way back into Stratford for an over-priced lunch.

 

After lunch we walked around and attempted to find "Shakespears' Birthplace".  On the way we booked in for a "Ghost Tour" at 6pm through the "Oldest building in Stratford".  Then onto the Birthplace - a fenced off Tudor cottage.  It cost us over £6 to enter and was basically a museum of how the house has been a museum in the past.  There are weird guides in each room who, as L. put it, "either don't talk or talk and you don't want them to".  The guide in the acutual bedroom where old William was supposed to have been born was an old lady with only about two teeth in her mouth.

 

The ghost tour was slightly better value for money, at only £5.  It was also a tour of a an old house that's a museum, although for the tour they turn all the lights off and the guide takes you through with a lantern telling you stories about the various ghosts and strage goings-on at the place.  It was interesting and a bit spooky, but we didn't see any ghosts :o(

 

And then we went home, in an even more dusty car.