After a long, deep, blissful sleep, I awoke on Saturday morning (5th July) incredibly excited about the day’s events. We were going to visit Pride and Prejudice (often abbreviated to P&P) filming locations – more specifically, two Pemberleys (home of the gorgeous Mr Darcy – eeeek!) – ‘eeek’ ‘eeek’ excited screaming, jumping etc...
But before I run away with my feelings on that subject...
Before we began our day indulging our P&P obsession (well my obsession; Anna & Dotti’s high levels of excited interest; and the boys’ less significant levels of interest), we had to wait for Dotti’s English friend Joe to arrive. Joe arrived, we met him and then we were off!!!! YAY YAY YAY 'more excited squeaking and jumping’. (NB. Accuracy note. Jumping in car is quite restricted by roof so really more like very enthusiastic bobbing.)
Our first destination was Lyme Park – filming location of the exterior scenes in the 1995 BBC version of P&P starring Colin Firth. Any residual tiredness was completely compensated for by the extremely high levels of adrenalin coursing through my veins (dramatic I know but I was rather excited!).
We visited the gardens first. Much jumping and squeaking excitedly followed – by this time all the guys had started to pay out on my expressions of excitement but I was WAY too ecstatic to even be bothered in the slightest…
I eagerly pointed out the patch of grass where Darcy and Elizabeth first met at Pemberley, the stairs that Darcy runs down in his haste to stop Lizzie leaving, the view of the house that Lizzie first sees of Pemberly, and of course the driveway where Lizzie looks longingly back at Darcy at the end of Episode 4... not to mention the famous spot at the lake’s edge where Darcy jumps in and gets his shirt delightfully wet.
Yes I am tragically obsessed, I know. :P As you can possibly imagine, my levels of excitement and rapture were increasing rapidly with the discovery of each new delight. I did manage to stay still long enough for a couple of photos. :D
In a summary of two sentences, this place had amazing water features, a cute little maze and an awesome rockery. The house was incredible, with detailed painting all over the ceiling and walls of the big important rooms, and the statue gallery was beyond description – marble is VERY beautiful.
Sunday we went to Dotti’s meeting which was really special, and then after the typical ‘English Pub Lunch’, Anna, Ben and I headed back to Crawley – via Cambridge.
Cambridge was absolutely adorable... we explored around the streets and then hired a punt (Editor's (i.e. Anna's) note: punt = a flat-bottomed boat propelled using a long pole). Our punting guide was very cute and kept us entertained with stories of the various exploits of past Cambridge students.
Our favourite was the story of the witch’s hat on the right steeple of King's College Chapel (Editor's note: witch's hat = traffic cone). Apparently some student climbed to the top and left the witch’s hat up there to prove he’d done it (Editor's note: see tall building on left in photo of Delle below). The university then hired a crew to get it down – and was told it would take 4 days to put the scaffolding up to reach it. On the third night the climber climbed back to the top, removed the witch’s hat and put it on the opposite steeple. :P We assume that at some point they got it down, and now there are spikes around the edges of the steeples further down to prevent any more adventures of a similar sort.
1 comment:
Wow delle! you sound relatively calm about the whole experience...you've obviously toned it down a little! :P
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