Hmm, for some reason I can't get pictures to work on this connection so they will have to wait until tomorrow night. Pity because we took some beautiful pictures of peacocks today but they won't be any less pretty for a day of sitting on my hard drive.
Mom and I had one more Shakespeare-related site to visit this morning before leaving Stratford-upon-Avon. We got out of the hotel quickly this morning and went to the countryside to see Mary Arden's house, the place where Shakespeare's mother (Mary Arden) grew up. The site actually consists of her modest brick farmhouse and farmyard and a nearby larger Tudor farmhouse and farmyard. A bit confusing at first since we didn't know which was which. Turns out an enterprising farmer (Palmer) living in the supposedly nicer-looking Tudor farmhouse told unsuspecting tourists years and years ago that his was actually the house where Mary Arden had lived. Apparently the farce was uncovered but it's unclear why we still tour Palmer's farmhouse - nothing special there although it was charming. According to the exhibit, Shakespeare spent some time on the farm while growing up. It had been left to Mary Arden in her father's will, so she was a property-owner in her own right. Cool stuff.
Our next stop was Warwick Castle just north of Stratford-upon-Avon where we ended up spending the remainder of the day after arriving about noon. There were plenty of different kinds of exhibits to see and a few shows. The whole thing reminded me of the Renaissance Faire at home, but much better done and centered around an actual medieval castle instead of artificially constructed in an empty field. But the exhibits and shows were in the same vein. Mom and I saw all of the exhibits that took visitors on tours of the castle; walked the ramparts; climbed the towers; watched a demonstration of a real and HUGE trebuchet (I have videos!); watched a falconry exhibition that used eagles, an owl, and a vulture instead of falcons; ate ridiculously fatty burgers and sausage rolls; climbed into the jail; and took probably over a hundred pictures of peacocks. It was a great day. The trebuchet demo was really great. The audience sat on the castle-side of the river with the trebuchet and its crew safely far away on the other side of the river. There was an announcer who explained to us how the mechanism worked and how we (the visitors had been recruited into the army) were going to use it in our siege against London. Finally, we did a countdown and the trebuchet launched a huge stone all the way across the open field and into the trees on the far side. I think the announcer said it was a distance of about 200 yards and was not the maximum that the trebuchet was capable of - they were operating it at half capacity. Mom's favorite thing, I think, were the many peacocks wandering around a garden outside of the castle walls. We took many bad pictures of them and got a few good ones.
We finally left the Castle around 5 pm and drove to our next hotel a little ways north of Birmingham. We took an accidental detour through the town of Lichfield which ended up being quite convenient. As soon as we realized that's where we were headed, I remembered something having to do with Lichfield from the class I took on Quakers at Swarthmore in 2008. After some brain-racking I was able to say that George Fox had been in Lichfield at some point and done something, probably preaching, and ended up in an altercation (nonviolent, of course) with some other folks. A little while later Mom remembered that he'd served a good length of time in the Lichfield jail and now that I'm typing this, I think some famous letters of his were written while in Lichfield. So, after this impressive display of our collective brain power, Mom and I decided that we were quite pleased with our accidental detour through Lichfield.
We're spending the night in a town called Rugeley. There's nothing touristy to do here and we enjoyed being able to settle into our hotel for the evening around 8:30 after a delicious dinner at a nearby Indian restaurant. Tomorrow morning it's up early and on the road for a 2-hour drive north to Pendle Hill - another spot where George Fox did something at some time involving some other people. We're pretty sure he wasn't thrown into the Pendle jail, though.
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