Wicked and York.

So it's been a busy few days.  We have arrived in London and been to Wicked the musical. The West end cast were the best I hsve seen yet. They were even better than the Broadway cast

We went to the Harry Potter experience the next day but I will leave that for Amelia in another post and today was York! I particularly love York Castle Museum as it has a lot of cool social history stuff including a very excellent Victorian street and a slightly creepy set of old prison cells complete with holographic prisoners.

  

Here is the very obedient Amelia playing at schools along with some of the other things we saw in the Museum.

Below is the aforementioned Victorian street. You need to see it to see how amazing it is!! I love it.

The next set of picture are various shots taken around the city of York itself. Including the Harry Potter store! 

Cardiff

Cardiff has been surprisingly interesting. We have a simply stunning apartment and it's an easy walk to a plethora of really good restaurants. Cardiff itself is really lovely too
 It's been really relaxing and there is a really fun water taxi you can use to get over to town.

Norwegian Church 

Carousel on the waterfront at Mermaid Quay

Pierhead building from Mermaid Quay

In town we went to Cardiff castle, visited the Vicorian Arcades, walked up the main street and went to the museum. We had dinner at a lovely French restaurant and the night previous we had dinner at a place with singing waiters! How fun is that??

Above is a picture of the municipal buildings and the a lovely old building ironically called New Theatre is below

Victorian arcade where we lunched 

Inside Cardiff Castle 

The keep at Cardid Castle

Book nerd mission #2 is complete

The Book of Kells was amazing to see IRL, and so well preserved! Of course there were no photos allowed, so have a pano-vision of Trinity College Library instead.

<3

Dublin

We really only had a day and a bit in Dublin and quite a lot of that was us exclaiming about how nice it was to be in sensible temperatures again... 18 degrees as opposed to 37. The first day we were there we basically collapsed in our unit after going to Dublinia the Viking and medieval exhibit across the road. We tried the local chip shop though which the taxi driver recommended and it was fab.

The next day we did a hop on hop off tour and saw some of the main sights. We visited Dublin Castle and TWO libraries. We even had to queue for 20 mins at one of them!  We also did a walk around our local area and took a few photos.

St Patrick's  (Johnathan Swift was deacon here for about 35 years 

Dublin Castle 

Inside the state rooms of Dublin Castle. 

Long Room - Trinity College Library 

This choir school was established in 1493.

Versalllies

My birthday involved an interesting trip to Versailles. We were super early so we jumped off the metro to look at the Arc de Triomphe and the champs ellesye.

That might have been a mistake.... we got back on the metro and would have almost have been ok if we had not taken the wrong train and not realised we needed to change. Sadly we ended up at a different station and by the time we found Versailles missed our tour. We went anyway and turns out that disabled people and their minders get in free!! Technically you need a disabled card but they waved us through. I loved it soooo much. It was absolutely scorching though so we were exhausted by the time we finished and could have done without having to switch train lines after a metro technical fault!!

Paris 2..

So what can I say  Paris was insanely hot. We did manage to get on a hop on and hop off bus tour  (which we stayed on the whole way round due to the fact I couldn't get down the stairs fast). We also did the Eiffel tour a river cruise and has crepes from a riverside vender.  Then we headed home to collapse from heat exhaustion. I have not ever had solo much water in my life.