Day Three - Monday, December 22, 2025
Day three of the Emerald Isles adventure, but good news! No rain. We woke up to warmish skies and broken clouds. An overall perfect day for walking all over greater London.
We fueled up with a small breakfast and a pot of French press coffee. We haven't used a French press in years so a quick tutorial from ChatGPT got us in business. Impressively we were out the door by 9:30 am to head to the Southwest train bound for Windsor. Pushed through time changes and jet lag so we could see one of the royal highlights -- Windsor Castle!
It was about a sixty-minute train ride out to Windsor and the scenery from the train of the rolling British countryside dotted with cows, schools, soccer pitches and quaint towns was lovely. We arrived around 11 am just in time for the Windsor tour.
The walk from the train station to the castle was quick. Now came one of a million moments where my technology ineptness was on full display. All of the tickets I purchased for this trip were in my email and not downloaded. And of course I stupidly opted for no wifi. Fortunately, my children are more tech savvy and less frugal and provided a quick hot spot where I could download the tickets to the Windsor Castle and St. George's Cathedral.
We plugged in to the audio tour and walked through the State Rooms of the Palace. Our group was entertained by the three bedrooms set up for the king to sleep and the hierarchy for who could be in each room determined by their proximity to the king. (Only the butler could be in the most private of the three bedrooms.). We marveled at the art and the furniture. I forgot the Castle caught on fire in 1992 and the massive destruction that followed. It was fascinating to see all the work that went in to restore it within the last thirty years. It's all stunningly overwhelming.
From there we moved to the St. George Cathedral where Harry and Megan wed. This is also the church where Elizabeth II is buried along with Prince Phillip.
After lunch the boys had enough of historic sightseeing and decided to wander the town finding Eton Academy one of Prince William's schools. Madelyn and I went back to the castle to see St. Mary's Doll House a stunning miniature mansion complete with electricity and at one time running water. Due to sustainability measures the water doesn't run. The miniature cars in the garage are incredible, the tiny wine bottles hold wine, the library is filled with thousands of miniature books and the servants' quarters received a fair amount of real estate as part of the house.
With night coming quickly on the shortest day of the year - the sun starts to set around 3:45 pm so we boarded the train back to London. We opted to skip a pitstop at Vauxhall and took the train to the end at the Waterloo station.
We wandered around London to check out the neighborhood, but most of the landmark sights we had seen in the rain the night before. But just off the train station in Waterloo we found an excellent pub - the White Hart where we filled up on beer, appetizers and fish and chips before heading to the National Theater to see Nicola Coughlan in The Playboy of the Western World. Highly recommended but hard to follow with thick Irish accents. Comments heard in the lobby and bathroom reviews cited great acting, once you got used to the dialect you could mostly understand the story. I think our group enjoyed the show and really loved the ice cream at intermission. And of course, my technology challenges continued with my phone and watch both going off at the show. I had to punt all my tech to the boys in the row behind me to turn it all off.
Show ended, jet lag set in hard but we stumbled upon where the University of Notre Dame has its classrooms and living quarters. So we grabbed a photo and then hopped the red bus home to 137 Fentimen Road.
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