I haven't been doing a lot of traveling around England and going to Leeds Castle was mentioned in a book of day trips, listed as the "loveliest castle in the world". I haven't seen may castles, but this one was indeed lovely. It looked like it was from the pages of a storybook. It's
the building version of the stick figure - even if I hadn't been I could have imagines it perfectly. Towers and turrets and a moat and a falconry! (Plus a dog collar museum but I have no idea why that was there.) Even the walk to the castle was lovely. It was a long one - about 15 minutes but we walked through the woods and a field and over a bridge with a lovely lake underneath that was overrun with ducks.We leisurely walked through the castle which was just as beautiful and interesting on the inside. Lots of fancy rooms and old paintings, but this castle has been used much more recently than some other museum-like buildings. One of the bathrooms was something you would normally see in
a big fancy house today.The furnishings were much more modern than I would have expected, but I really enjoyed it because so much of what we know about royalty is through history, so it was new and interesting to see how they still must live today.
The best part of the visit though was wandering the grounds. It was a rare day of sunshine and warmth, and the leaves had just started to turn. It was so relaxing to be out of the city and we were there for just long enough so we weren't bored.
We took our food to sit and picnic on the huge expanse of bright green lawn, in another storybook cliche. I bought a bottle of wine that had been made in the castle's vineyards and we were all settling in on our jackets when I realized none of us had a corkscrew. We all had been looking forward to sharing a bottle of wine in the vineyards where it was made, so I figured we could just push the cork down into the bottle. But the only thing to do this with was my pen. Not sure why I thought this was smart because my incredible brute strength did in fact get the cork down, taking my pen with it! Being the classy college students that we are, just just shrugged, laughed it off, and drank it anyway - pen and cork bobbling as we passed it around (without cups of course). That's when the mother of all geese waddled over, most likely after our food (not that we had anything special - the wine was $7),
but I swear I have never seen anything like it. It was easily bigger than us sitting down, huge and black and mean. We tried shooing it away but it kept slowly coming towards us like something out of a really bad horror film. We started getting a little nervous because those things bit! But even when the tall male in our group stood up, nothing deterred this goose from its mission. It even reared (do geese rear?) up and hissed and that's when we all fled the scene.Embarrassed by being driven off by what was probably a lovely swan roaming the lovely grounds, we skulked off to the road, this being my third meal off the curb (not including the charity Harri Krishna food I get on school days, but that's another story). But being a beautiful day, even the devil swan couldn't ruin our picnic - or me spilling both win and ketchup on myself, or all of us having our teeth hit by the pen in the bottle (which really hurt by the way), or seeing another picnicker drive the goose off by simply clapping in its face.
So though we probably all poisoned ourselves with the corked and inky wine, it was a pretty amazing day.
