Saturday May 11, 2019
I was so excited when I found out this trip included a Shakespeare tour I was so excited and the day finally came!
It was supposed to be pouring rain for our entire tour, but instead it was one of the most beautiful days we have had on this trip.
We walked around all of Stratford walking in the same spots Shakespeare once walked. The Tudor style houses were lovely to look at.
Part of our tour was seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company, a major British theatre company. Any actor that wants to really perform a Shakespearean play spends their life DREAMING of performing at this theater. Sir Ian McKellen, most famous for playing Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, is one of the best Shakespearean actors of all time and he performed here. Ralph Fiennes (Voldemort) also got his start with London’s Royal Shakespeare Company.
As a lover of both Shakespeare and the performing arts, I was geeking out in front of the theater. I took so many pictures, including ones of me doing the Hamlet “To be or not to be” pose.
I have now payed my respects to two out of three of my favorite writers. I visited F. Scott Fitzgerald and now Shakespeare. He was buried in the Holy Trinity Church, which was the same place he was baptized. The best Shakespeare fact is that grave robbers stole Shakespeare’s skull. It happened during a time when people thought the divots in someones skull could tell you about their intelligence.
The house where Shakespeare was born has a beautiful garden where people were sitting in the grass having picnics and actors were performing scenes from Shakespeare’s plays. We were told, however, that it didn’t look like that when Shakespeare was living there. His backyard would have been covered in mud a filth used for his fathers glove making.
Back on the bus we went after some shopping time. Liverpool was our next destination. We arrived in time for our group dinner at a Greek restaurant.
That dinner was wild because they just kept. bring. out. food. We had large plates filled with about four different appetizers, two salads, a mountain of French fries, and a plate with four different meats. Oh yes, and dessert. It was good that we had a 30 minute walk back to the hotel because I needed to walk all of that food off.
We finished off the night by checking out what the nightlife is like in Liverpool and then it was off to bed. It’s our first morning where we don’t have to be somewhere at 9 am.