Day 14 - Blenheim Palace and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford

We had another full day planned for today...  Visiting Blenheim Palace in the morning, the seat of the Duke of Marlborough, and home to Sir Winston Churchill for part of his childhood.  Then Oxford and the Ashmolean Museum in the afternoon.

Blenheim Palace is amazing.  It is a blend of grandeur and family touches.  In the long room there are family photos as well as more formal portraits.  There are invitations for the Duke and Duchess requiring their attendance at the coronation of HM Queen Elizabeth.  It is actually a demand for them to attend, I should have taken a photo!   The language is very formal and archaic, so I am imagining it is a protocol/tradition that has gone on and on.  There are amazing portraits of the family and one is of the 9th Duchess Consuelo Vanderbilt Spencer-Churchill.  When I was a child we had a beautiful cat called Consuelo Vanderbilt Spencer-Churchill Brown - or Connie for short!  In 1978, when my dad took my mum and Kathryn and me to the UK, we did a number of day trips from London which started out by train and then we got on buses and went off to such places as the Cotswalds, Stratford and Blenheim Palace.  Dad has always been a great admire of Sir Winston Churchill and one of the stories he tells is of seeing Sir Winston in London during the war, while Dad was serving in the Navy.  There are quite a number of rooms dedicated to Sir Winston and his story.  All very interesting.

Then of course there are the lovely gardens...  The formal gardens include an Italian garden with lots of topiary including what look like sparrows, and water gardens.  Then there are the lawns and parklands...  My favourite part was the secret garden which was recreated in the 2000s.

We had a lovely time there and had lunch at the cafe which was lovely - a Mezze plate which had five different dips on it avocado, hummus, capsicum, lentil and beet root and an egg tagalatelli with courgettes, sundried tomatoes and pesto.  Delicious!  There is an excellent display of model soldiers in the corridor outside the loos at the cafe, and worth spending a little time checking them out.

We were having such a good time, it was hard to leave, however I have wanted to see the Ashmolean Museum since studying Archaeology.  A lot of the artefacts we studied came from this fine museum.

We drove to Oxford, where parking is a nightmare!!!!  We ended up in a car park where it cost £8.90 to park for up to 4 hours!  But it was just across the road from the museum.

They have some fantastic exhibits covering all periods of history's however their ancient and classical collections are world famous.

Perhaps the most famous piece is the Alfred jewel.

There are also lovely textiles...

After we had finished looking thru as much as we could take in, we had a little wander around the streets of Oxford.  As it was so late, after 5pm, we were too late to get into any of the colleges.  We did visit Blackwell's Music Shop and bought a book of 20th century piano duets including Lsnd of Hope and Glory, which seemed particularly appropriate.  Oxford also has a lot of old buildings and lovely streetscapes, so lovely to wander around, but heaps of people and lots of shops....

We headed back to the car and drove home via the other Coach and Horses pub and had dinner there.  Peter had a delicious pork belly dish and I had mushrooms with Brie and onion marmalade.  Much more up market than the first pub!