UK, Day 3 - Goodrich Castle & Hereford

Saturday, we woke up early, had a Pop Tart breakfast, and headed out to Hereford. Max has a friend there whom we wanted to visit. We were supposed to meet him and his family at 1 at the Mappa Mundi in Hereford. We aimed to leave the hotel at 8, which would give us time to make the 3 hour drive, check in to the hotel, and have some lunch before meeting up. We made it out of the hotel pretty much on time, but we hadn't figured in the time it took to actually get back to the parking garage. Nor did we figure on all the wrong turns we would make before the GPS got satellites. We did end up on Abbey Road, which was kind of cool, but since we didn't know where the famous bit was, and we didn't know how long it would take us to get out of London, we decided not to pursue it. Once we got out of London, it was a pretty uneventful drive. Since we had some time, we looked in our English Heritage pass book to see if there was somewhere we could visit along the way. We saw that Goodrich Castle was just a bit out of the way, and it was one that Max had liked the picture. We found it pretty easily. By the time we got there, though, we only had about an hour to both see the castle and eat lunch. So, we grabbed sandwiches at the cafe and then went to the castle. The castle is a ruin, so it didn't take too long to see, thankfully. It was still pretty cool, though.

The gift shop was really nice, and they had a few of Emma's beloved Horrible Histories books. The guy working there had just written a huge paper on Beowulf, and he convinced us to get the kids' version of Beowulf, too. We're always willing to buy educational books. :) Em also got a nice wooden crossbow with a couple of "arrows."

We popped back in the car and made it to Hereford with moments to spare. We easily found our hotel, but unfortunately, there was no parking out front. We did find a parking lot around the corner, but we didn't have enough change for the machine. So, Max had to go find a place to get change, while Em & I stayed with the car. He came back, and we went to find Mappa Mundi. We walked up the road and back down without seeing it. We finally saw a small sign for it, which we followed. We didn't know it was in the cathedral. I wish the GPS would tell you things like that. The cathedral is quite easy to find. Rob, his wife Emily, and their 3 kids were waiting patiently for us.

I wish that we had been able to take pictures in the Mappa Mundi, but there were too many attendants around. It's the largest medieval map known to be in existence. We did the activity book for it, and it had us find all sorts of fun things, including people with gigantic lips that they use as sunshades, and people with no heads, who have faces on their chests. The really fun thing is that the city where we live in Germany was on the map! After the map, we looked through the lovely cathedral. Then, we went on a walk. We saw where the old castle had been, and we grabbed some ice cream near the river. We took our ice cram to a park, where the kids all played for a while. We went back to Rob & Emily's for a bit, and then we went out to Bunch of Carrots for dinner. Max had told Rob that I love steak & ale pie, so they took us to a place with excellent steak & ale pie. It was one of the best I've had - the other was at Hampton Court when we went to England a couple of years ago.

After dinner, it was time to go back to the hotel. We found that there was free wifi, so we checked our email and Facebook, and then headed off to bed.

Emma says - Hereford was cool, because I met new friends, and we got ice cream and ran around at the park. We found a cool but weird spinner toy that was slightly slanted, so it fun to ride. The Mappa Mundi had lots of animals and weird people things that don't really exist.