Adventures Ooop North

It's been a while since our last adventure, but on Thursday last week Jamie and I took advantage of cheap tickets and visited Warwick Castle.

We'd not been there before, so it's another English castle crossed off the list! I wasn't sure what to expect, now that the castle is owned by the Merlin Entertainment people (who also own Alton Towers, Madame Tussaudes etc). It turned out to be an interesting mix of actually interesting historical stuff, and entertaining aimed-at-children attractions.

Click through to embiggen

I did enjoy walking the walls and towers, although the hundreds of steps we had to climb were a bit of a struggle at times!

We were also massively lucky with the weather. Clear blue skies, with a rather stiff wind. The wind was good, because it meant we got to really see a good show when we stopped off to watch the Flight of the Eagles display.

Archie the Bald Eagle comes in to land on his trainer's wrist

Ernie the baby Milky Eagle Owl, demonstrating his hunting technique (badly)

Nikita the Stellar's Sea Eagle. Gorgeous bird, I am sad we didn't get to see her fly

Highlight of the day, though, had to be the firing of the trebuchet. Warwick Castle has the largest working siege engine in the world, and twice a day they fire a flaming missile from it to demonstrate how it works. I filmed the whole thing, from the moment they started to wind the arm down. If you just want to see it fire, skip ahead to about 8 mins.

The next morning we had a bit of time to kill before driving even further north, so we stopped off in Coventry to see the Cathedral and a dinosaur exhibition in the museum. We also found this beautiful 16th century almshouse as we were walking into the town centre.

The dinosaur exhibition was a little disappointing, but we did get to play with an animatronic Utahraptor that was used when filming Walking with Dinosaurs, so that was pretty cool.

I'd love to show you the final exciting part of our tour up north, as on Saturday I went wedding dress shopping! I hadn't intended to buy my dress there and then, as it was meant to be a fact finding trip with some of my friends who would miss out on the real dress shopping that would have taken place here with my bridesmaids. What I hadn't counted on was finding not just one, but two beautiful dresses, and making a snap decision to buy one of them because the price was so good, I got 10% off and had to order straight away to give myself time for the dress to be made and shipped over from Australia! It's by the designer Jean Fox and I am so excited to have bought my dress already! I am now searching for the perfect yarn to knit a shrug to wear with it.