Uncle Bill

Stratford-Upon-Avon was home to William Shakespeare. And that's about it. It's funny to think about what the town would be like without the Twelfth Night Cafe or Desdemona Diamonds, but thankfully for them, they'll never have to know. Regardless of how tiny the town is, we actually had a great time just being together, and goodness knows I love being in a hotel.
When we got off of the bus after riding 2 hours through the beautiful English countryside we had a few hours to explore the city and check into Ye Olde Holiday Inn before a drama workshop scheduled at a church on the other side of town. Little did we know it would only take 15 minutes to get to the other side of town, so we had plenty of time to take in the streets an then some. The workshop was our only scheduled activity on Wednesday so left to our own devices we wandered around a bit more before stumbling on Hathaway's Tea Room for traditional afternoon tea and scones. Had we known the buffet that we would be treated to for the next two nights and mornings we may have skipped out on the scones, but it didn't stop us from eating like it had been months since we had last seen food. We ended the night in a good ole English pub with every person in the group, plus our 2 chaperons and professor that came with us. It's a good thing that the entire population of Strtford is over the age of 86, so there wasn't anyone else around to bother.
The next day was all-tours, all the time. We started out at Anne Hathaway's house about 3 miles outside of the town, followed by a very modern new audio/visual museum at Shakespeare's birthplace. We really lucked out with beautiful weather on our trip, so after we finished the tour of the house we sat in the courtyard and 2 actresses, dressed in Elizabethan clothes performed 3 scenes from shows that we randomly called out. These women could literally pull out a scene from any show we called out (they struggled a bit with Cymbaline, so we moved onto Midsummer - it was very kind of us), we were all so jealous of how much they knew that we had to leave before we all started feeling bad about our inability to learn our scenes in less than a week.
The last two stops of the day were the original sight of Shakespeare's house, which had actually been leveled, so it's just an archelogical dig of sorts, and finally, Shakespeare's gravesite. It was a lot of Bard but when we made our way back to the hotel we had an hour and a half before dinner and somehow managed to find the latest episodes of Modern Family among the 8 channels we had at our disposal - the happiness I felt was almost comparable to how I felt the first time I stepped into the Globe. Almost. The night went off without any major events and the next morning we packed our bags, hoarded what we could from the breakfast buffet and headed back to good old London Town.
We're scheduled to meet David Suchet in an hour and then off to the Globe again for Henry IV: Part 1. It's been a long couple of days and the thought of standing outside for 3 hours tonight is a bit unnerving, but to be honest, I really can't complain.