Jane's visit

Aunt Jane spent a week with us.  Unfortunately, it was really cold in Durham.  We took a cold outing to the Cathedral and Castle on Monday.   

            On Tuesday, we went to part of Hadrian's Wall and tromped around in the rain and mud. 

The kids got to search for dragon egg signs at this place.

On Wednesday, we drove down to Trowbridge, near Bath and Bristol, to look at some family history sites.  We went to Stonehenge first on Thursday morning, and then went to wander around some graveyards in the afternoon. 

We got to see the church where Alex's great great great grandparents were married and find a grave of one of our ancestors.  Owen and Weston wanted to pray by the grave - not sure what they prayed for, but it was sweet to see them praying by their ancestor's grave.  I was surprised at how much they liked wandering around the graveyards searching for names.

Savannah liked all the flowers.  We got to meet a distant cousin, Stuart, a relation through Alex and Jane's family line.  We had dessert with him on Thursday evening. 

On Friday, we drove into southern Wales and did a short walk on the bridge headed in to Wales.  We didn't stay very long there, but headed over to a farm in Bath.

On Friday evening, we let the younger kids play at a park, and then we all enjoyed dinner and dessert at Frankie & Benny's.  They have good hamburgers and shakes there. 

On Saturday, we headed over to London, where Jane was flying out of on Sunday.  She wanted to rest (I can't imagine why, after having traveling around in the car with our family...), so we left her at her hotel and then spent a few hours in London that afternoon.  Alex and I split up, since we didn't think the younger ones would do well standing in line at the London Eye.  That was what Jared really wanted to see while we were in England.  I took Nathan and Jared and went on the London Eye, which was an amazing view of the city.

Alex took Owen, Weston, and Savannah back to the Natural History Museum (we didn't get to see all of it when we went in December).  Unfortunately, the line there was really long, so they found something else to do instead.  Alex took the kids to the Princess Diana Memorial Playground in Kensington Gardens - they enjoyed playing on the pirate ship playground. 

I was a little bit worried about splitting up in London, but we all made it back together.  We even ended up on the same train back to our destination.  We started on different lines that merged before we met up.  We discovered that Alex got on the train a little bit earlier and was sitting a few cars ahead of us.  It was fun to step out of the same train and meet up again. 

The second picture below was one we took while buying tickets for the London Eye.  We knew that Weston really wanted to see the Queen of England, so we snapped this photo, trying to make Weston jealous that we had seen the Queen!

We had dinner with Jane before we parted ways and then had a long drive back to Durham that night.