I mentioned previously our need for early morning departure for this trip. David got us down first, the Brit's were a bit late, but we got off first, found our driver and took off. It took just about two hours, the most expensive limo ride I ever took!
The countryside was beautiful and we saw many row hedges along the way. Some roads appeared to be one way but they weren’t. It was a matter of move over and let one pass. No specific side to do the pulling over! The driver said you get used to it! We were not allowed to take photos inside.
This was THE HIGHLIGHT for Kara and Kristin! We enjoyed it too but not as much as those two!
The tour was of the house included the halls and rooms that appeared in the TV series and 3 movies. Everyone had seen all the films and series. The downstairs kitchen scenes were shot in London but the grand hall, library, sitting room, bedrooms were all featured. Pat and Kelly took the train into London because they had never been there. Kara and Bill had flown over two days earlier than us stopping in London before continuing on to Stockholm.
One thing I was unaware of was the castles connection to Egypt and King Tut’s tomb. There was a small museum of sorts of replicas and artifacts found in the tomb in a space we would call the basement.
Highclere Castle in Hampshire, England, is now famous as the shooting location for Downton Abbey, but one of the estate's real-life lords funded the search for Tutankhamen's tomb. George Edward Stanhope Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earrl of Carnarvon, was born on June 26, 1866 and inherited the title and the estate in 1890.
Like the fictional 7th Lord Grantham (and a lot of English peers in the 1880s and 1890s), the 5th Lord Carnarvon married rich to bail himself and the estate out of financial ruin. Shortly after his 1895 wedding to heiress Almina Victoria Maria Alexandra Wombwell, her father, the millionaire banker Alfred de Rothschild, paid off Carnarvon's standing debts and bestowed a modest £500,000 (equivalent to about $81 million in 2019) settlement on his new son-in-law. Lady Carnarvon's fortune is, in part, how the Carnarvons funded archaeologist Howard Carter's excavations in Egypt's Valley of the Kings -- although he also spent a fair chunk of it on racehorses and fast cars, which makes it pretty easy to figure out how he got into so much debt in the first place. Arguably, several years of archaeology were a better investment than an ill-fated Canadian railroad venture.
We hit some traffic on the way back but arrived in plenty of time to make the All Aboard time. We ate at the specialty Mexican restaurant but it didn’t come close to any Mexican restaurant here in Texas!
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