They are come to search the house. Shall I let them in?

So Tuesday was a day all about houses.  We rented a bus and drove out to see Hampton Court and Down House.  For those of you who don't know, Down House is the house of Charles Darwin and Hampton Court is essentially the English version of Versailles.  It was built by Cardinal Wolsey, but when he fell out of favor with King Henry VIII, the king took the house for himself and expanded it and built it into a palace.  It was used fairly consistently as a palace all the way through the reign of William and Mary.

Lorraine and I in front of Hampton Court!  Unfortunately, this is not the Hampton Court that we'll be living at next semester.  That Hampton Court is in Provo and not nearly so impressive.  Sigh.

Hampton Court was pretty awesome.  It was considerably less ornate than Versailles (notice the lack of gold trimmings on everything) but still pretty cool.  We had audio guides (again!) and just wandered through all of the different rooms for a couple of hours.  But then we went out into the gardens, and that was the best part, because we found the rose garden!  I think I just about died it smelled so beautiful.

See all of the absolutely gorgeous roses?

This was basically the best part of the whole day, in case you all were wondering.  I've discovered that I have an absolute passion for taking pictures of flowers, and lots of my pictures turn out fairly decent.  I have a friend here who takes pictures of every funny sign that she sees (I do a lot of that too) but my big thing is taking pictures of all of the beautiful flowers that I see.  When they're just sitting there looking so beautiful I can't help but take the picture.  And then I take pictures of whatever's around the flowers that I'm supposed to be looking at.  I think that winter was far too long for me.

Anyway, that was Hampton Court.  It was pretty awesome and it was really neat to imagine all of Henry VIII's six wives living there.  I've always really liked learning about the Tudor period of the British monarchy.  Oh!  And we found this cool arch on the way out that had basically the only gold decoration on the whole place.

See how cool this arch is?  All those gold leaves . . . 

Anyway, after Hampton Court we went to Down House, which is Charles Darwin's house.  Where he lived when he wrote the Origin of Species and all that.  Hampton Court was way cooler, but Darwin was pretty neat.  The downstairs of his house was decorated as it would have been when he lived there and upstairs was a museum of sorts.  We also went for a walk around the grounds.  I've decided that having a miniature woods in your backyard is a splendid thing to have and that I want one to walk in every day.

Here's Down House.  I didn't get a picture of me in front of it somehow.  But aren't the vines cool?

Alright, and that was the end of Tuesday.  I'll be posting soon about Wednesday, when we went to Cambridge!  Until then.