31May2008: Day 7...one week and 51 more to go.

Today we went down to the Charles Dickens festival in Historic Rochester (meaning downtown). They had a parade of people dressed in period costumes and outfits from his novels. It was a nice day of walking around. They had bagpipe band as well. Chris filmed a bunch of it, (but I can't get it off of my video camera yet. I got a new laptop from work and it has the necessary fire wire connection, but I need to get the right cable to make it work.)

We went inside Rochester Castle and got some cool pictures...here are some. The picture of the cathedral was from the top of the castle. The small cottage is Charles Dickens summer cottage that was moved to Rochester sometime in 1973 to preserve it. It was somewhere along the river before. There is also a cool shot from the bottom of the castle looking up. It was interesting to hear all of the history that the castle had and how it was sieged and such. It was built for the Bishop of Rochester who also built Westminster. He was apparently a great architect of his day. though I can remember his name anymore. It has quite a history. All the floors are gone, but the stone remains and the walls at the top are 8 feet thick. It is incredible to think how people must have labored to built it. One of the things Chris found interesting was the well shaft that went down all floors in the center of the castle. You could drop a bucket all the way down to the well from the top most floor and bring water up. Another thing that was interesting was that they had Pigeon roosts at the top of the walls, apparently Pigeons were a food source for them.

Teri wants to go see the Tonbridge castle tomorrow, the Leeds castle is close by as well so we'll hit that up soon.

As you can see it was a beutiful day today. Very nice and not too hot. A nice day for climbing a thousand stairs carrying a 30 lbs baby!

We pushed Makenna pretty hard today and she only broke down towards the end of the day after missing her morning nap and reaching 3:00. So, we were pretty happy she made it that long. She was very good in the Castle for the most part.