28June2008: Day34: Upnor Castle

The owner of the house is in town from Australia and he came over for quite some time this morning to show Chris different things about the house, mow the “garden” and bring us our new flat screen TV – YEAH! Then he had to call his brother-in-law who works for Sky TV to come and get it working so that we had channels. They have “free” TV over here. There’s like 50 plus channels for free. Unfortunately, some of them play the same things repeatedly on various channels. But I can finally watch some Wimbledon matches now since I won’t be able to in person unfortunately. (Someone’s husband I know should look into getting US Open Tickets since his beloved wife wasn’t able to make it to Wimbledon like she wanted).

It was nice to meet the owner, and he was very nice and he’s having a new washer/dryer combo installed next week, (its one machine). Also, another King size bed, which is more like a queen or big double, is to be delivered. He gave us some areas that Makenna and I can walk to that are close by and gave us directions to the train station, also within walking distance.

In the afternoon, we took off to Upnor Castle. It was only about 15 minutes away. This castle was built in the 16th century and was built to protect warships that anchored in the River Medway. The castle doesn’t meet normal castle standards as it was built for a military naval purpose. I know at some point there was a fire and they had to rebuild some of it and you can see the difference from the stone to the brick in the pictures.

Another wedding was taking place so we had to wait a bit to get into the main area and then I felt like we were intruding on someone’s special day by walking around like tourists, but we weren’t the only ones. Again, not a “grand” castle per se but it has history.

On the way home, we noticed a park that seemed to have a lot of kids playing and also a lot of playground equipment. So we stopped at it. Unfortunately, most of the equipment seemed to be geared towards older kids – like over 3- but Makenna still enjoyed it and was quite upset when we had to go. It also had a kiddy pool and a bigger pool. There were plenty of people and kids in the kiddy pool but the bigger pool was closed. We didn’t even mention the pool to Makenna for fear of a massive meltdown.