14Feb2009: Day 264: Kenwood House

It's getting really hard to find places to go that aren't too far away and that are interesting and open this time of year. Unfortunately, today's trek was a bit of a bust, in my opinion. We had originally planned on going to this other place but when we looked on the website, it was closed due to bad weather - which must've been from Thursday night as that's when we got some snow. Even though our snow had pretty much already melted by Friday morning, this place must be in a bit of a higher elevation I’m guessing.

Anyways, the only other place we could find was Kenwood House. It’s located in part of London, but a part that we could drive to. This house is known for all of the paintings it has that were given to the British nation in the 20th century. A lot of the collection was formed by Edward Cecil Guinness, chairman of the brewery, back in 1890.

The rooms themselves were okay to look at and they had a little leaflet telling you about some of the paintings or pieces of furniture but not much on the room itself. We couldn’t take pictures or video inside so we basically walked through it fairly quickly. They did have this one exhibition on a freelance photographer, John Gay, who took a lot of pictures of England from 1936 – 1996. They were definitely good pictures. I thought of Chris’s niece Brittanie as she’s a photography student. This guy had some really interesting photos of simple every day things. One was of a plowed field and I really liked it. I would never have seen the beauty in that just to look at it myself to take a picture. Not my talent.

So this place was basically a big house show casing paintings. I like paintings, but I can’t get too much into them especially with a child that was just un-agreeable practically all day. That was most likely due to her late night. She got up at her usual time which meant she didn’t get her full night of sleep. She just whined and cried through most everything. We walked around the grounds a bit but it was a bit cold and wet.

We went back to the car and found a ticket for 30 pounds. We forgot, I guess I forgot, to tell Chris that it was a pay-and-display parking area. He didn’t see it when we drove in and I had forgotten as we sat and ate lunch in the car when we first got there. He wasn’t too happy to say the least. We just headed home as it actually takes about 20-25 minutes just to get out of this area of London and back on the motor way.