A 49th Wedding Anniversary to Remember

 Dale and I were set to celebrate our 49^th wedding anniversary! Last year we had reservations at Thornbury, the castle where King Henry and Anne Boleyn stayed. We ended up staying there this past summer after Covid nixed those plans.

This time we settled on Amberley Castle, a medieval castle in which building started in the 1100’s. It has been made into a hotel but there are still touches of the old.

The Castle and 900 year old walls

Our room, a little like the old, was very drafty and we had our gas fireplace lit in the morning and it ran all day. We sat on the small couch, in front of the fire, very close together with our feet on the table, reading the newspaper, drinking wine, looking at our laptops or just snoozing.

Dinner in front of our fire

The Castle is small but it seemed to have a nice garden. It was cold so we didn’t take much time in the garden, although I would like to see more, if we’d ever go back.

We walked into the town of Amberley, which is really small. We found a pottery shop where we found 2 women making pottery. Some of the pottery is a dark blue and quite beautiful, however, we are traveling light so we have no room for bulky things. I did find some handmade candles in both a dark green and pink/red and bought a box of each to burn both Christmas Eve and at Christmas dinner.

We found our way to the pub where we got a seat on a couch and ordered wine. There were 2 older men to the left of me and another couple, probably our age to the right of Dale. We sipped our wine and listened into the conversations of mostly the older men which were hysterical. Once I laughed right out loud, but fortunately, the men didn’t hear anything. They were both quite deaf. One conversation was about New Years Eve in Paris one year. Dinner started at 6 pm and they were still eating at 2am. One guy said in the morning they went croquet, other guy piped in but not many people were alive. This was our afternoons entertainment.

The town of Amberley, the pub is on the left

We walked back to the castle as it was getting dark and we didn’t have a flashlight for the footpath.

A really old cemetery.

We did have a formal dinner; 3-course for each of us. But, like we always do, we shared everything so ordered different dishes. I’m sure it looked really elegant passing the plates back and forth!

After breakfast the next morning we were off to London again. This time for 3 days.