Another exhilarating day in life: A visit to "The Windsor Castle", London

My first trip to the United Kingdom started off on the 19th of April, 2009, with the 1 hour 20 minutes British Airways flight BA307 landing at the London Heathrow airport, 5 minutes before schedule at 11:10 am. Immigration took another 20 minutes to clear. Ismail’s flight from Switzerland would land at 7:00 pm and I was free until then to visit Windsor (which was Ismail’s idea).

I had too much luggage to carry around on a small trip so, I left two bags at the ‘Left Baggage section’ (not my idea again) and boarded bus no. 77 from Terminal 5 and headed towards Windsor, which was to be my first city of visit in England. 30 minutes at the bus stand and another 45 minutes later I was getting off a bus on which I was the only £4 worth passenger. I had the entire Mercedes Benz bus to myself all the way.

I got off and walked a couple of hundred meters to come face to face with the massive walls of the fort known as the “Windsor Castle”.

A Horse drawn carriage immediately confronted me and there was Queen Victoria in the background. Once the carriage went by, I caught the Queen alone and got a picture of her

The flag flying high above the fort

indicated that the Queen was in the Castle. As advised, I boarded the “Sight Seeing, Hop on and Hop off” tourist bus, where I met Mr. Bhatti, who was the driver of the bus. Since it was already 2:00 pm and my stomach was rumbling, I asked Mr. Bhatti the whereabouts of Indian food in that part of the city and he told me the many options that I could take.

The tour started and I got on top of the half open Double Decker to get clear pictures of the city and the Castle. I had to keep ducking through out the route though, to make sure that the overhanging trees didn’t get me off the bus. The trip took me around Windsor and Eton and I saw many monuments including the Eton College, where a lot of royalty once studied. The kids looked very smart in their designer suit uniforms. The bus stopped at a few places and I kept clicking away to get as many good pictures as I could. Check out a few pics of the beautiful cities Windsor and Eton, I am sure you will love them

These are plain houses - believe that!

A Chapel in Eton

A Street in Eton

What a sight, that's not paddy for sure!

The Thames river can be found almost everywhere in England :)

This is a train station

That's my house...

Once back from the city tour, which took about 30 minutes, I made my way to the Pizza Hut and ordered for a personal pan ‘vegetarian chilli’ pizza for lunch and a ‘Tiramisu’ for dessert. £10 later, I was at the entrance of the Castle,

where I picked up a fridge magnet of a picture of Windsor Castle (this is a habit I have picked up from Rekha and Arvind, who collect fridge magnets of all places they visit). I then bought my entrance ticket which saw me poorer by £15.50 and with a temporary wireless set, which would tell me all about the Castle.

The grounds are expansive and beautiful and very well maintained.

The grounds... what a sight

I was there inside too :)

This is the Chapel inside the Castle

Here, I got an opportunity to be photographed with the world famous Queen's guard.

The impressive sections inside for me, were the state apartments with all the residential chambers, collection of paintings, crockery, weapons, other artifacts and the Queen’s doll house (ohhh! that was mind blowing, only a queen can afford a doll house of this sort). But the most impressive were the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. The collections were not only proper regular paintings, but also his notes etc. There was one detailed drawing of the anatomy of the human neck, the details were mind boggling. This reasserted the established fact that he was probably the best scientist of his time (and long after that as well). This section was also a no photo / video section, which was disappointing.

The State Apartments

I then made my way out of the Castle at 5:30 pm, after spending two and half hours exploring the beautiful monument and then set off to the beginning of the road which is the actual entrance to the Castle which was a good 3Km walk. With hardly any battery left in the camera, I managed to get a few pictures of the whole castle before the battery died completely.

Here are the pictures of the complete Castle, beauuutttiiifulllllll

Beautiful isn't it, was worth the walk

I did walk a long way

This should tell you the distance I walked

I then headed back to the bus stop and boarded 77 again to get back to London Heathrow, Terminal 5 . I reached back at 6:50 pm got by luggage back from the ‘Left Baggage section’ and waited for Mr. Ismail Sidat to arrive and take me to his home, which would be my base for the next couple of days.

These are a few more pictures of the magnificent castle for you to savour