still raining...

Mom and I slept about 11 hours last night - it felt wonderful! We could have kept sleeping, I'm sure, but Pam woke us up so we could sleep tonight. I don't think it will be a problem.

With daylight, we are able to see the beautiful backyard, or garden, I should say, of this house. I'll include a picture of the garden, where you can see an archway that leads out to another walled garden with a sundial in the middle of it. You should be able to see the rooftops of the houses in back - the buildings are 13th and 14th century buildings. The house we are staying in was built much more recently, but the ground it's built on was once part of the big garden around an old church, as were those buildings you can see.

When breakfast was over we walked down the driveway and

around the corner and walked around the grounds and cemetary of the church. There were wonderful old gravestones there, most of them you can hardly read anymore. The church wasn't open, so we couldn't get in to see the inside, but the outside was old and beautiful. It's still raining on and off, but we went out anyway - adds to the feeling. Right around the corner is a big old house that is now a detox center - Roger said one of the Rolling Stones was in there just last week. yay.

After our walk around, we drove into an area called Guildford, where we walked around and looked at the shops and toured through the remains of Guildford castle. The area that used to be a moat is now a beautiful garden, which we walked through. We went inside the tower, which is pretty much the only part of the castle still standing, and then took pictures from the top looking down on the town. This picture is taken from down in the moat.

We walked all over, ate lunch, took lots of pictures, and got ourselves tired. The streets were cobble-stoned, and it was fun to see all the tiny little shops, with these very narrow alley-ways

between buildings where people would walk up them to go to other offices or shops or apartments. It's hard to describe, but looks so fantastic! Everything is so old! It's hard to imagine things as old as these buildings are.

I'm going to quit - dinner's ready and this computer is on the dining table. I'll add more later - can't wait to show off ALL the pictures I've taken. Still no luggage, looks like we're washing our clothes tonight so we'll have something to wear tomorrow that's clean. Wish I had my curling iron and hairspray! My hair is hanging in my face and scraggly. We'll figure out something - but we're not letting it stop us anyway. We're going to do what we have planned, even if we wear the same clothes for 3 weeks. Having a great time in spite of the rain and no clothes!