Shakespeare wuz Here: Stratford upon Avon

As you ought to know, before it hit the fashion and aestetic world, steampunk began as a literary tradition. While Shakespeare lived long before steampunk, or even steam power, was a "thing," I thought a few pictures of his hometown would be a worthy homage.

This here is his place. I showed up in the evening, after the tours had closed, so I didn't get to see inside. :(

Local business, of course, has been capitalizing well on the town's most famous resident.

A Few More Details of the Power Plant at Warwick Castle

I did a bit more digging after yesterday's post on Warwick Castle and I found a few good pictures of the water powered electric station:

Warwick Castle

My reaction to the consumerist, child-ridden mess
that was Warwick Castle. (Slight Exaggeration.)

Ever wanted to go to a medieval and run around pretending to be a knight or a princess or whatever? Well, Warwick Castle is the place to do so. Unfortunately, it's full of  annoying schoolkids doing just that. So many of them...

Okay, as much as the Grumpy Cat in me wanted to be disappointed, (I mean, really, compare it to the elegant decay that was Corfe Castle) but Warwick Castle is very well preserved, thanks in part to this annoying tourism, so it does in fact deserve some historical merit. Here's some of the cool stuff I found.



Lovely gardens:

This here is a "test your strength" device in one of the exhibits.
It has multiple strength levels, from "girl" (I'm not kidding. Some bastard actually included that)
to "knight." This is me pulling it all the way up to the "knight" level. Ha.

For some reason this wax sculpture of a horse looks very surprised.

This part here was pretty cool. It's the water-powered electric station for the castle, added in the early 1900's.  Full of gears, rust, panels, levers and dials. My kinda place:

Update: More pictures of that here.

Inside the castle:

A Few Scenes of the English Countryside

Three words: Sheep, sheep, and sheep. 

Most of these pictures were taken in the Cotswold region, near-ish to Chipping Camden. Beautiful, pastoral area. Also, lots of cute sheep and ponies. 

An Afternoon of Time Travel! Blists Hill Victorian Town

First, I must apologize profusely for the long delay between posts; I was very busy for the last bit of my travel, and then was unfortunate enough to catch a dreadful illness on one of those awful heavier-than-air flying machines. I promise to chronicle the rest of my journey in reasonable time, and then we will get back to regular scheduled DIY tutorials and other such blogging.

So for those of you who may not remember my post on Iron Bridge Gorge, I remind you that the region was the jumping-off-point for the Industrial Revolution. And they built a fantastic outdoor museum to commemorate it! *cue geek-out*

Alrighty, picture spamming time:

This contraption here is to control a mine lift!

Inside an iron-working plant.

This is also the filming location for the show Victorian Pharmacy, which I blogged about ages ago. As if I wasn't already geeking out enough.