The past couple of days involved a lot of driving and were definitely a mixed bag. On Monday, we drove up to London - actually just North of London to the Warner Brothers Studio in Leavesden for the Harry Potter Studio Tour. From our arrival in the Warner Brothers parking lot to our exit through the gift shop, the Harry Potter Tour was such a blast. We were all so excited to be there, and from start to finish we went from sets to props to costuming to special effects - all displays surrounding the actual making of the movies.
It's actually quite mind-blowing when you think about the work they did there - for ten years they filmed these movies - thousands upon thousands of props crafted, hundreds of crew; they had a whole animal team to train the animals. And we got to see a ton of this stuff while listening to Tom Felton's (Draco) audio tour about the making of the movies. Here is a great overview of the Harry Potter Tour which, if you're ever in London and happen to be a Harry Potter fan, is well worth the cost and the trip up to Leavesden.
Berit took this great photo of Pam and I along with a throng sampling of the hundreds of British school children alongside of whom we took the tour.
We're sitting on Sirius Black's motorcycle in the outside courtyard (the Night Bus is in the background). We'd walked over and asked the kids who were all sitting on and standing around the bike at the time if they would let us in to take a picture and they all just stared at us. So instead we decided to just join them, telling them to "Smile!" while Berit took the picture.
My favorite part of the tour was just after this where there were a bunch of architectural drawings, concept sketches, paintings and card models, all of which built up to the grand daddy model of them all - a 1:24 scale model of Hogwarts, intricately detailed and added onto throughout the years of film production as new locations (ie: the bridge) were required, used for the wide angle shots of the castle exterior.
Yesterday was our biggest driving day so far this trip - two hours to Bath and two hours back, and if I'd had it do over... well. Seeing the Roman Baths and the Pump Room was something, and the town itself is a great place to walk around.
Have I become inured to the antiquity? Not sure. What I most enjoyed about yesterday was that we met up with June, a friend whose daughters used to babysit our daughters more than ten years ago and who has been living in England with her husband since then. What I least enjoyed was the amount of family friction. I don't know - the long time in the car? Too much togetherness? We were pretty over each other by the time we got home (Emsworth) last night. Good to have a couple of chill days around town and at the beach before we clean up here and head off to Oxford.
Oh yeah - the other saving grace from yesterday. Guess what's right off the A303 en route between here and Bath. I'll give you a hint: it's 3500 years old and composed of stones that only the gods (or aliens) could have arranged in this way at that time.
A veritable United Nations of individuals circled the stones while we were there, and as you can see the crows love it too. Oh. And I'm pretty sure I saw Jim Morrison.
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