Windsor and Royal England

I am starting this blog post on September 8th, the day that Queen Elizabeth II died. As a history lover, I’ve always been intrigued by the Royal Family and the pomp and circumstance of the British Monarchy. I believe that Queen Elizabeth demonstrated great service and duty to her country, and I also chuckle at the many funny stories that are shared about her sense of humor. One of her famous quotes, “I have to be seen to be believed”, to me seems a perfect blend of that sense of duty and a bit of that sharp humor. There are of course mixed feelings about the monarchy in the UK, but I do think that people are genuinely sad about her passing and will miss her warmth and consistency. I’m glad she’s reunited with her beloved Price Philip and wish all her family well.

Queen Elizabeth II and the rainbow that appeared over Windsor Castle shortly after her death

Windsor was our second base city during a two-week trip in England in July after we had spent time in London as described in this blog post. My ultimate goal with this Type A Travel venture is to offer customized travel planning services for clients and this was in many ways my first Type A Travel "Trip to Remember" as I did all of the planning and logistics for everyone. I hope they loved it as much as I did. Our journey from London to Windsor (a short 23 miles) was a bit complicated because we were renting a large car and picking up three people at Heathrow airport. Our journey began with a train trip (Great Western Railway) from London’s Paddington Station to the town of Slough. We had to start in Slough because we needed a vehicle for six plus luggage and that size was not available at Heathrow. We took the train to Slough, a taxi from the train station to the Enterprise car rental location, got the car and headed to Heathrow to pick up our friends. This was all a bit exhausting to be honest, but we finally were all together and battled the traffic on the M4 to arrive in Windsor in the late afternoon. We had booked our three nights in Windsor at the Castle Hotel Windsor, a delightful and very convenient hotel. The hotel is right on the High Street in downtown Windsor and a stone’s throw from the Castle itself. It consists of a main building and an annex where most of the rooms are located, an indoor and outdoor restaurant/bar and a more formal restaurant, as well as a car parking area. Rooms were big, modern, and most importantly, air conditioned! Highly recommended.

Around town in Windsor

Of the six of us, three had newly arrived from the US that day and the rest of us had been in Europe already and were time-zone adjusted. Because of that, we’d planned an unstructured day of just walking around town and getting familiar with it. Windsor is a charming town with lots of restaurants and shops of all kinds, Windsor Castle is smack dab in the center of it (I think I’d expected the Castle to be a little more removed). You can get a sense of how in Medieval times towns would have grown-up outside of castle walls and that’s exactly what happened here. We had a quick lunch at the hotel’s restaurant and walked along the river a bit and through some lovely gardens and parks. After that, three of us, my spouse and our friend Pennie, had a dinner reservation at The Fat Duck while the other newly arrived ones called it an early night to get some rest. The Fat Duck, located in the small town of Bray, about six miles from the hotel, is a well known and highly lauded restaurant run by the chef Heston Blumenthal. This Michelin three-starred restaurant and “Best of the Best” on the trusted Top 50 Restaurants of the World ranking, was a fantastical delight. Housed in a very small building in center of town, the dining room probably had only fifteen tables at most. The menu was an anthology of the greatest dishes from the restaurant’s past twenty-five years – including treats such as: red cabbage gazpacho and pommery mustard ice cream, jelly of oyster and passionfruit, sound of the sea (served with an iPod full of seagull and ocean sounds), mock turtle soup, and their famous sweet shop for take-away candies. Heston was an early adopter of cooking with liquid nitrogen and the evening started out with nitro poached Campari spritz for me. It was a fun night for the three of us and definitely one of the more inventive and light-hearted meals I’ve ever had.

Deliciousness from The Fat Duck

The next day we departed Windsor to visit Hampton Court Palace, one of the principle and favorite residences of King Henry VIII. The Palace was originally built in the early 1500’s for Cardinal Wolsey who then gave it to Henry VIII to atone for his fall from grace with the King. Through a bit of complicated ancestry, Elizabeth II and the current King Charles III are descendants of Henry VIII. The Palace itself is a huge complex, greatly expanded by Henry VIII to accommodate the large royal retinue of the time. One notable addition he made was the expansion of the large Tudor kitchens, added to feed his large court. The Palace felt a bit chock-a-block in design and the self-guided tour was not sequential in a way that helped you understand the timeline of the building and its history. One thing I learned from the visit was the general layout of the royal chambers – from more accessible (Henry VIII’s Great Hall, Guard’s Chamber) to most restrictive (Privy Chamber and then Bed Chamber), this was a flow that we would see later in Windsor Castle. In the late 1600’s, King William III completed major revisions here and styled the Palace to rival Versailles. The Palace is enormous, with beautiful gardens, a Tudor-era indoor tennis court, and many interesting architectural elements.

The majesty of Hampton Court Palace

This rental car had proved to be the bane of our existence on this trip – we had to call roadside service twice and even though it was the biggest car we could get, we struggled to house all of our luggage and fit six people in there. On the way back from Hampton Court, we blew a tire and had to have the car towed to a service station for two days to have the tires replaced. Certainly not what we were expecting but, in the British way, we carried on with a stiff upper lip. Taking an Uber back to the hotel, we took a little rest and then had dinner at Cote Brasserie across the Thames River in Eton. A British chain with heavy French influences, the restaurant sits right on the river and offers beautiful views of Windsor town and Castle. It was busy and buzzing with energy from the crowd which was a nice diversion from the fatigue of the long day and car troubles. We enjoyed a sharing board with cheeses, meats, olives and the like and I had a wonder filet noir – with mushroom marmalade, black garlic jus, and charred gem lettuce. Very delicious!

Scenes on our way to and from dinner at Cote Brasserie

The following day, July 7th, was very full as we squeezed in visits to both Windsor Castle and Kew Gardens. We were all excited about the Castle tour since none of us had even been and it’s so well associated with Queen Elizabeth, having become her primary residence. The main entrance for the tour was just across the street so it could not have been easier. The Castle is the largest and oldest continually inhabited one in the world, with a history going back to its founding by William the Conqueror around 1070. Its strategic site on a hill above the Thames and close to London as well as near a large hunting area made it an ideal location and favorite for many of Britain’s thirty-nine monarchs. Once inside the imposing Castle walls, the property is divided into three wards: lower, middle and upper. The lower ward houses St. George Chapel (where Queen Elizabeth will be entombed) and many of the Castle’s administrative offices and the Horseshoe Cloister (there the changing of the guard happens). The middle ward contains the motte and baily design of the original fortress and the Round Tower and finally the upper ward contains the palace itself, the residences and other state rooms. Photography was not allowed in any of the buildings and it was as you’d expected absolutely beautiful and very grand, so historically significant. We were able to see the Changing of the Guard, which took much longer than you’d expect and it was interesting to see the precision of these soldiers. Unfortunately, we did not meet any members of the Royal Family but I do now look back on this visit very fondly.

Exterior shots of Windsor Castle

After our Castle tour we sought out a lunch place in town and found a charming Italian restaurant called Sebastian’s Italian. Discovered gems are the best finds and this certainly fit that bill, and would be the first in several delicious Italian meals we’d have on this trip. One of our friends is crazy for nduja (a spicy pork and pepper spread) and we found it on their Calabrese pizza (this would not be our last nduja but the first that turned me into a fan too). It was a lovely lunch and readied us for next part of our day which was a visit to Kew Gardens and the pickup of the rental car from the tire repair place. Kew Gardens, a Royal Botanical Garden, dates from 1840 and houses one of the largest and most diverse botanical collections in the world. The royal connection is that the gardens evolved from royal properties in nearby Richmond and Kew, which were merged in 1772. Many royal patrons have supported Kew over the years and have helped in its development and evolution. The three-hundred-acre site contains many greenhouses specializing in specific plant types – arid desert, tropical, and carnivorous to name a small few. There are sweeping fields and groves of trees to admire for their beauty and breadth. The layout of the various beds and collections was at the same time impressive and very organic in appearance – and all so beautiful. We loved seeing the newly discovered waterlily, Victoria boliviana, as well as the “Hive” multisensory sculpture and the numerous other beautiful natural features of this incredible and historic garden. The last royal connection to Kew Gardens was Kew Palace which was the home, and some may say prison, of King George III and his wife Charlotte. This small and tidy royal palace was a stark reminder of the poor understanding of mental illness at the time and the cruelty people can have to each other.

Kew Gardens and Palace

After Kew, we secured the car and headed back to Windsor. Our route took us through Runnymede and the location of the signing of the Magna Carta. The Magna Carta, viewed as one of the defining documents of democracy and self-determination, was signed between King John and his Barons on this site. There are numerous other monuments to liberty in this area but, unfortunately, we were unable to figure out the parking logistics and satisfied ourselves with a few roadside pictures. The setting was serene and very lovely. Back in Windsor, we had dinner at Bel and The Dragon, part of a small chain of old country inns in central England. The setting was very cute, the historic restaurant and tea room has been serving food since the 11th century, but we were literally the only people there! Wondering if there was something wrong with this restaurant but enjoying the hyper-personalized service by our young waitress, we did have a great evening. I loved my linguine with Devon crab and we all shared a spot-on apple tarte tatin.

Apple tarte tatin at Bel and The Dragon

July 8th was to have been our early morning departure from Windsor en route to Bath and an afternoon there before checking into our next hotel in Coresham. But we loved Windsor so much that we’d decided to skip Bath altogether (or rather leave that for another time) and spend another day in Windsor. We packed our bags and checked out of the hotel by noon and then started our day together with lunch (many of us did other morning sightseeing such as The Long Walk, Windsor Parish Church of Saint John the Baptist, and viewing of the Queen’s guard leaving from the changing of the guard ceremony, among other things). We met at noon at The Ivy, a restaurant we’d been eyeing up all week. The Ivy is part of a small chain and I’d had the opportunity to visit the lovely restaurant in Dublin in 2019 (mentioned in this blog post) and again in 2021. A hallmark of the Ivy locations is the vibrant and expressive interior décor – literally a riot of greens, pastels, plant prints and mix and match furniture and fabrics utilized to the best effect. The Ivy in Windsor was no exception, a beautiful setting and quite large, making the previous issues with reservations all the more confusing (we’d tried twice impromptu reservations here). I absolutely loved my starter of pan friend scallops and my main of grilled haloumi. After lunch we did a little bit of shopping in Windsor city center, there is a main shopping area by the converted old train station. The shops were a mix of moderate and higher-end and I was pleased to be able to get some cologne from my favorite perfumier Jo Malone. As a late afternoon last hurrah in Windsor, we took a short boat ride on the Thames. The 45-minute or so French Brothers cruise was absolutely idyllic. It may have been the cocktails from lunch or the slow tug of the boat on the slow and winding Thames or the warm sunny day, but all of us almost fell into naps as we journeyed up and down the river. As we returned to Windsor town, seeing the Castle from the water was absolutely awe inspiring and it was easy to see why folks from a bygone age would have been very intimated by it.

Windsor Parish Church and the Guards leaving the Castle

Gorgeous lunch at The Ivy

Boat ride on the Thames

After this last day in Windsor, and one last roadside assistance call due to a lack of solvent for leaded gas in our car (who knew?), we finally departed in the late afternoon for our next stop, the town of Coresham in west Wiltshire County. A blog post on that part of the trip is soon forth coming.