Mother's Day

My girls gave me lovely cards, chocolates and flowers this morning :)

It's a stroke of good fortune that Mother's Day has fallen during the Northumberland residents' weekend this year. Lots of places around the county are offering cut price or free entry to those of us lucky enough to live here. We took advantage of an offer at The Alnwick Garden and had a lot of fun there.

It's a place where the kids enjoy themselves best with a waterproof suit on, so they can get wet and messy in the fountain and streaming jets of water in the Grand Cascade. Of course, they ought to have taken their coats off first...Luckily it wasn't terribly cold, despite the thick fog.

Since we were there, we combined the visit to the garden with one to the grand castle next door. This was the setting for Harry Potter's Hogwarts school in the first two movies, which Grace found very exciting as we are almost finished reading the first book together. They did broomstick training and also dressed up as medieval princesses in the 'Knight's Quest' activity arena. We also saw a pair of very funny jesters in action and got to visit the state rooms.

We packed a lot into the day, but it passed without us seeing much of what is there, so I'm glad we have validated our tickets to last a full year.