Dover Castle

Last Saturday we went with the Willeys and the Lakes to Dover Castle.  We've seen signs for it when going other places but had never stopped to check it out.  It's a little more than a two hour drive if I remember correctly.  Anyway, it's right on the edge of some of the famous white cliffs, and since it's on the coast, it was cold!!   If there weren't so many places in this country that I wanted to see before we move, I'd save travelling for March-early October.  Cool place though.  I'm glad we went.   Driving up to the castle...

The castle entrance...

One of the first things we did was climb to the top of the castle to get a good view.  Here's Jake and kiddos at the top.

And some pictures of the view from the top!  The English Channel...

Another part of the castle and the town..

More view from the castle top... See those towers way in the distance (top right) in the next picture?  On the way to the castle we drove by them and Ella yelled out, "Hey!  It's the Eiffel Tower!!"  haha.  Not quite.  I guess her memory of our trip to the real thing is a little foggy.   She cracks us up!

Dover is probably the most popular location to drive aboard a ferry to cross over to France if you go the ferry route.  You can see one taking off way out in the ocean...

Okay, one last view of the top of the castle.

Lots and lots of stairs and windy hallways...

The castle kitchen...

There's a little war museum there.  Luke liked the guns.

Knight training  was going on that day so all the kids got to train to be knights.  It was actually really informative.  I leaned a lot!  After going through 45 minutes of  "training" the kids got to hunt down the castle's dragon and the king gave them all chocolate and dubbed them knights afterwards.

This guy taught the kids about weapons.  His dog was pretty much the size of a horse.

Kill the dragon!

After finishing up at the castle we went down to the secret war tunnels there.  They were used for hundreds of years.. up through WW2.  No pictures were allowed inside.  Some of the stuff in there reminded me of being at the Churchill War Rooms in London.  We drove over to the park to see the cliffs once we finished with the tunnels and in the five minutes it took to drive over there both kids fell asleep and it started pouring really hard.  Guess we'll do the cliffs another day.