Parks and Wars and Libraries

We started out our day by having breakfast with Sally.  She is a very nice lady, but she Never. Stopped. Talking. She took Seth and me to town, and we met up with the delegates and other leaders at 8:30.  We took the kids to the park and they wrote in their journals and then played ball until it was time to go to the Commandery Museum.  The Commandery is an old house/ factory from the 1400's that served as the command post for the Parlimentary troops during the English Civil War.  It has served as private homes, a school for blind boys, a textile factory, a war command post, and other uses during the last 600 years.  The building is so old that the floors and walls are warped and it gave me an unsettling feeling, kind of like the whole thing was going to collapse around me.   

The kids were givin a talk about arms and armor of the Civil War, and then were given the chance to practice using a pike (18 ft long pole with a sharp point used to stab your enemy in the face or throat) and loading and firing a cannon.  We had lunch there also, which was a sack lunch packed by their homestay families.  I had a roasted chicken breast sandwich, which was quite lovely.  Tracie and Dina had egg salad, which may or may not have given Tracie food poisoning.  Ugh.

When we were ready to leave the Commandery, we stopped in the gift shop where I bought a couple of books about Tudor life.  I paid 10 pounds and put it on my CC.  As we were lined up ready to leave, the lady working there came up in a panic because the cc machine had spit my receipt out after I left and she voided it because she didn't know what it was for.  I said that it wasn't a problem, and pulled out my card again, but she took forever to figure out how to make the till come out right and run my card again.  She was apologizing all over herself, but ended up calling the manager which took forever.  In the meantime, the entire delegation was outside waiting for me.  She finally got it straightened out and took my number to call me at the end of the day when she ran her reports, to make sure I hadn't been charged twice.  

When I finally got all that straightened out, we walked all the way across town to the new public library named the Hive.  It was very nice, but not someplace I wanted to spend a couple hours.  On our way back from the Hive, we stopped in the shopping district and spent 20 minutes.  Dina and I went to Poundland, which is the English dollar store.  We made it back to the park and the kids played ball while we waited for our homestay families to pick us up.

We had supper with Sally and Carys (Ian was at a football game) and then Seth, Sally, and Carys went to get ice cream while I Facetimed with mom and Kellie.  We visited and then gave them our gifts.  The Montana book (Montana: East of the Mountains) seemed to be a big hit.  

I want to get this posted while I have wifi, so no pictures tonight.  I will add them later.  Next stop, London!

The cathedral in Worchester.