Driving Home and Castle Howard...

The drive home was really the only time we had any rain or cloudy skies the whole trip, so we were very lucky...

That purple haze is all heather in bloom...

It's hard to capture the scale, since it was SO VAST!, but if you look in the center of this picture, those little white specks, are sheep!  Amazing...

This is the heather close up...It's a deeper purple than I thought it would be...

Castle Howard had a series of gate houses and was surrounded by walls...you can tell they were planned for horses passing through, not cars!

We rode a little tram to the house from the entrance.  The boys loved it!

Will was actually really bored going through the house, I however, had a great time!

This is by far the fanciest commode I have ever seen...

I wondered how many babies had been rocked in this intricately carved cradle...

They had an incredible collection of marble statues, it seriously rivaled the collections of the museums we saw in Provence!  In a home! That still has CHILDREN living in it!  I can't even imagine...

This was looking across the balcony into the great hall...

Looking up from the balcony into the dome..

An original painting of King Henry the 8th...

I was fascinated by what this wooden lady could have been used for.  I asked and they said it was used as a fire screen at times, but mostly they were placed in upstairs windows as sort of an early burglar deterrent.  People couldn't tell if someone was really home or not, if they saw a lady in the window.  (Unless they were smart enough to stay there a while and watch)

This room seriously killed me.  The silk on the furniture is the same as the silk on the walls.  It was amazing.  I can't imagine how much that must have cost...

This was the family's private chapel.  Can you imagine?  I can't imagine having a church in my home that is fancier than most churches in the world!

The Atlas Fountain...

The view of the house from the fountain...

After the fountain we stopped for lunch, where I had one of the best scones I have ever had in my life...

This was another folly, a temple.  Many estates had these put up in the early 1800's.  They were to amuse visitors, and a way to spend money if you had too much...( :

We returned that night to the cottage, and then packed up, spent the next day packing and then flew out really, really early the next morning.