European Adventure--Chatsworth House

After our little Blackpool adventure, we got to get on with the REAL fun of being in Europe with the love of your life. We took two days to get to London, and did a few site seeing doodahs on the way.

Our first mini stop was to the Preston, England Temple. It was the first clean place we had seen in over a week since Blackpool isn't exactly classy or clean in the slightest. We wanted to just kiss the ground and hug the temple. The temple is one of the smaller ones, and it is right next to the Preston MTC. The grounds are absolutely gorgeous.

In front of the gorgeous temple.

Walking the grounds and absolutely loving all the flowers and trees.

After visiting the temple we stopped at Chatsworth House. This is where the Duke and Duchess of something (I can't remember right now) currently live. The Pride and Prejudice movies were filmed here. I have never seen these movies, but after seeing the grounds, I've been dying to watch them...so if anyone would like to have a movie party, I'll bring treats. I'm just sayin'....

These grounds are AMAZING. Take the Thanksgiving Pointe Gardens and times them by about 14. They are just incredible. We had scheduled about 3 hours to walk around the gardens, but we all ended up staying about 6. The house was amazing too...so ornate. They definitely like to be flashy with their decor. The whole time we were there we kept saying how much we wished we could bring over our whole family to see just this very place. It was just so incredible.

My favorite part of the gardens. They have a sprinkler type thing that looks like a weeping willow. The steel are the branches, and the water is the leaves hanging down. You can run around in it, or just sit and admire. It really is just so gorgeous.

The had a REAL LIFE hedge maze--like in all the movies! They really do exist! Logan and I found our way to the middle pretty easy, it was getting out that was the hard part!

Most gorgeous flowers ever.

Inside the house...this dining room was MASSIVE!! It was to serve all of their guests at their outrageous parties. They had a menu displayed and it was a full ten course meal.

Intricate wood carvings on the walls. This all was one chunk of wood, and they cut out the flowers and made them pop out of the wood. Amazing.

Reason #28372 I wish I could bring the whole family over to this place. Not only would Deana just flip out over the gardens, but they had a big dress up room that you could try on costumes of their era. They also had a big playground for the kids.