Skip to main content

Balmoral: The Queen's Summer Home

Balmoral, in Royal Deeside, Aberdeenshire, is the Scottish home to the Royal family; I prefer calling it Liz's summer home because, well, she's super adorable and she has a serious crib for her summer home. We paid a visit here on our drive from Fort William to Ballater, our stay for the next three nights. The castle is only open from April to July, so we got lucky to get here on the last day it was open. Was Queen Elizabeth there??

As for Royal homes, I've been to Tower of London, Kensington Palace, and Hampton Court Palace. If I had to rank Balmoral, I'd put it behind Hampton Court Palace. There are quite a few similarities between the two, mostly due to the extensive gardens, which doesn't exist in near the scale at Tower of London nor Kensington Palace.

We had a couple of hours to spend here, so being the tourists we are, we went with the audio tour, always a favorite of mine so that I can listen and look without needing to read to much. I find I enjoy this way more. The first few stops on the tour covered:

  1. A brief history of the castle, focusing on the purchase of the property in 1852 by Prince Albert, husband to Queen Victoria.
  2. The improvements Prince Albert made to the property.
  3. The deer larder, basically where they process the deer that they kill every year as part of the deer control policy.
From the exhibition area you head down The Avenue of Conifers and if you peek to the right and walk off the path through the trees, you're treated with this spectacular view.



The tour winds down the road to the impressive vegetable garden. All of the vegetables are grown to be ready exactly when the Royal family comes for the summer.

The lettuce, cabbage, rocket, etc. ready to be eaten.

Massive onions! They are about the size of a softball.

The vegetable garden leads to the Conservatory and then Queen Mary's Garden, which reminded me the most of the gardens you see at Hampton Court. You're now standing facing the front of the castle.

Queen Mary's Garden

Making memories with Henry

We continued to follow our tour around the 50,000 acre estate, going past the Garden Cottage and the approach to the Castle.

Approach to Balmoral Castle

To the left of the castle is the sunken garden, again, much like those at Hampton Court. I can't help but wonder if the grounds here were inspired by King Henry VIII's home. Surely it was.

Sunken Gardens

The tour finished up with a visit to the Ballroom, a vast room designed to hold events and dinner parties. The Queen uses the ballroom often to entertain her guests. As we headed back out to the car, I notice the flag flying high above the castle.


That's the Royal Standard of Scotland, which means the Queen is in residence. And to think she didn't invite me in for tea. Well, if you read this Your Majesty, I'm available any time.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No more trips to Vietnam

Well, last week was a big week for me. I decided to leave FCG and return to work for Coca-Cola Enterprises. I had been talking with the people I know at CCE since late last year about working with them and they finally had a position open up a couple of weeks ago. I'm excited to go back there and work on the business side of the company versus the IT side. I start on Apri l16. I will be working in the Revenue Management Department as the Forecasting & Planning Manager. Essentially I will be the business process owner, facilitator, and coordinator of all forecasting and planning activities within the company. That involves working with all of the regional and corporate business units to ensure that the tools and related processes are thoroughly integrated across finance, revenue management, supply chain, logistics and sales. I will also be responsible for managing all of the support tools and solutions, so I still get to be a Project Manager. This is a big job with lo
6 comments
Read more

Dublin & Beyond

I arrived in Dublin Wednesday evening. Somehow the 1-hour flight from Heathrow made it in 30 minutes. How is that even possible? I'm staying at The Marker Hotel again. I stayed at The Marker when I first came to Dublin two years ago. Back then, it was their grand opening. This is one of the nicest hotels I've ever stayed in. Incredible service (more on that in a bit). Thursday and Friday I was teaching a 2-day Tableau class at the Facebook office. Since I was last here, Facebook has moved into a new office right next to The Marker. Facebook Dublin's new home From the 5th floor looking down at the cafeteria The rooftop has spectacular views of the entire city Thursday evening, my good friend Ivan took me to a local eatery called Lolly & Cooks. We kind of had to go here since nothing else was open. All of the pubs stop serving food at like 5:30pm. It's strange! We enjoyed a light meal of fish before taking on these amazing desserts. I went for the r
2 comments
Read more

Double Chocolate Chip Dream Cookies

If you love chocolate, these are the cookies for you. The name says it all...Double Chocolate Chip Dream Cookies. Indeed, they are a dream! It takes about 10 minutes to make the batter, then eight minutes to cook. You can be eating these in less time than it takes to watch an episode of The Office. To make them vegan:  Use 1/4 cup of applesauce (from Whole Foods in the UK) for each egg Replace the butter with margarine (make sure it's stick margarine) Use dark chocolate chips (you can get a 2KG bag of chocolate chips at Costco).  Unlike last time, when I used tub margarine and melted it too much, use stick margarine and let it come to room temperature to soften. This made a HUGE difference.  They're super delicious! Enjoy!
Post a Comment
Read more