More Ruins!

We visited two more ruins today.  The Witley Court and Gardens and the Kenilworth Castle.  Witley Court was not that old, at around 350 years old. It was a grand mansion on beautiful grounds but was destroyed by fire in the 1930s.  Kenilworth was built 800 years ago.

We are taking advantage of our English Heritage membership and going as many sites as possible.  The membership packet includes a map and a catalog but it’s not really detailed to use to find your way. Most of the sites don’t have actual street addresses but they include the postal code.

In the UK,  you can use the postal code and get pretty close.  Unfortunately the Garmin doesn’t work by entering the postal code and most of these sites are not major enough be in the points of interest database.  Fortunately when we got our free upgrade to a diesel on our rental car it included a built-in navigation system that works with the postal codes.

We have been pretty reliant on the GPS in the car.  The UK is full of roundabouts and the roads not labeled well.  On the downside the GPS will direct you to shortcuts using  roads that are narrower than the alley behind our house but have a speed limit of 50 mph!  Today we ended down a road that got narrower and narrower till it became a rutted gravel driveway which took us to the rear of Witley Court but not the parking lot.  We now leaned to use the GPS to get us near a site and follow the brown colored tourist signs which usually start to appear when you get close to the destination.