Picnic at Blenheim Palace

This weekend I had the chance to escape the dreary mundane working life and go on a picnic to one of my favorite places here in England with two of my favorite people, Aya and Anne-Marie!  The morning was full of good omens as Aya and I were walking to the bus stop and we found a secret path in the city! It was one of those secret paths that are full of mystery and intrigue, was oh so pretty, and seemed to be heading in the direction we needed to go, so we decided to be adventurous and give it a go.  I didn't take pictures of it, even though it was so adorable looking, so I'll have to go back and get some photos at some point.  Aya and I also had the chance to get in a couple board games at the board game cafe before meeting up with Anne-Marie, which is always uber amounts of fun!  It was raining in the morning, but by the time we arrived in Woodstock the weather was looking up for us.  We meandered a bit around the quaint little village right next to the Palace before heading in.  After walking a bit on the grounds of the Palace, we stopped for a delightful picnic with the most delightful foods!  It was a mixture of delightful Japanese, German and American foods, and what better sort of picnic could there even possibly be? (I suppose you could argue some of the German and American contributions looked suspiciously like British food, but I'd rather stick to our roots and claim it wasn't British in the slightest!  Well, except for the clotted cream....but who's going to say no to that sort of British influence?  Certainly not me!!)  After our extremely yummy picnic, we walked around the gardens some more and enjoyed English nature at it's finest.  We even got caught in a couple massive downpours of rain, interspersed with enough blazing hot sun to give me quite a sunburn, despite wearing SPF 50 sunscreen!  Oh the British weather...   We didn't get a chance to visit inside the Palace this time, but I guess that just means we'll have to plan another picnic!

Aya trying to sneak up close to some bunnies in the field!

Sheep, just for Camilla! ;)

Our beautiful picnic spot!

Best. Picnic Food. Ever.

Aya stopping to smell the roses!

There was some sort of "outdoor sports" fair or something going on as well.  You can't tell very well, but this is a man on a hunting horse parading around with hunting dogs.

This flower was called "Fire and Ice", which I thought was a lovely name