Warwick Castle

I've been saying to my nephew, Max, for a while that when he's a big boy I'll take him to a castle. Well, he's recently turned three and that qualifies as a big boy to us, so we visited Warwick Castle today.

As soon as we entered we caught a glimpse of the castle, so we knew in which direction we had to head:

But before we'd taken even a few steps, we found an adventure playground, so Max got stuck in:

As we headed towards the castle we found some stocks and so pretended that we'd been naughty:

Not long after that we got really close to the castle:

And so we headed across the moat and under the portcullis:

It didn't take Max long to find some shields, weapons, and a big helmet:

We spent a little bit of time inside the castle:

... but it wasn't long before Max decided he wanted to start climbing! We got to the very top - some of the views of the castle and countryside were breathtaking:

When we finally got down again Max wanted to do it all over again. I did my best to keep up with him!

We saw some colourful peacocks:

And then we watched a man give a display of some birds of prey:

Afterwards we headed for the bridge across the River Avon, which we'd spotted from upon high earlier:

That gave us a nice view of the castle from the other side:

Max explored the trebuchet, a device for hurling huge rocks, whilst we were there:

Then we headed back across the bridge:

We visited some of the birds of prey. Archie is a bald eagle. We'd seen him in the display earlier:

The biggest bird there was Nikita, a sea eagle:

And after that we headed to my house, where Pebbles immediately came trotting over to Max to say hello. He was fabulous with both the cats, giving them treats and patting them. We had some chocolate, played with some Transformers, and then drove to my parents' to end a busy day.