Honeymoon Tour - London: Day Four

On our final day in London we tried to move in with Kate Middleton returned to Kensington Palace for a tour. I learned something as we were waiting to go inside: the royal grass is cut by royal horses. Think I'm joking?

There is the royal lawn crew. Seriously.

I guess they don't want to disturb the royals' precious beauty sleep! Kensington Palace was having an special exhibition of Princess Diana's various dresses that she wore during her lifetime. But first we toured the King's and Queen's Apartments. This is me on the Queen's staircase. I'm ready to move in any time!

Just check out these ceilings!

And I got to tend to official royal business. Lol.

After Kensington Palace (which is FAR from Buckingham Palace, even by cab), we headed to the train station for our next adventure: Leavesden. What's in Leavesden you ask? 

Leavesden is home to the studios where all the Harry Potter movies were filmed. Since they finished shooting they opened up the studios to us mere muggles for "The Making of Harry Potter" self-guided tours. It.was.epic.

You get off the train and board a shuttle that is right there waiting for you to whisk you off to Hogwarts the studios. You are greeted immediately by Wizard Chess pieces (yes, the actual pieces from the movie).

Then you go inside and there's a short video welcoming you to the studios and then you enter the great hall. This is the door to Hogwarts, literally.

From there it's kind of a choose-your-own-adventure. Everything is in two warehouses and you can spend as long as you like going through. They have all the sets, props, wigs, costumes, etc and you can see and read about it all.  The exhibit that was being shown while we were there were costumes. Between Kensington Palace and Harry Potter it was a regular clothing theme!

You can also get audio guides to tell you about everything. Be warned, the audio guides are LONG. We ended up sitting in the butter beer cafeteria listening and watching all of them so we could then walk around and enjoy what we were seeing. They also had the various backdrops from the movies. For example, Dumbledore's office:

and Diagon Alley.

And last but not least, le piece de resistance.....a full to-scale model of Hogwarts. This thing could have inspired tears from the right fan. I was just in awe from its size.

It doesn't look like it would be very large but check out the people on the right side of the photo. That will show you the scale. It was incredible to see.

After we made it back from the Harry Potter studio we swung by Abbey Road. Naturally, we had to pose on the crosswalk.

And that marks the end of our London leg of the Honeymoon Tour. The next day we headed to Liverpool. If you're not interested in the Beatles you may want to skip that post!