Inspecting the car for dings pre driving away...
We pick up Raff at his hotel and head out for...
Such a cute little town!
With decorations on all the traffic lights...
And gorgeous little shops, homes and a music hall...
While we're debating where to have lunch, a local passing by - walking her dog, that's why we assume she's local - recommends the Silver Tea room for great tea-smoked egg sandwiches. So we pop in there and all order a petit luncheon which has a sandwich, a scone and two little desserts and a cup of tea - the tea menu alone is pages long!
The it's off to our first activity of the day - a tour of Lyndhurst Manor, a gothic mansion. The grounds and the building are magnificent and it's great to be out in the open, wide spaces!
Lots of Halloween displays...
And then we're inside for the tour, can't take photos on the first floor as there are Halloween decorations - not sure what difference that makes. Interesting tour with the history of the house and it's owners through the late 1880s. Different owners added different sections and the last one willed it to the people, national trust type of thing. We could take photos upstairs - the ornate portrait room (our guide asked what word came to mind in this room. I said "ornate" and he had no idea what I said - I didn't think my accent was that bad. Amazing window too.
Opposite this window was an amazing bedroom suite...
And a couple of other fancy rooms.
It was a magnificent house. The marble on the walls was actually painted on wood - it cost more to do it like this than it would have been to use actual marble - showed wealth, they could afford to do it. The guy who owned it last was a Gould - I will have to follow up our family tree to see if nana's family is related.
After the tour, we went for a walk around the back part, passed the oldest bowling alley in the northern hemisphere, they are refurbishing it. And passed the scarecrow field - spot the Aussies tourists - there are three...
We then drop Raff off at his hotel and continue on to our B&B - in a converted firehouse over a babbling brook. The place is amazing but the lady who runs it is just a bit crazy - she said that she didn't want to talk politics and then spent half an hour telling us why Hillary is no good and a liar and Trump will make the country great again and so on and so on until we glazed over and just stood there speechless. It was quite ridiculous and not good! But the place is great...
Bit of a rest before we head out to pick up Raff and drive to our second Halloween activity - the Great Jack O Lantern Blaze. We're a bit early so we stop for a pizza before walking across - this event sells out and sells hundreds of tickets. We got ours early and when you book, they say 'if you're doing this event, leave this much time to get to the second event', which we did. You enter through the gift shop - Brett's pumpkin obsession continues - can't even remember what this product was - they had pumpkin popcorn, pumpkin jam, pumpkin everything.
Ah, this was pumpkin pasta - yummy...
Into the Blaze itself - there are thousands of pumpkins in amazing arrangements - trains, dinosaurs, snakes, all sorts. My pictures aren't overly clear but they're okay.
And information on the Blaze itself.
And the Van Cortland Manor.
Just amazing! And unique.
Next, onto the Headless Horseman Haunted maze. Bit of a drive and then they have event parking, there's so many people but it's very well organised. Up and into the queue to get into the maze. They have a bit of entertainment on a stage for the queue, which actually moves pretty well.
As we're waiting in line, Raff notices someone in the fast lane moving to be just ahead of us - it's a guy called Aaron Tveit, who was apparently in the Les Mis movie and has done a lot of theatre, so that was cool - I didn't really know who he was!
You walk down a path lit with lanterns and then into the maze itself. This involves lots of different structures - a barn, a boat, a cornfield, all dark with things hanging down and people waiting to jump out and scare you. Apparently I giggled the whole way through. It was fun but scary at the same time. The first one we went through, I held onto Brett the whole way through.
At one point a guy jumped out at me and I accidentally stood on his foot. I did apologise a couple of times and he said, in normal voice, "that's fine, don't worry".
We were right behind Aaron Tveit's group and the guy who was in the back of that group seemed to be more scared than I was and if we stayed close enough to them, they got the scare just before us so we knew what to expect!
It was all very hilarious and not somewhere you can take pictures. This was the best I got...
Few spooky tombstones...
Got Shaun and Brett with one of the ghouls...
And then we headed back, great night!
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