Derby Weekend

This past weekend we decided to stay in Derby. On Saturday we were invited over to Sarah and Dave's house for dinner with a couple other families that are all here from Indy. Dave made us an AMAZING dinner and Sarah made some wonderful desserts. I am pretty sure Andrew's favorite part were the cupcake ice cream cones. We are so fortunate to have met a few people from Indy. They are all so nice and helpful!! They definitely help us feel more at home here in the UK!!

Sarah and Dave have an adorable four month old named Anna. Andrew loves to be around Anna. He decided he wanted to try out her activity mat. His eyes just happend to be closed in this picture. It made me think back to when he was small enough to play with an activity mat. He had a great time playing with Nicole and Kalle too. They are much older than Andrew, but they kept him busy.

After dinner the guys decided to play a little euchre. Sorry guys, I had to put this picture in :) That is Jay, Dave, Steve, and Mark. Dave and Steve both work at Rolls-Royce. Jay's wife works for Rolls-Royce and I get to see him during the week for lunch occasionally along with Dave's wife, Sarah.

 

Sunday was Derby day. We decided to head downtown to see if we could get a closer look at the Derby Cathedral. We were not sure if we would be able to on a Sunday, but it was open. This is the Cathedral that was in our view in the first apartment. The church was built in 1530.

This is the fancy Lectern.

This is actually the memorial for Bess of Hardwick. She is the one who was involved with building Chatsworth (from a previous post) and she is buried in the this memorial with 45 of her relatives. It is kind of creepy to think about 46 people being in the memorial somewhere.

A view from the front looking towards the back.

The pulpit, fancy again.

So this is the first cathedral we have seen over here and I really enjoyed it. We have a few more on our list to see before we head back to the states. I really looking forward to seeing them.

Our next stop was the Derby Museum and Art Gallery. I really didn't know what to expect, but it ended up being pretty fun with a lot of interesting things to see. Our first interesting thing was this old wooden boat that was made about 3,400 years ago. It was made from a single oak tree trunk. The boat was actually found in a gravel quarry in 1998. It was pretty amazing to see it still so in tact.

The museum had a whole collection of different animal bones. I thought these shark tooth swords were pretty crafty.

I took this picture for my mom who works at Luxottica/Lenscrafters. Thought she might think it was cool. This is a collection of glasses from the 18th century to the 1980s. There are even a couple glass eyes in there.

Andrew was pretty interested in this hippo. This exhibit explained how hippos used to swim in the Derwent River 120 thousand years ago. I just thought that was kind of cool our first apartment was right on the Derwent River.

Andrew took a quick stop to do a little coloring.

Hope this picture doesn't offend anyone. It was pretty creepy looking at this mummy!!

Andrew and Daddy!! They are so cute!!

 

The best part about our day in Derby was we only had to pay for parking and our traditional stop at our favorite cafe. The cathedral and museum were free. As we were walking back to our car I wanted to take this picture for everyone at home to see. Derby is a London Live site, so they have this big screen set up so people can watch the Olympics live. It has actually been set up since we arrived in Derby. They showed the Queen's Jubilee and today they were showing Wimbledon.