Well, in a completely perfectly timed moment, two of my best friends came to stay and we went off on a little mini-adventure to explore Leicester (we do love a mini-break).

It was a perfectly-timed mini-holiday with fun and lots of good food and plenty of booze and lots of interesting things to see and do, and cheered me up immensely!

The MAIN reason for going was to see the Car Park where they dug up Richard III a couple of years ago, which was a ridiculous and amazing thing. (If you’re interested in the whole story, there is a documentary about it called The King in the Car Park, in which a slightly batty and obsessed lady spends years fundraising so she can dig up the car park, and lo and behold the king turned out to be in there!).

Here we are at the new visitor’s centre:

Peeking out the window at the ACTUAL car park where he was found (it’s probably my favourite part of this story)

Here it is in all it’s glory – still being used as a car park, though they have built a little room around the space where they found his highness (which we were sitting in to take this picture).

Outside with the statue (I genuinely thought he was holding a tambourine for a little while).

In the Cathedral where they eventually laid him to rest.

Some rather glorious stained glass windows

At the 14th century guildhall where the town council had their meetings for a good 400 years or so. Beautiful building!

Then out and about for a little wander around Leicester, which is a surprisingly pretty medieval town.

And then on to the trendy hipster bars where they will literally put anything into your drink – this gin was with pink grapefruit and rosemary, and was actually delicious.

This one was significantly more wanky – they put my cocktail into a teacup and then put dry ice in it so it was smoking/steaming. Hipsters, honestly.

The next day it was cold and rainy and grey, so we dragged our slightly hungover bodies to the National Space Centre (who knew the UK even had one? Or that it is in fact in Leicester?).

Turns out it was a really excellent day out-a great and fun centre with some fascinating exhibitions!

Fascinating display about some research that was done in the 60’s indicating that women are better suited to space travel than men for a number of reasons, (physical size, temperament, etc) but sadly it was ignored by NASA.

These upright rockets are immense in scale!

In general a fab weekend away was had by all!