Warwick Castle with Sir Ninetoday and Sir Stropalot

For Ebi-kun's birthday I booked an over night stay at the glamping at Warwick Castle and invited my best mate Di and her little boy along too. We were coming from opposite directions and met up just before lunchtime.

There are some very cool perks to the glamping experience, one is that the carpark for the glamping is free and only a couple of minutes from the tents and the glamping site has a short cut up to the castle grounds, whereas the non glamping peasants have to walk a good 15 minutes from their car to the castle!

If you do go, either take swords with you or be prepared to buy one, Sir Stropalot (aged 4.5) had a foam one, which was just as well considering how much he was into fighting! Many small boys would have been going home with broken fingers and missing eyeballs otherwise. Sir Ebi-kun bought himself a wooden Excalibur from the shop.

We grabbed some lunch as soon as we arrived and then watched the jousting - better pics tomorrow because we weren't in a very good spot the first day. Then it was time to explore, we found these young hoodlums on our way...

The Horrible Histories were set up too and were hysterical, I really wish history had been this much fun when I was a kid. Here is the Gorgeous Georgian who told us all about using mercury to kill the head lice, which make your hair and eyebrows fall out. So you would the catch a rat, skin it and use a couple of slices of rat fur to make eyebrows! Delightful.

We did lots of exploring and around 4.00pm we headed down to the campsite. Each tent will sleep 6, they have a double bed, two singles and if you want more beds they put in a couple of airbeds. All with fresh linen and a wooden floor. Spotlessly clean. They also hide chocolate coins for the kids to find.

We were camped right at the far end which was lovely, the setting is beautiful, under all these old trees and next to the river.

We decided to go for the early sitting for the banquet, the food was delicious and you could just help yourself to whatever you wanted. The roast hog and cracking was superb and I maybe ate far too much! Cider was quaffed and much merriment went on.

I had sneaked a cake in earlier so the staff bought it out and we sang happy birthday but then we were too full to eat it! So we took it back to the tent.

I suppose you think that was it for the night but oh no...after dinner was school time. First up was archery school for Sir Ninetoday, he has been asking to do this for months so I was chuffed that he finally got to do it. All this is part of the glamping package.

Then both the boys joined knight school, which is where they learned sword skills

And jousting skills...

Then at the end they were knighted! The staff are brilliant and this fella at knight school was really good, funny too.

Finally we got the boys into bed (and my mom) and me and Di went to find some Good Knights, well actually the bar and to take some silly photos for her comping habit. We had a good chat and a chinwag, then headed off to bed around 11pm. Ebi-kun did wake us up shouting "Stop, Stop" but he didn't realise because he was still asleep. The next morning he said it was because he was dreaming someone was trying to steal his sword!

Lots more photos tomorrow and I will share my top tips to get the most out of the experience!