exploring & escapades

“Dear old Sandringham, the place I love better than anywhere else in the world.” – King George V

The Queen’s Norfolk country estate. The place she spends every Christimas. The place her father died.

So much history. Trespassing on a private life. 

The grounds, the halls, the stables; they all have so much to say.

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Inside the house, in the last room open to visitors, a ballroom covered in Indian armor, I saw a filthy, tattered British flag suspended from the corner. The kind of flag that has obviously survived something; I assumed WWI or WWII, but I was wrong. When I approached and read the plaque displayed beneath it, I learned that it was the flag that Ernest Shackleton carried to the South Pole and back on his first Antactica expedition. The exact flag. It made it all the way back to England. 

To see that flag in person, knowing all that it had survived; there were no photos allowed, but I’ll never, ever forget it.