Getting Our Harry Potter Fix Wherever We Can

Day 5: Hitting a Wall in Oxford

My niece and I are big Harry Potter fans, so when we started planning this trip, one of the first things we considered doing was visiting Warner Brothers Studio for the Harry Potter experience. As the schedule started to fill up, we decided we didn’t want to burn most of a day doing this, so we looked for ways to incorporate some filming locations into our other sightseeing. Enter Oxford. We booked a tour of the reading rooms at Bodleian Library, which included a look around Duke Humphry’s Library, which served as Hogwarts’s library in some of the films.

We successfully took our first tube journey to Paddington Station and caught a train to Oxford. Our plan had been to do a self-guided walking tour until it was time for our Bodleian tour. But, we were all dragging a bit, and my mom said that she might find a place to sit while my niece and I walked around. Sitting sounded kind of good to all of us. So…to the HOHO bus. Yeah, still not my favorite thing in the world, but in this instance, it saved the day. I suppose the lesson is that you need to be willing to change things up to fit the circumstances. For us, taking a loop on the HOHO bus (and half of a second loop when we mostly dozed) gave us the rest we needed to go on.

Serene Scene in Oxford