The Boy Who Lived . . .

I do believe that the phrase "You can sleep when you're dead." is artfully applying to me right now.
Not having any time to breathe, I had class on Monday morning and remembered that I had booked my tickets for the Harry Potter/ Warner Brothers Studio Tour the first weekend in London for this past Monday.  Already being exhausted, it took a bus, two Tube rides, and a train to get out there.  But let me tell you . . . it was worth every bit of it.
After getting our official tickets and audio guides, Becca and I could not stop giggling with excitement and anticipation.  I swear, we acted like 15 year old girls: taking pictures of EVERYTHING and not caring who we had to push pass to get to it.
They initially shuttled us into a small screen room where you listen to a short introduction and then we scooted into yet another movie room with a large cinematic screen.  At the very end of the sightly longer introduction, the screen paused on the doors entering into The Great Hall.  The lights went up so we assumed that it was our cue to move on to the next section.
                                       NO!
      Instead the screen rolls up and in place of the picture are the ACTUAL doors to The Great Hall!!
I just about died.  With a mixture of goosebumps and butterflies, Becca and I were walloping each others arm as if we weren't seeing the same thing already.

  And of course we walked through them into . . . well, The Great Hall . . .

I should also mention that all of the costumes they had on display are the ORIGINAL everything!

Absolutely could not contain myself.  It doesn't matter how deep your affiliation with Harry Potter goes, this was awesome.
While there was only two stages and a back-lot full of stuff (only??), we still spent slightly over three hours there.
  What's neat about the way everything is set up is the fact that it is a hot set, which means that it is perfect condition to start shooting on it right then and there.  Several of the sets had even been left exactly as they were from the very last take, which is of course, indelible.
It's easier to dissect the pictures into sections, so this is from the first stage:

Now the back-lot, complete with a side trip for some Butterbeer :)

Now for the last stage.  This focused on the technical an architectural aspects of the set and props:

 I literally started to skip when I saw this sign.  Why get so excited over something that is not real?  Well, some things lie in the reality of the heart and when the mind fails us, the heart takes over.

Then, just when you think your heart can't take in any more wonder and joy, the audio guide announces that they have one more special surprise in store.  I round the corner from all of the set designs and replicas to find this baby:

This, my dears, is the actual model that they used to shoot any and all external shots of Hogwarts with.  That means that the detail is so intricate that there are torches that could fit on the point of a pen.  Enjoy . . .

"The scar had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well."