Windsor Woes

According to Google Maps, my house is 13.8 miles from Windsor Castle, the queen's weekend residence and the largest and oldest occupied fortress in the world. Lonely Planet Great Britain says there's bus service from London's Victoria Station which takes one hour and 15 minutes. There's also a bus from Heathrow Airport to Windsor. Heathrow airport is 13.9 miles from my place. There's local bus service from here to Heathrow. As the tube journey from our place into central London takes at least 45 minutes, we decided not to take the bus from Victoria. Our bright idea was to take the local bus from our place to Heathrow, then the other bus from Heathrow to Windsor. Google maps says that each leg of the journey should take approximately 20 minutes, to make for a total of 40 minutes from door to door.
Stephanie and I planned to leave our place at 10am for an afternoon of royal sightseeing. We were a bit slow moving due to the rain, but we managed to get going by 11:30am. The bus to Heathrow took about 35 minutes. Once there we looked around for the stop to catch to Windsor bus. I finally found it only to notice a small sign saying that they'd changed the location of the stop to the recently opened, yet hopelessly defunct Terminal 5.
The thing about Terminal 5 is that despite its shiny newness, it is somewhat inaccessible. The Heathrow Express train goes from Terminals 1, 2, and 3 to Terminals 4 and 5 every 20 minutes. We traveled on the second day of Terminal 5's opening. The BBC said, "The chaos that marred Heathrow's Terminal 5 on its opening day, leaving many stranded overnight, 'was not our finest hour' BA's boss has admitted." It took us ages to get to T5. Then we wandered around looking for the bus stop. When we found the stop, we had to wait 20 minutes for the bus. At 2pm, we arrived in Windsor just outside the castle.
Ravenous from our journey, we wandered around to find a place for lunch. With a mere hour and 15 minutes left until the castle closed, we scurry to the entrance to discover that the queen's apartments are closed, but we could get in for half price. Our discount meant that we were entitled to come again for free another time to see the queen's apartments if we filled out a form and got a special stamp on the form. Steph wanted to shop for mother's day gifts, so we spent 30 mins in the gift shop. We saw Queen Anne's doll house, the royal china collection, and an exhibit on the 60th wedding anniversary of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip. Then they shooed us off the grounds after they stamped our forms.
We had ice cream and decided to take a taxi back home. It cost us 25 pounds, but we made it home in 20 minutes, versus the 2 hours it took us to get there. Insane! Windsor Castle was some drama!
Next time, we'll rent a car.