We ate a delicious breakfast of warm scones, yogurt, and fresh fruit at our Avebury AirBNB, served by the daughter at the house who just finished her A levels. Hilariously, we recognized her from the Red Lion pub last night. She was one of the people we asked to borrow a phone (to call her own house!). Small world. Or small village, rather.
Then we drove to Stonehenge. We got there 30 minutes after opening and managed to walk around the stones and get decent pictures before the deluge of people showed up. (Including the BYU Ballroom Dance Company!). They have a new visitor's center which was very nice and well done and they've re-routed the path to get us closer to the stones than the last time I was there ten years ago, so that was nice.
Can you find us in these these two pictures?:
From Stonehenge, we drove to Salisbury. We have now seen two of the four original copies of the Magna Carta on this trip (the other one was in the British Library). Salisbury is also home to the oldest working clock, which is always a fun thing. Also, the lady we sat by at the Globe last week told us about the infinity font at Salisbury, and now we know what that is. I really liked walking around Salisbury. We stopped in at Poundland and bough some Jaffa Cakes, some Jammie Dodgers, and a selection of McVities biscuits. We ate some of those in the car on the way to Stourhead.
Again, today was a bit drizzly, but it didn't rain on us at Stonehenge and the hardest it rained all day was when we were inside the Stourhead house. When we got out to the gardens, it was drizzling which was perfect because we could walk around without getting too wet and there were fewer people. The gardens are just as beautiful as always. The swans were out, the rhododendron trees were in bloom and they were giant!
After seeing it all at Stourhead, we drove to Bath. The traffic in and out of Bath is ridiculous. And then we, sort of by accident, drove through the Town Centre which was all crazy narrow one-way streets (as most town centers), but on top of crazy streets, it was crowded! Several times we thought we were driving into pedestrian only areas, but we weren't. We finally parked just outside the main area and walked all around. The Baths had already closed (we'll do those in the morning), but we walked the streets, saw the Circus and the Royal Crescent. We ate dinner at a pizza and pie place - Tom got a butternut squash sweet potato pie and I got a jerk chicken pizza. Then we drove up to the place we're staying tonight. It's right up on the hill in Bath and our bedroom downstairs has a view of the abbey out the window. We'll try to Skype with the kiddos before going to bed (though it's hard to predict how fast the internet is and if it will work. I guess we'll see.)
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