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Avebury stones and ditch
Watch out for the two druids poking out. Oy.
We defy you to find us on a map. First find Slough, just west of Heathrow Airport, then you do the rest!
A whirlwind trip around southern England has seen us take the ferry from Le Havre to Portsmouth, where we stayed for only a night, and then hook up with our friend Eve in Reading. If you cannot recall Eve, look back into our Ecuador blogs at the beginning of the trip! Amazing to see her again on the same trip, only 8 months later.
We stayed with Eve for a few days, during which we saw parts of Reading (nice but relatively unremarkable in our opinion) and even took trips to Oxford and also out to Avebury. Oxford is a beautiful town, and our only complaints are the masses of tourists on a Saturday (stupid tourists - what gives them the right to interfere with OUR tourism?) and also that if you stay until closing (12:00) at a nice Oxford pub you will definitely miss the last train and have to crash in the student dorms for the night. Uh, hypothetically of course.
Avebury is apparently similar to Stonehenge (hard to compare since we've never
Eve demonstrates how to use a "post box"
Just like a mail box, only round and British. been to Stonehenge)...."a circle of stones" is an accurate translation of Stonehenge, and Avebury certainly qualifies, only it's bigger and surrounded by a massive ditch. It's so big that the entire earthwork encompasses and surrounds a little town. We stopped at a pub in the middle of town, and while scarfing down a nice burger and a Guinness actually WITHIN an archaeological site, Nick thought "it doesn't get any better than this". To top it off, within walking distance are two other archaeological sites, Silbury Hill (a massive, earthen pyramid structure) and a Long Barrow (basically a massive, elongated, burial cairn earthwork). Even though these sites are thousands of years old, you find yourself looking to the horizon and imagining that people must have used them as landmarks (they're THAT big). Now all they do is attract tourists and New Age "druids" (The Melvilles will recognize the personality type from Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast). Great, stoned hippies even found their way to England.
Eve was heading to Spain early this week and so we took our leave a little early to give her time to finish some work (work? what's that?) and pack. Fortunately, we had kept
in touch with some Loyal Subjects we had met in the Galapagos Islands (see Galapagos blogs for more information) and they had extended an invitation that we gladly accepted. Once we figured out where the heck "Stoke Poges" was, we hopped a train to Slough. (No hints now: you find it!)
The coolest thing happened just before we got off the train at Slough - WE WERE RECOGNIZED! That's right, as we were gathering our things, someone asked us whether we had a travel blog....when we replied that we did, he mentioned that he had seen our blog, that he loved the pictures, and that he had even dropped us a comment a week or two ago. His travelblog name is Guz, and you should check out his blog for some funny tales and photos of Europe. He'll soon be in Spain apparently, so we'll keep tabs on it. Thanks to Guz, Sarah feels that we're legitimate celebrities and that we should run out and buy wigs, big hats and sunglasses. Nick only wants to buy a cool, bushy moustache.
Anyways, once we got to Slough, it was the funniest contrast to our past few transportation experiences when
Oxford at a distance
Probably the closest we will get to an Oxford degree...fortunately, the pubs are more accessible. we were picked up and whisked away by Sarah and Deborah, two of the "Galapagos Brits" in a new Jaguar. We had a wonderful Sunday during which Nigel, Chris, Sarah and Deborah pumped us full of roast pork and wine, and we recounted our respective experiences since we'd last seen each other (approximately 8 months earlier). Our only regret was that we were actually wearing the exact same clothing they had last seen us in. They were good sports about it and we heard no adverse comments. Of course we were "daft" and didn't get any photos of the evening, and so you will have to imagine four British people. Try it. Now picture them with good teeth.
At one point in the night we got out the mapbooks to compare England and Canada (Canada won by virtue of landmass), and try as we might we couldn't pursuade them that England had actually stolen OUR place names. Nick even showed them Ontario - specifically Windsor, Chatham, Essex and Kent counties, Peterborough, etc.....finally in desperation he showed them that indeed, London, Ontario is situated on the Thames River. They didn't buy it. Whatever... we USED to have a town called
"York" but it got old so we changed the name to "Toronto".
Yesterday we made the pilgrimage to Windsor (England, that is) to see Her Majesty at Windsor Castle. The royal standard was indeed up on the pole, signifying that she was home....we didn't see her on the tour so she must have been busy watching the Eastenders or Coronation Street. Maybe next time Liz! Regardless, we still had a great time seeing the "rather quaint" castle, witnessed a guard inspection, a giant doll house and THE bullet that killed Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar. That last is a rather macabre method of hero worship, but hey, JFK's Magic Bullet is also probably out there somewhere.
Thanks especially to Eve, Nigel and Sarah for putting us up (or just putting up with us) for a few days!!!! Can't wait to return the favour.
Now we're heading up north for the next little while.
Cheers
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guz
non-member comment
oh, my god its you.
Ya, i thought that i scared you on the train. But that is ok. I would have reacted the same way. Thanks for the shout-out. Maybe i´ll run into you two again.