Visiting Stonehenge

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After the noise of London, Barbara's house in the country is gloriously quiet and we all slept in today. After breakfast, we pointed the GPS for Stonehenge and set off.

Much of the route took us along small country roads and through some of the small villages including Sheffield, where my brother Richard went to school when he lived with Barbara and Victor.

After the small roads we got on the highway and drove for some distance before rounding the top of a hill and finding ourselves facing Stonehenge, just a short distance off the highway.

After parking and buying a family ticket, we picked up electronic tour guide units and took the tunnel under the road to the site.

Seeing the site with your own eyes is quite impressive, though because of the size it is sometime hard to take in the whole site in a single view.

The audio guides gave an excellent point by point tour. I was under the impression that it had been a druid site, but the guide said that there was no evidence of this. Though there are many sites similar to this in the Britain and Ireland, this is the largest site of its kind. Being that we are here a mere 10 days before the summer solstice, it was particularly interesting to hear how the sun shines through at various time of the year.

We took lots of photos, including our mascot in front of the stones, and Benjamin even consented to having his photo taken with the stones as a backdrop. Our only disappointment is that you can no longer go in among the stones, but have to keep to a marked periphery on the outside.

After Stonehenge, we drove back to the town of Hungersford. Here we went the supermarket and bought some lunch which we ate, with the company of many over eager ducks, down by the river.

We still need some sort of a scale to weigh our luggage for our flight next week, so we followed some local advice and found the fishing store. Unfortunately, their scales only go up to a few pounds - not much help for us.

Back in Brightwalton, we had some tea before Celia, Barbara's stepdaughter, showed up along with her dog Charlie. I haven't seen Celia in over twenty years, so it was great to see her. Her and her husband Nigel were very kind to me when I visited as a teenager, putting me up for several nights and taking me into London with them. After a bit of time talking at home, we all headed off to the pub for dinner.

Back at the pub again we spend a terrific and relaxing evening before saying goodbye to Celia (and Charlie). Back at Brightwalton, we tried to phone my parents as they had called earlier in the day, but were unable to reach them.

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