Ronda and I flew from Minneapolis/St.
Paul directly to London's Gatwick airport. We arrived in the
morning of Tuesday June 29 and found our way to customs. The odd
thing about customs was that it was freakishly quiet. There were
several hundred people all waiting to go through their respective line
and everyone was either silent or whispering. The only reason for
the quietness that we could fathom was that everyone was just pooped
from overnight flights.
We had arranged a car rental at Hertz and I spent a few minutes thinking LEFT SIDE OF THE ROAD before venturing onto the road. The car had manual transmission so not only was I sitting on the right side of the car but I was also shifting with my left hand. It wasn't really all that hard but it seemed very awkward for a day. At least the foot pedals were all in the same place. The car was a Ford Focus which was about the right size car for what we needed: It could hold our luggage easily but wasn't too large for driving on smaller roads than we're used to.
We headed west and our first stop was the village of Avebury, which is notable for an ancient stone circle that surrounds the village. These stones were laid there 4500 years ago and are quite an impressive sight. You can walk around them and marvel at the size of the ring. There's a nice aerial shot of the village with the surrounding stones here. We also visited the medieval church Avebury which was an unexpectedly wonderful extra sight that the village had to offer.
Some of the stones around Avebury. The very short stones are markers signifying where an original stone once laid. Many stones were ruined for building materials at one time.
Some sheep laze around a stone in the Avebury Henge.
The church in Avebury.
We also drove by the Cherhill Horse which is a horse carved out of the chalky hills in the area. There are several horses throughout the area that have been cut out in the past couple hundred years and we were glad to have found one more or less by accident. Yes, I wanted to see one. No, I hadn't actually worked out a map on how to find them. I was maybe going to do that in tomorrow's itinerary but this worked out well.
Eventually we made it the small village of Monkton Farleigh which is located between Bradford-on-Avon and Bath and pretty much does not appear on most maps you'll ever find unless you go out of your way looking for a map with enough detail to show you actual sheep and trees on it. Our Bed and Breakfast was the lovely Fern Cottage. We ate dinner that night at a great pub, The King's Arms. Unfortunately they seem to not have a working website so no link. I read on another website that the building dates from the eleventh century and that the pub is supposedly haunted but if it was haunted that night we were too worn out from travel to notice. We ended up talking with some local residents there for a while before dinner over a pint or two of beer and they were very nice.
We ended up going to bed at 8:30 PM local time and slept for 11 hours, waking up at 7:30 the next morning and any residual jet lag was slept away!
We had arranged a car rental at Hertz and I spent a few minutes thinking LEFT SIDE OF THE ROAD before venturing onto the road. The car had manual transmission so not only was I sitting on the right side of the car but I was also shifting with my left hand. It wasn't really all that hard but it seemed very awkward for a day. At least the foot pedals were all in the same place. The car was a Ford Focus which was about the right size car for what we needed: It could hold our luggage easily but wasn't too large for driving on smaller roads than we're used to.
We headed west and our first stop was the village of Avebury, which is notable for an ancient stone circle that surrounds the village. These stones were laid there 4500 years ago and are quite an impressive sight. You can walk around them and marvel at the size of the ring. There's a nice aerial shot of the village with the surrounding stones here. We also visited the medieval church Avebury which was an unexpectedly wonderful extra sight that the village had to offer.
Some of the stones around Avebury. The very short stones are markers signifying where an original stone once laid. Many stones were ruined for building materials at one time.
Some sheep laze around a stone in the Avebury Henge.
The church in Avebury.
We also drove by the Cherhill Horse which is a horse carved out of the chalky hills in the area. There are several horses throughout the area that have been cut out in the past couple hundred years and we were glad to have found one more or less by accident. Yes, I wanted to see one. No, I hadn't actually worked out a map on how to find them. I was maybe going to do that in tomorrow's itinerary but this worked out well.
Eventually we made it the small village of Monkton Farleigh which is located between Bradford-on-Avon and Bath and pretty much does not appear on most maps you'll ever find unless you go out of your way looking for a map with enough detail to show you actual sheep and trees on it. Our Bed and Breakfast was the lovely Fern Cottage. We ate dinner that night at a great pub, The King's Arms. Unfortunately they seem to not have a working website so no link. I read on another website that the building dates from the eleventh century and that the pub is supposedly haunted but if it was haunted that night we were too worn out from travel to notice. We ended up talking with some local residents there for a while before dinner over a pint or two of beer and they were very nice.
We ended up going to bed at 8:30 PM local time and slept for 11 hours, waking up at 7:30 the next morning and any residual jet lag was slept away!
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