First Trip Out of London

We left London at 7am yesterday and drove to Salisbury where we stayed the night at a cute little B&B. On our way to Salisbury we first stopped at Stonehenge, which is right off the road, you can see it as you drive up to it, which is pretty amazing. There's only so many ways to take a photo of a block of stone, but it was an amazing site.

We learned in class that Stonehenge was basically a cemetery, a place where ancient people may have worshiped a sun god of some sort, because the ring of stones can also be used as a calender. Outside of the immediate site of Stonehenge there are fairly recent excavations of a city. We didn't get to see the site, but basically the idea is that Stonehenge was for the dead and the city was for the living.

Our next stop was Stourhead Estate. Some people weren't very excited about this stop, but it was the highlight of the trip for me. Remember the scene in "Pride and Prejudice" with Kira Knightly where Mr. Darcy proposes to Jane? Well, that is called the 'Temple of Apollo' and is located in the gardens of the estate. The entire time I was walking through the gardens I kept thinking, "Mom and Sarah, Emily and La would love this"! It's absolutely stunningly beautiful and one day (soonish) we need to see it all together. Sometimes photographs just can't do the subject justice. Not only was it beautiful to look at but it smelled wonderful with all of the flowers in bloom.

We stopped at Old Sarum which is an old Medieval ruin outside of Salisbury. It was the least exciting stop of the trip, but a beautiful location high up on a hill looking down over Salisbury.

Next we drove into Salisbury where were toured the Cathedral. It was a very beautiful building that is nearly 1000 years old but to be honest I didn't feel very comfortable in there. It was weird...I don't know how to explain it. When we went to Bath today I couldn't make myself go into the Cathedral there because of the memory of the unpleasant feeling I had in Salisbury.

Today we went to Bath as I mentioned. First I toured the Bath House and the old Roman ruins, then I admired the Cathedral from the outside, then I walked up the the Jane Austen museum and toured there. That was pretty fun, you know what a fan I am of Jane. I'm sure we would have been friends back in the day! *grin*

Now we're back in our flat in London with brand new clean sheets on our beds and planning our trip to Canterbury (another Cathedral...I'll force myself to go it) and Dover. I'll post on that one tomorrow night.

PS: I've put a few photo's on here but I'm really limited, so I'm downloading all of my pictures onto Photobucket now. Here's the link if you want to see all the pictures http://s1112.photobucket.com/albums/k495/Moxeyjc/London%20Summer/
If it doesn't work please let me know.