England Trip, September 2009, Day 5
This was the view from the window in my hotel room. I took it in the morning as I was getting ready to head out to meet an organized bus tour. The tour was provided by a company called "Mad Max". The founder's name was Maddie, and her family had a dog named Max, so that's where the name came from.
The tour was a day long trip which went to some famous sites and cute villages in the area. This morning I took a taxi into town, because I didn't want to get hopelessly lost and miss the tour bus!
The tour was a day long trip which went to some famous sites and cute villages in the area. This morning I took a taxi into town, because I didn't want to get hopelessly lost and miss the tour bus!
This picture was taken in the village of Castle Combe (pronounced Coom), which was our first stop on the tour. It wasn't actually a castle, although there used to be a castle here. It was a very cute village, much more picturesque than the major cities I had been in up to this point.
This is another view of some of the houses in the village.
One of the residents of this village was a friend of our guide (the guy in this picture) and they permitted us to go into their back yard area.
In their back yard, the residents had this monument for 9/11. Apparently they were formerly from the U.S.
This is a blurry picture from inside one of the cottages. It was very small and cramped, so it was difficult to get a good picture of the inside.
This is a picture from further inside the same town. The lighting is a little weird. The guy in the white cap and his wife were from Indiana, if I remember correctly. They were very nice and I hung out with them some in one of the other towns we visited. The two women on the left were from Australia, and they were also very nice. I spent some time talking to them during the Stonehenge part of the tour. Part of the fun of the tour was getting to meet some different people.
This is another picture from the same town. I thought this door was neat because of the way it opened up at the top. It reminded me of the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and company are trying to get into the palace in the Emerald City.
This is a picture of the center of the town.
This was a beautiful house with a thatched roof that we passed not long after leaving Castle Combe. Our tour guide stopped the bus so we could get out and take pictures.
While driving to our next site, we passed this really big mound and the tour guide slowed down so we could get pictures. It's called Silbury Hill. It was built around 4800 years ago and nobody knows why. The guide said they tried using equipment to see what was in there, but they didn't find anything.
This was a chalk horse carved into a hill. There were a few of these in the area. This one is about 300 years old.
This was the Lacock National Trust Village. We stopped at a pub here for lunch and then walked around the village for a while. Somewhere in this village was a house that was used for filming in a Harry Potter movie, but I don't think I took a picture of it.
This is just another picture of one of the buildings in the village. This was the Village Hall. I know this because of the sign over the door.
This picture was of a church in the village. Those are the two ladies from Australia.
This was a picture taken at Stonehenge, another stop on our tour. It was very, very, very windy and cold here. Very.
Stonehenge was also in the middle of nowhere. It was very pretty out here.
I didn't take any more pictures after that. We headed back to Bath, and I believe it was about 5:30pm when we got back. I planned to attend a comedy walk called Bizarre Bath that evening, but it didn't start until 8:00pm so I had two and a half hours to kill until then. The stores close at 5:00pm, so there wasn't too much to do at that time of day. However, it wasn't worth the time it would take to go all the way back to my hotel.
I killed about half an hour on a quest for public restrooms. I knew they had them because they were on the map, but it took me forever to find the closest one and then it was locked with no apparent way in. So I had to find another one, which was fortunately open, because I was getting pretty desperate by that point!
After that, I spent some time sitting on a bench in the square at the center of town reading on my Kindle, but this was probably the coldest day of my trip and it was too cold to sit still once the sun started going down.
I wandered around for a while, and then eventually decided to go into a restaurant for dessert so I could warm up. I had some sort of lemon ice cream cake which was very good, but that probably didn't make a lot of sense since I was trying to warm up by eating ice cream.
The wait and the cold were worth it, because the comedy walk was hilarious. It's too difficult to describe because you really had to have been there, but there were times I could hardly walk because I was laughing so hard. It lasted 90 minutes, so it was about 9:30pm when it was over. I took a taxi to get back to my hotel, and I got to listen to the taxi driver tell me about how his taxi had been in the shop, and his GPS still wasn't working, and he had to pay for it all out of his own pocket, and he was being made to work more hours (or maybe he was being told to work less, I just remember there was something about his hours he didn't like), and he was told that if he didn't like it maybe he should retire, and he was too young to retire, and on and on and on all in this obnoxious, whiney voice. He was the only annoying taxi driver I ever had, but I was really glad when we finally arrived at my hotel!
I didn't take any more pictures after that. We headed back to Bath, and I believe it was about 5:30pm when we got back. I planned to attend a comedy walk called Bizarre Bath that evening, but it didn't start until 8:00pm so I had two and a half hours to kill until then. The stores close at 5:00pm, so there wasn't too much to do at that time of day. However, it wasn't worth the time it would take to go all the way back to my hotel.
I killed about half an hour on a quest for public restrooms. I knew they had them because they were on the map, but it took me forever to find the closest one and then it was locked with no apparent way in. So I had to find another one, which was fortunately open, because I was getting pretty desperate by that point!
After that, I spent some time sitting on a bench in the square at the center of town reading on my Kindle, but this was probably the coldest day of my trip and it was too cold to sit still once the sun started going down.
I wandered around for a while, and then eventually decided to go into a restaurant for dessert so I could warm up. I had some sort of lemon ice cream cake which was very good, but that probably didn't make a lot of sense since I was trying to warm up by eating ice cream.
The wait and the cold were worth it, because the comedy walk was hilarious. It's too difficult to describe because you really had to have been there, but there were times I could hardly walk because I was laughing so hard. It lasted 90 minutes, so it was about 9:30pm when it was over. I took a taxi to get back to my hotel, and I got to listen to the taxi driver tell me about how his taxi had been in the shop, and his GPS still wasn't working, and he had to pay for it all out of his own pocket, and he was being made to work more hours (or maybe he was being told to work less, I just remember there was something about his hours he didn't like), and he was told that if he didn't like it maybe he should retire, and he was too young to retire, and on and on and on all in this obnoxious, whiney voice. He was the only annoying taxi driver I ever had, but I was really glad when we finally arrived at my hotel!