The trip started off with a two-hour delay (thank you United Airlines), which didn’t leave a lot of time for my one hour layover in Chicago. In fact, it left no time, and I spent the entire flight biting my nails and wondering if I’d even make it to England that night. (Although it didn’t keep me from noticing the beautiful sunset.)
My flight landed at 4:23, exactly 5 minutes after the flight to Heathrow was supposed to take off. But I got lucky. The flight to Heathrow was also delayed, and I got there just in time for the flight attendants to usher me quickly onto the plane minutes before it took off. This time, I spent 7 hours with a nagging worry that just perhaps my large suitcase didn’t have time to make it on the plane. Luckily, I had the forethought to pack my most needed necessities in my carry-on. But things have a way of working out sometimes. I got the whole row to myself and spent the flight putting my two new purchases to good use. I tried to sleep for an hour, but I’m not one to sleep in public. I just can’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I got a view of England waking up.
I landed at Heathrow and made my way through a very long customs line and then waited, impatiently, to see if my bag had arrived. The Trip Gods were smiling down one me because there it was, just waiting. I had about five minutes to catch the bus to Reading, which had a much more bustling station than I had expected and I searched around looking for my friend, Kris. Once again, the Trip Gods blessed me and we found each other quickly.
That afternoon, after I took a quick nap, we headed off to explore nearby Oxford. I took tons of pictures (which you can find here, but here’s a brief tour of what we saw.
(I love that there are blossoms here already!)
We stopped at the University Church and went inside and climbed up the scariest, narrow set of spiral stairs, I’ve ever seen. Luckily, there’s a rope you can hold onto.
But the view was entirely worth it.
Other than that, we basically wandered around for a while and sat in a little bookshop looking through guides to Paris before heading home for the evening.
The next day, we took off bright and early to visit Stonehenge and Salisbury. I kept taking pictures of the lovely green, English countryside.
I hadn’t planned on going to Stonehenge when I was mapping out my trip. Our original plans to visit a quarterly antiques fair in the south of England didn’t work out, so we decided to go there instead, and I’m so glad I did. It was a strange feeling to see something in person that we had seen so often in pictures. I always figured visiting Stonehenge would be lame because it’d be all fenced off with lots of people staring at it, and I had some notion of sitting amidst the ruins reading (or writing) poetry or something equally 19th Century romanticist. And I was right. There was a pathway for walking and we couldn’t get anywhere really near the stones, so I could forget about whiling away the afternoon with book in hand. It was cold and windy anyway, so I wouldn’t have wanted to linger too long, but Stonehenge was still incredible to visit.
The guidebooks told us that we’d see the spire of the nearby Salisbury Cathedral long before we entered the town. They were right.
The oldest existing working clock is located in the Salisbury Cathedral.
Here are some more interior shots:
Some school kids were going on a fieldtrip through the cathedral. We never went to cool places like that.
Since it was a ruins kind of day, we decided to stop by the Avebury ruins on our way home. We could see Stonehenge from the side of the road, and we thought how strange it would be to see something so famous every day on your way to work. It would become so casual.
The Avebury ruins, much less famous than Stonehenge, are a series of megaliths, some in semi-circular forms and others in a pathway. Apparently, the people of the 19th Century were a little suspicious of the stones and took pickaxes and other tools to them, so many are now missing. But those that remain are simply standing along the side of the road, and visitors can access them through a series of fences. No pathways blocking them, so I would’ve been free to read and write poetry to my heart’s content, but I found I’d rather take photos. Funny how things work.
Well, that only took pretty much all day to write. Good thing it’s a stormy day outside, and I’ve been perfectly content to relax in Kris’s comfy living room for the day. Tomorrow, the adventures begin again, so blogging will be slow… but a ridiculous amount of pictures are (yes, another self-promotional plug) on my flickr.
It looks like a magical trip so far, Katie! I’m so glad you had time to write this. Have a wonderful time!
katie!! you take magical pictures! what kind of camera do you have? man, you are so close to me now – can you feel the hug i am sending you?
post soon and have an awesome and unforgettable time!