Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British-themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!
Last week’s British Isles Friday post gathered historical research, book reviews, and photos including Jackie’s delightful piece about the Keep Calm and Carry On poster and its many variations.
I don’t sleep on planes, so although Day 1 was two days on the calendar, it felt like one long day to me that began with last-minute clean up of the house in Missouri and ended with bed-time 32 hours later in Bath, England. In between….
We were picked up bright and early in the morning by a driver — a service that I prearranged by email so that we could see a few sites on our way to Bath and not have to worry about the transportation from Heathrow.
We drove past Stonehenge.
We stopped at the Stonehenge Visitors Center where our driver, on the left, explained to Rick how thatched roofs are made.
We stopped at Avebury — a larger stone circle than Stonehenge where you can walk right up to the stones. Rick took this, my favorite photo of our visit.
Then, the thing I didn’t plan for in our itinerary — we were in an accident! Fortunately, no one was hurt. We got a chance to meet “Wiltshire’s Finest” and they really were very pleasant.
It was quite a relief to reach our hotel in Bath. We enjoyed drinks and supper in the multi-room garden behind the hotel.
The car accident put us off the idea of renting a car during our trip. If the people who lived there can’t drive on the wrong side of the road without getting in an accident, we weren’t going to try it! So, we relied on public transportation for the rest of the trip.
The idea, from Rick Steves, to recover from jet lag in Bath worked well for us. We enjoyed the garden at Queensberry Hotel each evening. Now, that we’re comfortable with trains in the UK, next time we will take a train from Heathrow to Paddington and, then, from Paddington to Bath.
There are more photos of what we saw on the first day on my Flickr photo stream.
I’ll link this post, tomorrow, to Saturday Snapshot, the weekly gathering of photo posts at West Metro Mommy Reads.
Also, tomorrow, I’m putting up a post about Fish and Chips!
