Rings & Roads… & roads… & more roads…

As I type this I’m sitting in the backseat of our car as we drive through the Scottish highlands. 

It’s been a fairly borrrrrrring day of driving and weather.  We left Morecambe before 9:00 a.m. and except for one stop at a stone circle have been heading north ever since. I did ask Patrick (who does ALL the driving) how he can keep driving so well when everything seems backwards to me.  He said he just keeps saying to himself “left, left, left, left.” 

We’ve seen sun, mist, rain, hail and yes, even snow. It’s 3:00 p.m. and we’ve still got an hour to drive to get to Inverness – tonight’s destination. 

Nessie @ Castlerigg

We did stop at the Castlerigg Stone Circle and it was pretty nice. I think the biggest problem now is that we already saw Stonehenge (fabulous) and now we’re comparing everything to that.  I think a smart traveler would see Stonehenge at the end of their trip instead of in the middle. The Castlerigg Stone Circle is near Keswick in northern England. It’s 90 feet across, 5,000 years old and has 38 stones. 

As we entered Scotland it seemed a bit like southwest Washington – rolling hills and trees. Now that we’re further north there are still hills but fewer trees.  I’m thinking that what we’re in is the “heath” – rolling open hills with only very low vegetation.  I’m also guessing that what we’re seeing is heather (?) but right now it’s all brown and looks quite dead. 

Funny thing though – in last night’s B&B garden and along the road earlier today there was a lot of what looked like good ol’ yellow scotch broom – although I believe it’s called gorse here. 

We stopped twice today to fill up on Costa coffee – it’s pretty good and Patrick and I like it. We also filled up the car with diesel. Gulp.  It was £65!  That works out to $97.50.  Egad.  It was $8.00 a gallon.  No wonder we see so many tiny cars here… 

It’s hailing again and there are still spots of snow left from winter. I’m glad we’re in the car right now and not trying to do any sightseeing. 

We’re all tired and grumpy – it’ll be good tomorrow to be staying local and seeing things within Inverness. We’ll have a chance to catch up on food other than (veggie) burgers and fries and hopefully get some sleep. My cold is about gone but Amber’s got a sore throat and sniffles, and Patrick has a sore throat now too. 

My Room @ Dionard Guest House

Later… Goggle maps says we’ve driven 564 miles in the past two days (over 300 miles just today). We made it to our B&B just fine – great directions! It’s named the Dionard Guest House and all I can say so far is:  jackpot! I’ve got a huge room with a bathroom big enough to turn around in! I’m in heaven!  Of course, we’ll have to see if the bed is comfy or not, but so far, it’s good. After a tiring two days on the road we made it here without any manslaughter charges (ok, ok, ok in all fairness, it was close a few times), so I think it’ll all be sweet from here on.

 

Old Sarum to Morecambe

The B&B started serving breakfast at 8:00 a.m. and they were pretty serious about it! We were eager to get off to a quick start, but had to hang around until they “opened” their breakfast room.  The food was pretty typical of a B&B: fresh fruit, English breakfast if you wanted, tea, coffee, cereals, pastries, etc.  I opted for a mound of scrambled eggs, toast, fruit and coffee.  I got to add my own milk/chocolate mixture to the coffee – it was the best coffee I’ve had since I got here!

Prawn Cocktail Flavored Chips

We finished breakfast, surfed the web a bit on their wifi (which really only worked well in the breakfast room) and then headed back in to Salisbury again. We hit up a huge Tesco Extra – which reminded me a bit of a Fred Meyer back home. We loaded up on water, pre-made sandwiches, chocolate, etc. and hit the road.  I did finally get up the nerve to try some potato chips that I’d seen last year in Ireland – and they’re also here everywhere in the UK – Prawn Cocktail flavor! Honest!  And believe it or not – they’re good!!  They taste like shrimp cocktail sauce – a bit spicy and a little bar-be-que-y.  I’m planning on buying more.

Ha ha ha on “hit the road”. We only drove about 10 minutes and stopped at Old Sarum – this was where the original Salisbury was located. We only stopped there because the owner of the B&B suggested it – but wow – it was pretty neat! Not much at all of the old town is left, but it had been built on a hill – with a huge steep ditch around it – kind of like a moat.  And once you got on top of everything you had a spectacular view all around. We even got to see a crop circle – LOL.

We keep seeing fields of yellow “stuff” everywhere.  I think it’s mustard plants – but if that’s true, then since there is so much of it this must be the only place in the world that grows mustard.

After about an hour at Old Sarum we continued to drive north, taking smaller roads until we hit the M5 – a nice modern motorway with a speed limit of 70 mph. We’re headed north of Liverpool today and it was a day of mostly driving.

We stopped twice at the British equivalent of a rest stop – but what rest stops! Not only bathrooms (whew), but also Costa Coffee (not too bad!), Burger King, a little grocery store, a deli kind of store called “Eat & Drink Co.”, lots of seating, free wifi, and even gas.  Pretty sweet.

What's That on the Overpass?

Motorway Mooovement

We finally arrived at our B&B in Morecambe (left coast of England, about one-half of the way up the coast of all of England/Scotland).  Patrick drove over 300 miles and we’re ready to sit somewhere else for a while.

 

On the Road for Mother’s Day

The day started off very smoothly: we caught the underground back to Heathrow and picked up our rental car without a hitch. Patrick is an AMAZING driver.  You should think about driving a car with the steering wheel on the right side of the car, and then driving on the left side of the road, and then going through a roundabout in traffic.  When you add Amber’s navigation to the mix you get a great pair!  

We headed east from London and within just a very few minutes we were out in the country. I’ve got to tell you – the open fields and skies felt great!  It drizzled on us as we drove for a bit, but no big deal.  

Our rental car is a Ford Mondeo and is pretty sweet. Huge trunk, four doors, A/C, automatic everything. It does however have a very strange front windshield. When driving you can kind of see a grid of little fine wires in it? And for some reason, later in the day all the little squares of glass started showing and the windshield got all wavy. We’ve really got to figure it out – it was very disconcerting!  

Avebury

  

Our first goal of the day (after working our way out of London traffic) was to head for Avebury.  This is part of a World Heritage site that also includes Stonehenge. The two are about an hour apart. We found our way to Avebury very easily and it was quite interesting. It’s 16 times larger than Stonehenge but was a little bit disappointing?  It was a series of many large stones, vaguely arranged in circles, strewn throughout sheep fields. You entered the fields through latched gates and then you were free to climb on the stone, lean on them, touch them, etc. – you just had to watch out for sheep poop! We wandered around for quite a while, had lunch at a vegetarian restaurant near the stones, and then headed south for the town of Salisbury.  

We thought that our B&B for the night was near Salisbury (more on that later) so we tried to find the famous Salisbury Cathedral first. It’s an interesting cathedral because the spire is just over 400 feet tall and you can see it from far away – but getting to it is another story. It seemed as though all the streets were one-way, going away from the cathedral. Parking was almost non-existent too. We finally did find a parking garage that was only going to be open one more hour (it was Sunday), so Patrick drove in, parked, and we hoofed it to the cathedral.  Wow – it was super worth it too. What a great cathedral!  The interior was amazing too – so I’m hoping some of the 51 pictures I took there came out well.  

Salisbury Cathedral

Next it was on to our B&B  – and it ends up it was about 15 miles east of Salisbury. We arrived, got settled in (tiny rooms!) and headed out for dinner. After dinner we drove back north for Stonehenge. I’m glad it was a Sunday as there was very light traffic in Salisbury.  

We’d paid extra to have access to the Inner Circle of Stonehenge. Only 26 people are allowed inside at a time, for 60 minutes. Typical tourists have to stay on a paved path about 20 feet from the stones. Our scheduled time was 7:45 – 8:45. We got there early and even from the parking lot it was amazing. The parking lot was interesting too – it was almost vacant! We were in the last group allowed to enter Stonehenge so it was very much like a private showing.  

Amber was SO EXCITED once we were allowed to enter she almost ran through the tunnel that goes under the road and on into Stonehenge. She was the first one in our group to enter! I went crazy and only took 173 pictures of Stonehenge.  

Here is a lot of the typical information you read about Stonehenge:  

• Archaeologists believe that the stone monument was erected anywhere from 3000 BC to 2200 BC. Scholars believe that Stonehenge once stood as a magnificent complete monument. This cannot be proved as around half of the stones that should be present are missing, and many of the assumed stone sockets have never been found.
• The tallest stone is 7.3m high and weighs over 45 tons. It is one of the 5 sarsen Trilithons. The sarsen circle was originally composed of 30 uprights (each weighing about 25 tons) capped by horizontal lintels (about 7 tons). The bluestones, weighing up to 4 tons each, came from the Preseli Hills in Wales, some 240km away.
• In 2007/2008 there were 887,000 visitors to Stonehenge excluding the Solstice and including free education visits and stone circle access). (I’m sure they’ll top a million this year.) About 50% are from overseas, 30% are part of a group and 5% are education visitors. More than 70% of the education visitors are from overseas. During just the Summer Solstice in 2008 30,000 people visited Stonehenge.

I found it interesting how Stonehenge is situated. It’s kind of near the top of a plain, on grassy ground with no trees or shrubs or anything around. I understand that’s because of the soil in the area – there’s virtually none. The area is mostly chalk with a thin layer of soil on top – hence no trees, etc.  But Stonehenge just sits there! In America it would be surrounded with search lights, Burger Kings, and t-shirt vendors.  Here – bam! There it is. I think it’s all the more impressive because of this.  

We wandered around the stones for our full hour. Even though it was cool and windy – who cared!? We had been very worried about the weather too – first it was going to rain, then it was going to be cloudy and maybe rain. This was our once-in-a-lifetime visit and we’d paid extra for “good seats”. But by the time we got in the skies parted and we had a glorious sunset. We could not have asked for better weather.  

We walked back to our car and left Stonehenge as darkness settled, smiling all the way back to our B&B.