Lisa Lives Life, Anxiously : Off to see Stonehenge and the Cotswolds

Thursday morning started with a full English breakfast at our hotel, for myself, plus a small chocolate croissant, a regular croissant, one piece of toast to be able to try raspberry, strawberry, and current jam, and earl grey tea with milk and sugar. Technically I didn’t eat the tomato or mushrooms and only tasted the beans. I told myself that we were doing a lot of walking so it was ok, which was true.

Today was Stonehenge day, I was so excited. I have been looking forward to seeing this since I found it in the encyclopedia when I was child. I found it after in old copies of National Geographic my grandmother gave us. There were other stops on this particular tour but this is the thing I needed to see.

We met up with our tour guide, Sean with Mad Max’s tours, in front of the Abbey hotel at 8:00am. This tour was a small group that had 14 people in a small bus/van-type thing. We ended up with another person that was from Oregon on the tour, small world.

First stop: Stonehenge; Awesome! We were told they had made improvements to the grounds and security recently. I had nothing to compare it to, so it was all good for me. I picked up a sausage roll at the cafe with intent to have for lunch at one of our next stops since we were picnicking.

Stop two: I was not sure if this was intended, but we stopped in the village of Upavon to look at thatched roofs. While there we ran into a lady Sean knew who had just purchased a pub called The Ship. She invited us in to look around. Unfortunately none of the taps were hooked up yet.

Stop three: It also felt like a little like it was not on the itinerary. We stopped to visit some horses because apparently around there they have massive horse reliefs carved into the hillsides that get freshly chalked white so they can be seen for miles.

Stop four: The Standing Stones at Avebury. This is a town built into part of a henge. The circle stands about thirteen feet high and takes about twenty minutes to walk around. They let you walk up to the stones and touch them. Sean informed us there was a fertility seat in one of the stones, I made sure to avoid that one. We ended looking around the town and there was a church that was beautiful but mostly I felt I had seen it before, possibly in a movie or television show, maybe in my dreams, who knows.

Stop five: Lacock village for a bit of architectural history and visit some filming sites. There was a manor that we had no time to explore unfortunately but it also cost more money than was worth it apparently. It was impressive looking enough from the outside. I purchased a strawberry cream scone at a bakery here, so delicious!

Stop six: The iconic Cotswolds village of Castle Combe. A beautiful small village with pretty much just one street and no shops really. The type of people that can afford to stay here drive a Lotus. I feel like that says a lot.

It was a beautiful day out. The sun shined all day and no rain. We were told that the rain was coming and they had been experiencing unusually warm weather for this time of year. We arrived back at our pick-up just after 5:00pm. We went back to our hotel to freshen up then walked out to see the Royal Crescent and Pulteney bridge.