Saturday, May 29, 2010

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Fun day! A group of us (Jessica, Danny, Chris Buttars, Nich Herrick, Robert Mc Clellan, Chris Udall and I) rented a car and headed out to Stonehenge and then Portsmouth.

We woke up pretty early and proceeded to wait for a while while everyone got ready, far past the time when we were supposed to leave. Once we finally did leave, we headed out to the airport and grabbed the car. Since we didn't feel like paying extra to have someone “under age” drive, we only had Chris B. drive. It was definitely entertaining watching him figure out how to drive on the left side of the road, from the right hand side of the car. Listening to him say to himself “left, stay left,” every time he went around a turn really never got old. However, he did quite well, and we returned without incident.

So we headed out to Stonehenge, waiting a ridiculous amount of time in traffic (heaven knows for what—once we got on the road to Stonehenge, it wasn't crowded at all) all the way out there. Once we got there, however, the group found out it would be 6 lbs to take the tour and didn't want to go! Ugh. We waited 2.5 hours to get out there just to take a picture and leave? Kind of lame. But they didn't want to go, so I didn't want to force them. We stayed for a bit, I got some nice photos of the English countryside, which is BEAUTIFUL, and we went on our way to Portsmouth.

Because of the traffic on the way out to Stonehenge, plus the long(ish) drives to our stops, we got to Portsmouth just as everything was closing, so we spent the majority of our time just wandering the city, which I loved, of course.

Portsmouth has a great “English sea town” feel to it. It helped that the weather was kind of chilly, rather billowy, and a little rainy at times. It just felt like a true port city, aided of course by the fact that ships were constantly coming in and out of the harbor. There were a few small rock islands just off the coast, which totally reminded me of the scene in the first Harry Potter when they go out to the random rocky isalnd in the sea in the middle of the night. It was so dead-on that scene.

Anyway, we spent a good long time, going from one ruined, historical fort to another, taking lots of photos (soon to come—facebook), and eventually ending up in a pub, where we had some pretty yummy-but-not fantastic food. After dinner, we continued the wanderage around the harbor, which I really did love. It was just so.....seatownesque! I guess I just really love feeling towns. I love getting the feeling of the town. And the cool thing about Europe is that each town is so unique that they really do have a different feel in each town.

And then on home.