A drive through the English countryside
As usual, I am taking way longer to post than I intended. But here, at last, is the second installment of my grand tour of Europe: a little dose of England.
When I was planning my trip, I was excited at the prospect of visiting friends in various countries around Europe. I emailed bootstrapbetti first, to the effect of “Guess what? I’m coming to Germany! Let’s hang out!”
Betti’s response (I’m paraphrasing here):
“That’s great. Except I’m moving to London.”
In a similar vein, another German friend, Patricia, was actually doing her PhD in Bristol. Add to that Tania and Leonid (the family friends I stayed with in London); Sonia - another friend , who had moved to London with her parents several years earlier; and finally, Tim, a friend who had just moved to London in order to pursue his acting career: I had an entire crowd of people clustered around London, and almost nobody anywhere else in Europe.
After catching up with Tim, Betti and Sonia in London, it was time to venture out. I caught the bus to Bristol to visit Patricia.
To be honest, I was a little nervous about this. I’d met Pat in Japan, when we both found ourselves accidentally crashing a Japanese funeral. We bonded over a mutual love for Japan, books and martial arts (she’s an almost-black belt in Aikido), and promised to keep in touch after going our separate ways, but as often happens with people you meet while travelling, the most we’d done was friend each other on Facebook. However, when I told her I was on my way to the UK, she seemed quite happy to meet up, assured me I was welcome to stay at her house and invited me out clubbing in Bristol.
First, of course, I had to get there. A tip for young players: if you have to get from London to Bristol, don’t take the bus. We seemed to be rolling along quite smoothly, when suddenly the driver announced that there was heavy traffic up ahead and he was going to take us off the main highway to try and get around it. “I don’t really know this area,” he added. “But I’m sure we’ll be fine.”
Two hours later, as we circled the same roundabout for the third time, I was frantically messaging Pat in the hope that she would understand this was not my fault. I feel bad keeping people waiting, and it’s far worse with people I don’t know very well. Eventually, she called me: “Hey, I’m at the bus station and they’re saying you’ll be another forty minutes!”
My extremely full bladder nearly cried at this point, but to my immense relief the prognosis was wrong: we pulled into the station before I had even hung up the phone. To my even greater relief, Pat was friendly, happy to see me, and we picked up our conversation essentially where we’d left off in Japan several months earlier.
Pat, a PhD student, lives in a shared house with some other students. Her house in four hundred years old. To a European, this probably means nothing, but to an Australian it’s mind-boggling. The colony of New South Wales is a little over two hundred years old. The Aboriginal people have been here for 60,000 years, of course, but being a nomadic people, they left little in the way of permanent traces of their existence. Certainly no houses that ordinary people can still live in!
Anyway, our plan for the evening was to go clubbing. Generally, clubbing is not my scene, but Pat assured me that the music would be good and the crowd would be relatively un-pretentious - I didn’t need to worry about dressing up, at least. And I wasn’t disappointed. I spent half the night dancing to reggae (of all the things I never associated with Bristol) and the other half watching a band I can only describe as hideously awesome. How can I explain this? The music was a sort of retro electro-pop, with emphasis on the retro. The lead singer was overweight, wearing aviators, spandex and an absolutely filthy handlebar moustache. The back-up singers had afros. By the end of the show, all of them were in varying states of undress, with the lead also being the greatest offender (I suppose I should be grateful he kept the budgie smugglers ON).
I will say this about clubbing in Bristol - even without the spectacle of overweight men in sparkly briefs, you can’t be too squeamish. I suppose it has something to do with the cold weather outside. As people dance, they sweat - that is inevitable. But in Bristol, what happens next is a little more disgusting. The sweat evaporates from the mass of bodies and then condenses on the ceiling. And, as all condensed water must, once there’s enough of it, eventually it starts to drip back down on the dancers. So clubbing in Bristol offers the unique experience of indoor rain. Composed of the condensed sweat of a couple of thousand people. Say it with me, folks: “EWWWWWWWWW!”
Aaanyway. Sweaty indoor rain aside, I had a good time. Pat and I creaked back into her 400-year-old house in the early hours of the morning, and slept until midday the next day (at which point, I forced us out of bed by means of alarm - I only had half a day left to explore both Bristol and Bath!)
Needless to say, there wasn’t enough time. We were both groggy after the big night, but Pat played the dutiful host and showed me as much as she could. We even managed a visit to the Roman Baths and tho the Bristol museum - which just happened to have a free (!) exhibition of drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci. Have I raved before about Britain’s excellent idea that cultural treasures should be displayed for free, so everybody can enjoy them? Even if I have, I can’t praise them enough.
Banksy graffiti in Bristol
Anyway, I’ll skip ahead now. From Bristol, I flew to Edinburgh, but since that little outing warrants a post to itself, I’ll move on to the following weekend, and a roadtrip to Stonehenge.
This particular trip was something of a planning nightmare. It started out simple: when emailing bootstrapbetti about my upcoming trip, I suggested that we could go and see Stonehenge together, since neither of us had been there. Betti agreed, and the matter rested there for a while. But I was also emailing my friend Tim, the aforementioned actor. He asked me where I planned to go in the UK, and when I mentioned Stonehenge, he immediately asked if he could come with me - and sweetened the deal by offering me accommodation for the night with his uncle’s family in Swindon. Needless to say, this sounded great, but I couldn’t very well give Betti the flick when I’d already planned to go with her. I explained the situation to Tim, and what followed was a long and somewhat tedious process of emailing as we hammered out a plan. The final agreement was this: Tim, Betti and I would go together in a rental car. We would spend the night with Tim’s family, and get up VERY EARLY in the morning to catch the sunrise at Stonehenge.
Several aspects of this worried me greatly. Tim and Betti had never met - what if they hated each other? Tim’s family had never met me, let alone Betti - what if they hated us both? The sunrise thing was my idea - what if the other two were going along with it for my sake, but really could think of nothing more horrid than waking up THAT early? And finally, out of the three of us, I was the only one who could drive in the UK... but I couldn’t drive manual, and guess what kind of car we’d hired?
In retrospect, I think I was really overthinking the whole thing, except the bit about the car. That part was a genuine problem. It’s not that I can’t drive manual at all - I knew it was a possibility on the trip, and I had taken a couple of lessons before leaving Australia - but as anyone who’s ever tried to switch from driving automatic to manual will know, it takes more than a couple of lessons to get the hang of it. Ironically, both Tim and Betti could drive manual perfectly well, but Tim didn’t have a license and Betti had just come from Germany, and was nervous about driving on the opposite side of the road.
So, it was with some trepidation that I awaited the trip to Stonehenge. To make things just that little bit worse, the car turned out to be a box just about large enough for one pair of midgets, despite being, allegedly, a 5-seater. With the three of us plus our bags and an uncharacteristically warm London day, the trip was off to an uncomfortable start. We were on the road for about two minutes before I stalled for the first time.
A GPS can make your life easier when travelling, but it is important to remember that it is, after all, a dumb machine, and doesn’t understand such concepts as “Avoid the traffic, please!” So the blasted thing directed us right through the centre of London. I stalled twice on the Tower Bridge alone.
To their credit and my immense gratitude, neither Betti nor Tim made a SINGLE complaint about my driving. We joked about it, and I encouraged them to make bets on how long I could go without stalling. But not once did either of them actually criticise me. Guys, if you’re reading this - thank you both for your incredible patience.
Once the awful drive was over, we had a wonderful day. I need not have worried about Tim’s family. I felt a bit awkward at first, but once I discovered a battered copy of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” in the bathroom, I realised these were my kind of people!
Tim’s aunt and uncle drove us out to see the Uffington White Horse, and we spent a remarkably warm and sunny afternoon walking among the green, rolling “Windows backdrop” hills. We then went for a beer at a “proper English country pub”, followed by dinner at the family home, cooked for us by Tim’s cousins (all Harry Potter fanatics just like us). Somehow the evening rolled into night, and eventually, we were climbing into our sleeping bags at two in the morning. At some point, rather late in the evening, an unpleasant detail came to light: it would take us about an hour to drive to Stonehenge from Swindon! None of us had bothered to do the research beforehand. It was better than driving from London, of course, but still meant we’d need to be up by 4:30 in the morning (a time of day I normally see only from the wrong side of a night shift!)
English countryside. Time to go Hobbit-spotting.
Look: it's the Windows default backdrop!
But get up we did, after what felt like five minutes of sleep (and may well have been less than that, since all three of us were affected by varying levels of over-excitement, overheating or just plain old-fashioned discomfort from sleeping on the floor.
I managed to complete the drive with a minimal amount of stalling - probably aided by the fact that as there was no traffic, there was virtually no need to stop. However, when I overshot the Stonehenge carpark and pulled over by the side of the road fifty metres away, I decided we should just walk back from there instead of starting the car again and turning around. Betti and Tim didn’t argue with this, but I’m not sure if they realised that my decision stemmed completely from my overwhelming dread of having to start the car.
What is there to say about Stonehenge? It’s certainly big, and far more impressive in person than in any photograph. At 5:30 in the morning, it rises majestically out of mist-shrouded hills. The sunrise was spectacular.
The thing is, it takes about ten minutes to walk around and through the stones, so as to look at them from every angle. Then, another ten, twenty minutes at a push, are needed for taking photos and admiring the surrounding scenery (rolling, mist-shrouded hills and distant barrows). After that, you’re pretty much done. We hung around for a bit longer, perhaps out of a sense that we needed to get our money’s worth (the visit was supposed to be for one hour). Eventually, Betti and I called an end to the festivities - both of us were freezing.
I feel that the sly, insidious cold at Stonehenge was so spectacular as to rate its own paragraph. When we left the house in Swindon, we all remarked on the mild weather, and I tossed my coat into the car almost as an afterthought. Even once we arrived at Stonehenge, I didn’t notice the cold straight away. But by the time we left, I was colder than I had ever been in my life. I felt as if the freeze had entered my very bones. My hands were aching with it, even though I had gloves on. My feet had gone beyond aching and into completely numb. Betti was in a similar state, but Tim seemed completely unaffected.
It was now a little after six in the morning. All our thoughts were on hot breakfast and nice, strong coffee, but suddenly we realised another flaw in my plan: where does one find such things at six o’clock on a Sunday morning in rural England? We had not intended to return to Swindon - our plan for the day was to explore Salisbury, and head back to London early in the afternoon. But anything we wanted to see in Salisbury was unlikely to open before ten... and a six a.m., Sunday breakfast might be hard to find even in London.
With what I feel was an insane level of optimism, we decided to drive to Salisbury and hope for the best. I blame our lack of sleep for this. Needless to say, Salisbury was completely and utterly devoid of any waking life. I drove us aimlessly through the empty streets until, to my vast astonishment, I did find another sleepless soul: a taxi driver, approaching us from the opposite end of the street, whose blaring horn echoed through the silent city. He pulled up alongside us and rolled down the window.
“What are you doing? This is a one-way street!” he yelled at me.
I replied defensively, and I must admit, almost rudely, “Where does it say that? There aren’t any signs!”
“Well, trust me, I drive here every day. It’s a one-way street.”
“Oh. Well. Sorry.” (Sullen me.)
“Hey,” said the taxi driver, suddenly friendly, “You’re not Australian, are you?”
“Yes, actually we are!” Tim now chimed in. “And one German.”
“Oooh, why didn’t you say so? I LOVE Australians! Especially when we’re beating you at cricket. What are you looking for anyway?”
I am not exaggerating - his change in tone and attitude was that instantaneous. I have heard from people in the past that Australian travellers are often well-liked - especially compared to Americans, or even the British themselves. But I’d never had somebody positively and blatantly start being nice to me as soon as they found out I was Australian. It was a surreal experience.
We explained, a little sheepishly, that we were hoping to find some sort of cafe that would sell us an early-morning coffee. I expected him to laugh in our faces, but instead, he told us that there was a McDonalds just around the corner which opened at six! He told me to turn around and follow him, he would take us all the way there.
I completed the entire complicated manoeuvre (a three-point turn, followed by a short drive behind the taxi) without stalling once. It was my crowning achievement for the weekend.
Unfortunately, after consuming our coffee and McDonald’s breakfasts (beggars can’t be choosers, people), we were still in Salisbury at seven a.m. on a Sunday. Eventually, we drove to Woodhenge, which one can visit at any time of day, and then parked the car on a grassy hill and did our best to have a nap. I’m not sure how well the others managed, since most people would struggle to sleep with their knees digging into their armpits, but I was tired enough to at least dose for an hour or so.
The remainder of the day can be summed up as follows: 1) The quest to find a toilet (or sufficiently dense clump of bushes) 2) A trip to a ruined castle (I have forgotten the name, but it’s near Salisbury, there can’t be that many of them) and 3) A visit to Salisbury Cathedral. We returned to London with considerably fewer stalling incidents than on the outward journey, though some credit must go to Tim for working out a route that avoided the centre of London. At some point, either he or Betti made the bet that I would stall one last time when pulling into the parking space at the car rental place. Sadly, life does not conform to the rules of comedy. I stalled a couple of times on the home stretch, but the final parking job was completely smooth.
Tim inside Salisbury Cathedral
Three weary travellers enjoying a pint before heading back to London. From left: Tim, Betti, me. (That’s Coke in my glass, don’t worry!)
For anyone who just wants to look at some pretty photos, the photo album for this section of the trip can be found here or on facebook if you're friends with me.
When I was planning my trip, I was excited at the prospect of visiting friends in various countries around Europe. I emailed bootstrapbetti first, to the effect of “Guess what? I’m coming to Germany! Let’s hang out!”
Betti’s response (I’m paraphrasing here):
“That’s great. Except I’m moving to London.”
In a similar vein, another German friend, Patricia, was actually doing her PhD in Bristol. Add to that Tania and Leonid (the family friends I stayed with in London); Sonia - another friend , who had moved to London with her parents several years earlier; and finally, Tim, a friend who had just moved to London in order to pursue his acting career: I had an entire crowd of people clustered around London, and almost nobody anywhere else in Europe.
After catching up with Tim, Betti and Sonia in London, it was time to venture out. I caught the bus to Bristol to visit Patricia.
To be honest, I was a little nervous about this. I’d met Pat in Japan, when we both found ourselves accidentally crashing a Japanese funeral. We bonded over a mutual love for Japan, books and martial arts (she’s an almost-black belt in Aikido), and promised to keep in touch after going our separate ways, but as often happens with people you meet while travelling, the most we’d done was friend each other on Facebook. However, when I told her I was on my way to the UK, she seemed quite happy to meet up, assured me I was welcome to stay at her house and invited me out clubbing in Bristol.
First, of course, I had to get there. A tip for young players: if you have to get from London to Bristol, don’t take the bus. We seemed to be rolling along quite smoothly, when suddenly the driver announced that there was heavy traffic up ahead and he was going to take us off the main highway to try and get around it. “I don’t really know this area,” he added. “But I’m sure we’ll be fine.”
Two hours later, as we circled the same roundabout for the third time, I was frantically messaging Pat in the hope that she would understand this was not my fault. I feel bad keeping people waiting, and it’s far worse with people I don’t know very well. Eventually, she called me: “Hey, I’m at the bus station and they’re saying you’ll be another forty minutes!”
My extremely full bladder nearly cried at this point, but to my immense relief the prognosis was wrong: we pulled into the station before I had even hung up the phone. To my even greater relief, Pat was friendly, happy to see me, and we picked up our conversation essentially where we’d left off in Japan several months earlier.
Pat, a PhD student, lives in a shared house with some other students. Her house in four hundred years old. To a European, this probably means nothing, but to an Australian it’s mind-boggling. The colony of New South Wales is a little over two hundred years old. The Aboriginal people have been here for 60,000 years, of course, but being a nomadic people, they left little in the way of permanent traces of their existence. Certainly no houses that ordinary people can still live in!
Anyway, our plan for the evening was to go clubbing. Generally, clubbing is not my scene, but Pat assured me that the music would be good and the crowd would be relatively un-pretentious - I didn’t need to worry about dressing up, at least. And I wasn’t disappointed. I spent half the night dancing to reggae (of all the things I never associated with Bristol) and the other half watching a band I can only describe as hideously awesome. How can I explain this? The music was a sort of retro electro-pop, with emphasis on the retro. The lead singer was overweight, wearing aviators, spandex and an absolutely filthy handlebar moustache. The back-up singers had afros. By the end of the show, all of them were in varying states of undress, with the lead also being the greatest offender (I suppose I should be grateful he kept the budgie smugglers ON).
I will say this about clubbing in Bristol - even without the spectacle of overweight men in sparkly briefs, you can’t be too squeamish. I suppose it has something to do with the cold weather outside. As people dance, they sweat - that is inevitable. But in Bristol, what happens next is a little more disgusting. The sweat evaporates from the mass of bodies and then condenses on the ceiling. And, as all condensed water must, once there’s enough of it, eventually it starts to drip back down on the dancers. So clubbing in Bristol offers the unique experience of indoor rain. Composed of the condensed sweat of a couple of thousand people. Say it with me, folks: “EWWWWWWWWW!”
Aaanyway. Sweaty indoor rain aside, I had a good time. Pat and I creaked back into her 400-year-old house in the early hours of the morning, and slept until midday the next day (at which point, I forced us out of bed by means of alarm - I only had half a day left to explore both Bristol and Bath!)
Needless to say, there wasn’t enough time. We were both groggy after the big night, but Pat played the dutiful host and showed me as much as she could. We even managed a visit to the Roman Baths and tho the Bristol museum - which just happened to have a free (!) exhibition of drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci. Have I raved before about Britain’s excellent idea that cultural treasures should be displayed for free, so everybody can enjoy them? Even if I have, I can’t praise them enough.
Banksy graffiti in Bristol
Anyway, I’ll skip ahead now. From Bristol, I flew to Edinburgh, but since that little outing warrants a post to itself, I’ll move on to the following weekend, and a roadtrip to Stonehenge.
This particular trip was something of a planning nightmare. It started out simple: when emailing bootstrapbetti about my upcoming trip, I suggested that we could go and see Stonehenge together, since neither of us had been there. Betti agreed, and the matter rested there for a while. But I was also emailing my friend Tim, the aforementioned actor. He asked me where I planned to go in the UK, and when I mentioned Stonehenge, he immediately asked if he could come with me - and sweetened the deal by offering me accommodation for the night with his uncle’s family in Swindon. Needless to say, this sounded great, but I couldn’t very well give Betti the flick when I’d already planned to go with her. I explained the situation to Tim, and what followed was a long and somewhat tedious process of emailing as we hammered out a plan. The final agreement was this: Tim, Betti and I would go together in a rental car. We would spend the night with Tim’s family, and get up VERY EARLY in the morning to catch the sunrise at Stonehenge.
Several aspects of this worried me greatly. Tim and Betti had never met - what if they hated each other? Tim’s family had never met me, let alone Betti - what if they hated us both? The sunrise thing was my idea - what if the other two were going along with it for my sake, but really could think of nothing more horrid than waking up THAT early? And finally, out of the three of us, I was the only one who could drive in the UK... but I couldn’t drive manual, and guess what kind of car we’d hired?
In retrospect, I think I was really overthinking the whole thing, except the bit about the car. That part was a genuine problem. It’s not that I can’t drive manual at all - I knew it was a possibility on the trip, and I had taken a couple of lessons before leaving Australia - but as anyone who’s ever tried to switch from driving automatic to manual will know, it takes more than a couple of lessons to get the hang of it. Ironically, both Tim and Betti could drive manual perfectly well, but Tim didn’t have a license and Betti had just come from Germany, and was nervous about driving on the opposite side of the road.
So, it was with some trepidation that I awaited the trip to Stonehenge. To make things just that little bit worse, the car turned out to be a box just about large enough for one pair of midgets, despite being, allegedly, a 5-seater. With the three of us plus our bags and an uncharacteristically warm London day, the trip was off to an uncomfortable start. We were on the road for about two minutes before I stalled for the first time.
A GPS can make your life easier when travelling, but it is important to remember that it is, after all, a dumb machine, and doesn’t understand such concepts as “Avoid the traffic, please!” So the blasted thing directed us right through the centre of London. I stalled twice on the Tower Bridge alone.
To their credit and my immense gratitude, neither Betti nor Tim made a SINGLE complaint about my driving. We joked about it, and I encouraged them to make bets on how long I could go without stalling. But not once did either of them actually criticise me. Guys, if you’re reading this - thank you both for your incredible patience.
Once the awful drive was over, we had a wonderful day. I need not have worried about Tim’s family. I felt a bit awkward at first, but once I discovered a battered copy of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” in the bathroom, I realised these were my kind of people!
Tim’s aunt and uncle drove us out to see the Uffington White Horse, and we spent a remarkably warm and sunny afternoon walking among the green, rolling “Windows backdrop” hills. We then went for a beer at a “proper English country pub”, followed by dinner at the family home, cooked for us by Tim’s cousins (all Harry Potter fanatics just like us). Somehow the evening rolled into night, and eventually, we were climbing into our sleeping bags at two in the morning. At some point, rather late in the evening, an unpleasant detail came to light: it would take us about an hour to drive to Stonehenge from Swindon! None of us had bothered to do the research beforehand. It was better than driving from London, of course, but still meant we’d need to be up by 4:30 in the morning (a time of day I normally see only from the wrong side of a night shift!)
English countryside. Time to go Hobbit-spotting.
Look: it's the Windows default backdrop!
But get up we did, after what felt like five minutes of sleep (and may well have been less than that, since all three of us were affected by varying levels of over-excitement, overheating or just plain old-fashioned discomfort from sleeping on the floor.
I managed to complete the drive with a minimal amount of stalling - probably aided by the fact that as there was no traffic, there was virtually no need to stop. However, when I overshot the Stonehenge carpark and pulled over by the side of the road fifty metres away, I decided we should just walk back from there instead of starting the car again and turning around. Betti and Tim didn’t argue with this, but I’m not sure if they realised that my decision stemmed completely from my overwhelming dread of having to start the car.
What is there to say about Stonehenge? It’s certainly big, and far more impressive in person than in any photograph. At 5:30 in the morning, it rises majestically out of mist-shrouded hills. The sunrise was spectacular.
The thing is, it takes about ten minutes to walk around and through the stones, so as to look at them from every angle. Then, another ten, twenty minutes at a push, are needed for taking photos and admiring the surrounding scenery (rolling, mist-shrouded hills and distant barrows). After that, you’re pretty much done. We hung around for a bit longer, perhaps out of a sense that we needed to get our money’s worth (the visit was supposed to be for one hour). Eventually, Betti and I called an end to the festivities - both of us were freezing.
I feel that the sly, insidious cold at Stonehenge was so spectacular as to rate its own paragraph. When we left the house in Swindon, we all remarked on the mild weather, and I tossed my coat into the car almost as an afterthought. Even once we arrived at Stonehenge, I didn’t notice the cold straight away. But by the time we left, I was colder than I had ever been in my life. I felt as if the freeze had entered my very bones. My hands were aching with it, even though I had gloves on. My feet had gone beyond aching and into completely numb. Betti was in a similar state, but Tim seemed completely unaffected.
It was now a little after six in the morning. All our thoughts were on hot breakfast and nice, strong coffee, but suddenly we realised another flaw in my plan: where does one find such things at six o’clock on a Sunday morning in rural England? We had not intended to return to Swindon - our plan for the day was to explore Salisbury, and head back to London early in the afternoon. But anything we wanted to see in Salisbury was unlikely to open before ten... and a six a.m., Sunday breakfast might be hard to find even in London.
With what I feel was an insane level of optimism, we decided to drive to Salisbury and hope for the best. I blame our lack of sleep for this. Needless to say, Salisbury was completely and utterly devoid of any waking life. I drove us aimlessly through the empty streets until, to my vast astonishment, I did find another sleepless soul: a taxi driver, approaching us from the opposite end of the street, whose blaring horn echoed through the silent city. He pulled up alongside us and rolled down the window.
“What are you doing? This is a one-way street!” he yelled at me.
I replied defensively, and I must admit, almost rudely, “Where does it say that? There aren’t any signs!”
“Well, trust me, I drive here every day. It’s a one-way street.”
“Oh. Well. Sorry.” (Sullen me.)
“Hey,” said the taxi driver, suddenly friendly, “You’re not Australian, are you?”
“Yes, actually we are!” Tim now chimed in. “And one German.”
“Oooh, why didn’t you say so? I LOVE Australians! Especially when we’re beating you at cricket. What are you looking for anyway?”
I am not exaggerating - his change in tone and attitude was that instantaneous. I have heard from people in the past that Australian travellers are often well-liked - especially compared to Americans, or even the British themselves. But I’d never had somebody positively and blatantly start being nice to me as soon as they found out I was Australian. It was a surreal experience.
We explained, a little sheepishly, that we were hoping to find some sort of cafe that would sell us an early-morning coffee. I expected him to laugh in our faces, but instead, he told us that there was a McDonalds just around the corner which opened at six! He told me to turn around and follow him, he would take us all the way there.
I completed the entire complicated manoeuvre (a three-point turn, followed by a short drive behind the taxi) without stalling once. It was my crowning achievement for the weekend.
Unfortunately, after consuming our coffee and McDonald’s breakfasts (beggars can’t be choosers, people), we were still in Salisbury at seven a.m. on a Sunday. Eventually, we drove to Woodhenge, which one can visit at any time of day, and then parked the car on a grassy hill and did our best to have a nap. I’m not sure how well the others managed, since most people would struggle to sleep with their knees digging into their armpits, but I was tired enough to at least dose for an hour or so.
The remainder of the day can be summed up as follows: 1) The quest to find a toilet (or sufficiently dense clump of bushes) 2) A trip to a ruined castle (I have forgotten the name, but it’s near Salisbury, there can’t be that many of them) and 3) A visit to Salisbury Cathedral. We returned to London with considerably fewer stalling incidents than on the outward journey, though some credit must go to Tim for working out a route that avoided the centre of London. At some point, either he or Betti made the bet that I would stall one last time when pulling into the parking space at the car rental place. Sadly, life does not conform to the rules of comedy. I stalled a couple of times on the home stretch, but the final parking job was completely smooth.
Tim inside Salisbury Cathedral
Three weary travellers enjoying a pint before heading back to London. From left: Tim, Betti, me. (That’s Coke in my glass, don’t worry!)
For anyone who just wants to look at some pretty photos, the photo album for this section of the trip can be found here or on facebook if you're friends with me.