Stonehenge looked like a 15 to 20 mile blast up the A303 from Stourhead on our map, so we hopped in our little street racer and made for it before the afternoon slipped into evening.

We’ve all seen pictures of Stonehenge. They universally depict a huge megalithic ruin standing completely alone on the wide, green Salisbury Plain of Southern Wiltshire. I had always assumed that it was in the middle of nowhere, that we’d have to drive for miles down unpaved country lanes, crossing streams and pastures, dodging lines of druids along the way. Then, finally, it would appear almost magically before us. It would be massive, full of mystery, beckoning us nearer with its ancient spiritual authority.

My first glimpse of Stonehenge wasn’t so dreamy. We were flying down the A303, looking for a road sign, anything that might tell us where the hell we were. Finally, I spotted a strange assemblage of stones a few hundred yards off the road, sandwiched between the A303 and another large “A” road. I was sure it was something else. One of the lesser stone circles that dot the English countryside, perhaps.

Even as we approached the ruin I didn’t recognize it as Stonehenge. The scale and color was all wrong. It shone a stunning greenish blue in the sun, and it wasn’t nearly as big as I had imagined (only about twice my own height).

I speak heresy, I’m sure, when I say that I wasn’t particularly impressed with Stonehenge…at first. We strolled around it a couple times, taking the obligatory photos, sure that the images would be as underwhelming as the place itself seemed.

Perhaps it was because of the trucks motoring loudly down the big roads on either side of us, or maybe it was because of the crowd, but, I had a hard a time feeling even a tinge of the spiritual potency that people so often attribute to the place. I have to admit to leaving a little disappointed.

It wasn’t until we had gotten home and started picking through the hundreds of images we had captured of our trip that I began to understand the magic of Stonehenge. The place is incredibly photogenic…the world seems to shrink around it in pictures. And I noticed something else…the flat gray color of the rocks in our photos (in every photo I’ve ever seen of the place) is nothing like what I saw in person. Somehow our 1,500 dollar camera had utterly failed to pick up the brilliant bluish-green hue that I had seen so clearly. That I had thought so strange when I first laid eyes on it.



I think Stonehenge has imprinted on my subconscious. It’s crept into my dreams with increasing frequency since our return. The dream is always the same, too. I find myself wading through tall grass, across open fields until I see it glowing in that unnatural bluish-green color in the distance. I walk towards it in great anticipation, knowing that when I get there I’ll learn some great secret about my future…about the future in general. I never reach it, though. Instead, I just wake up with a terrible sense of foreboding.

I don’t know, maybe there’s something to Stonehenge after all…

There’s a reason you don’t often hear about American tourists renting cars and driving the entire length and breadth of the main British Island…lots of reasons. But that’s precisely what we were planning to do.

I had always assumed that the hardest part about learning to drive in the UK would be remembering to stay on the left side of the road. Not so much...I was surprised how quickly that became second nature. It was probably the easiest part about learning to navigate the British Road System. There were a host of other, more difficult things to master.

For instance, there’s the peculiar fact that English roads are positively lillipution compared to their American counterparts. Every oncoming car feels like a head-on collision, and trynig to scoot by an on-rushing laurie (semi-truck) is very much a religious experience (my confessions were fast and silent). Cars and trucks are forced to pass each other at breakneck speeds, separated by mere inches. There’s zero margin for error.

Roads that would be 45 MPH in the states are 60 MPH in the UK. Their “A” roads resemble narrow, undivided rural routes, but they treat them like friggin’ interstates. I’m a fast driver by American standards (I’ve got the points on my license to prove it) but I never felt truly comfortable driving the speed limit there.

Then there’s those infernal roundabouts! And we’re not talking about the little ones you see in America. These things have two, three, even four lanes, and they’re not afraid to stack them one after another so that you have to negotiate the entire series of them to get anyplace. It’s absolute madness! Driving quickly became a chore, and we looked for opportunities to ditch the car.

It was all made OK by the fact that we were there, motoring through one of the most beautifully pastoral landscapes in the world, though. The very place that my ancestors had called home for a thousand generations. It was somewhere between Midsomer Norton and Shepton Mallet that I realized this wasn’t just a vacation for me. It was a homecoming of sorts. A pilgrimage.

We drove through sparkling little towns and villages with names like Little Keyford and Maiden Bradley, to a British National Trust sight called Stourhead.


Stourhouse

Shauna had spent a day there during her semester abroad and it was at the top of her list of places she wanted to see again, And for good reason. Stourhead is widely thought to be the most beautiful landscape garden in all of England. It sprawls over an early 18th century estate originally owned by the Hoare family, founders of the Hoare Company (the only privately held bank in Britain). It’s a tree lover’s paradise, home to an unsurpassed collection of domestic and exotic lumber. There were Redwoods, Sequoias, Sitka Spruces and Western Red Cedars right next to Common Oaks and English Maples.




The whole place is littered with ancient looking structures. There’s a medieval church, a Palladian House, and a pair of Greco-Roman Temples rumored to have been used for wild, week long royal orgies. Alright, I made that last bit up…but they could have been used for something like that!


The lake at Stourhead



We walked around the grounds for a couple hours, snapping photos and generally taking it all in. It was every bit as amazing as Shauna had boasted. To my knowledge, no garden in the states even comes close. But, in the end I was just putting off the inevitable. We couldn’t stay there forever…I’d have to eventually cowboy up and learn to drive like a Brit!

I expected to wake to the sound of rain tapping against our hotel window. Or, to the sight of fog drifting through the streets below. We were, after all, in London. I hadn’t even entertained the possibility of bright blue skies and temps in the mid to upper perfect range. But I’d take it.

We were at Paddington Station early, but only after a traditional English breakfast at St. David’s. Eggs sunny side up, English bacon, sausage, the whole nine yards…all with a spot of tea.

The train pulled out of London and we were soon speeding through southern portions of the Cotswolds, the most ridiculously charming piece of countryside in England…maybe anywhere. I struggle to describe just how quaint, how picturesque this place is. Deep green pastures divided by ancient hedgerows roll gently from one horizon to the other. Happy little sheep and ponies graze next to ageless rock walls and medieval stone cottages. It really is the prototypical storybook backdrop.



The Cotswolds

We de-trained in Bath, and dragged our luggage off the platform and up Manvers Street towards the bus depot. We had been told that we could rent a locker there, and I was looking forward to dumping our stuff for awhile and having a look around while the day was still young.

The place was chaos, though. Tourists of every persuasion crowded the sidewalks and spilled onto the streets. It was impossible to walk more than a few steps without being jostled or bumped. Shauna had her bags knocked out of her hands a couple times before finally reaching the bus terminal. I was starting to get a little testy for her.

We waited in line for nearly a half hour only to learn that they didn’t really rent lockers. We were told to try the youth hostel about a half mile up the street. It was then that we elected to take the road less traveled by…and it made all the difference.

Instead of marching uphill to the hostel through a sea of humanity, with all our things in tow, where they may or may not even rent lockers, we hauled ourselves and our bags back to the train station, hopped in a cab, and got the hell out of Dodge. I was a little bummed to leave without exploring the place, but, we didn’t cross the bloody Atlantic to spend what little time we had there fighting the weekend hordes. We had places to go, things to see, people to bug with our ugly Americanism.

The driver dropped us off at the Eurocar office in Marksbury, a little town about 10 minutes southwest of Bath. We had a reservation, but we were early, and our car wasn’t ready yet. I passed the time by franticly trying to cram the entire contents of a little book about driving in the UK into my memory. All the good it did!

We reserved an economy class car, so I was expecting a Geo Metro, or a Ford Festiva, or some European variant thereof.




Needless to say I was jazzed when they pulled this little number out of the garage…a Vauxhall Astra, complete with a turbocharged 1.8 liter 4-banger and race tuned suspension.

“HOT DAMN” was all I could say as I gassed it onto the A39 out of town. As they say in the biz…that little car hauled ass!

We saw Ireland First. It rose like Valinor from the gray waters of the north Atlantic as we approached. Tall cliffs and narrow strands of beach marked the meeting of land and sea, while a vast green countryside rolled out before us. Even from 32,000 feet it was obvious that this place had been blessed with uncommon charm. Ancient rock walls dissected the landscape, and pretty little villages dotted the terrain like bright stars against an emerald backcloth.

Then, the ocean again, and a wall of thick white clouds. I strained for a glimpse of the land as we drew near the Cornish coast, but no luck. It wasn’t until our final approach to Gatwick that I saw it through a driving rain…The Big Island…The Old Country…England.

Gatwick was a mess but we battled through customs and baggage claim without a single “bugger off”, and snagged a couple seats on the Hogwart’s…err…Gatwick Express for London before it filled up. The train sped through a gray, green world that seemed at once strange and familiar. It was raining hard, and the symptoms of jetlag had started to kick my ass, but the excitement of being there made the beating almost tolerable.



The Gatwick Express.

Shauna’s eyes brightened as we pulled into Victoria Station. London is her favorite city on earth. She spent an entire semester there during her junior year in college, and had been aching to get back ever since.

It was soon very clear that she was in her element, and I was not. I’m really no good at big cities, and London is about as big, and as noisy as they get. The cab ride to our hotel was one part culture shock, one part sensory overload, and two parts scrape with death. The rules of the road were either non-existent or completely inscrutable as our driver picked his route through the maze of main streets and back ways to Norfolk Square and St. David’s Hotel. Shauna was unphased.



Norfolk Square.

Our room wasn’t quite ready for us when we arrived, so we dropped our bags off at the front desk and stepped out into the rain. Norfolk Square is nearly ideally situated. It’s within a stone’s throw of Paddington Station and a short walk from Hyde Park. Most importantly it’s less than a block from Garfunkels restaurant, and a desert of legendary status (Shauna had talked about it for as long as I had known her); a large Belgian waffle topped with unnaturally rich vanilla ice cream, maple syrup, and a sprinkling of toffee bits. It would have probably been worth the jetlag by itself.

From Garfunkels, we wandered down Praed Street and Leinster Terrace to Hyde Park. We’d planned on taking a stroll across the green, but a raucous Islamic Jihad Rally being held there persuaded us to keep moving down Bayswater Road. We turned up a side street and loitered for a moment in front of the building where Shauna had lived during her semester abroad.

It was about then that I decided I’d had enough. Neither of us had slept in better than 24 hours, and walking around in the rain, jet lagged out of my mind just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I was all about going back to the hotel and sleeping it off, but Shauna wasn’t down with it. She insisted that day 2 would suck just as badly if we didn’t allow our circadian rhythms to reset for London Time. She forbade me from going to sleep before 9:00 PM.

I pissed and moaned all the way down Moscow Road and then Queensway, knowing Shauna was probably right. This was her third trip to the UK. She’d backpacked through Europe for an entire summer, toured the Soviet Union, partied in Australia… I had to acknowledge that she might know more about jetlag than I did (seeing as I’d never left North America before).

We thought momentarily about hopping on the tube and seeing the sites in Westminster (Parliament, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Trafalgar Square, etc.), but I wanted to actually be awake for those things. Instead we walked into Whiteleys Shopping Center (London’s main indoor mall) to get out of the rain, and to kill a little time. At some point we spotted a cinema and decided it would be a brilliant way to knock out a couple hours.

We purchased two tickets to a British film called “Children of Men”. It was a dark, unnecessarily violent piece with an agenda. I didn’t get it; perhaps because I don’t completely understand the subtleties of British politics. It was quietly anti-American, and endlessly slow moving. The plot just seemed to collapse on itself. Shauna hated it even worse than I did. Imagine our surprise when Children of Men made damn near every American critic’s top ten films of the year list. I guess there’s no accounting for taste. In any event, it had served it's purpose.

The rain had stopped while we we in the theater, so we spent the rest of the afternoon wandering aimlessly down little streets and alleyways, stumbling into cool little shops and bakeries. We bought some sandwiches at a delicatessen around the corner from our hotel, and took them back to our room after finally checking in.



Barbed wire on the fire escape?



London from our window.

We watched the sun set over London from our window as we ate. We were asleep about ten minutes later.