Make it count

Friday, July 4th

Abigail's Graduation Trip - Day #8

Happy 4th of July!! It's always a different feeling being out of the US for the 4th - makes you appreciate the red, white & blue.

Today we took a day tour from London to 3 destinations: Windsor Castle, Bath, and Stonehenge.
It's a nice change-up to take a day tour on occasion - allows you to sit back and enjoy the sites with little planning.

We started the day by taking the metro to the Victoria Station stop. Our departure time was 9am. We arrived a bit early - glad we did, as the Victoria Coach Station tool a few minutes to find. Our tour bus was nice and completely full. We had an older gentlemen as the tour guide.

Our first stop was Windsor Castle. Took us about 30 minutes to arrive at our destination. We had about 1.5 hours to tour the Castle. Interesting sites included Mary's Doll House, viewing the royal quarters for the Queen, the ornament state rooms, and the changing of the guard. It was really interesting to see the pageantry around the changing of the guard ceremony. It occurs at 11am each day -- taking about 15-20 minutes to complete. We were just able to get this in before heading back to the bus. One of the themes today was very quick timing while at the viewing destinations because of the lengthy drive time between each spot.

Next we headed to Bath, a city most commonly known in Shakespeare's writings as well as being the home of Jane Austen. We were there specifically to see the Roman Baths, a museum famous for holding the only hot spring in all of England. We took an audio guided tour here and moved at a pretty quick pace in order to get back on the bus to go to our next destination. Before we got on, we checked out the city of Bath, a really neat town full of shops, ice cream places, and cafes.

We hit the bus for another 1.5 hour ride, this time to a remote English countryside area home to the popular location, Stonehenge. We got off of our tour bus right onto another coach for a short shuttle to the famous rock formation. Another audio tour guided us through this attraction as well, and we took some cool pics as we circled around. This was a really cool experience - Stonehenge is a top site in the whole world and although it was windy and a little cold, we all enjoyed our time here. We hopped on the bus for a 2 hour ride back to our flat and finished the day with pizza and the Brazil/Columbia World Cup game. Another fantastic day in London.