I've been wanting to go to Bath ever since I became an ardent fan of Jane Austen, and we were about to buy train tickets there when I realized that it would be less expensive to go on a coach tour to Bath with the added plus of a stop by Stonehenge along the way.
Stonehenge is in Wiltshire, about an hour and forty five minute drive away from London, and there's no way of reaching the site via public transport so the coach tour was the perfect way to visit one of the world's wonders. There's not much to do once you arrive except listen to the audio guide and wander around the rocks. Visitors are no longer allowed to frolic amongst the rocks and are kept a respectable distance away. My first impression of the place? I thought it'd be bigger. Don't get me wrong, the rocks were plenty big. I just thought they'd be... bigger.
In case you didn't know much about Stonehenge (like myself), it was built by prehistoric people around 2000 B.C., and they still haven't figured out why a bunch of folks decided to drag around 45 ton boulders hundreds of miles to stack them up in big piles. Calendar? Burial place? What's also amusing is that the Druids have kind of adopted the site as their own, but the truth is that they have absolutely nothing to do with Stonehenge. However, they're still permitted to have their summer solstice celebrations on the site.
Another thing I didn't know about Stonehenge is that it's surrounded by sheep. Angry sheep. One of them actually stood in front of J and I with its legs splayed wide apart and started baa-ing his head off at us. It was hilarious, and I may have been more amused by the sheep than the boulders behind me.
Then we all piled back on the bus for the hour long ride to Bath - Jane Austen, here I come!
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