5.25.09 –A good tailwind must been moving us along last night. We land almost an hour early at just a little after 6:00 a.m. Passport control takes about twenty minutes. We grab our bags, walk through the Nothing To Declare door at Customs, and check in at the Hertz car rental counter. We get on the Hertz shuttle bus at stop 18 and ride to the rental car lot. We are about to start what may be the biggest adventure of the whole trip: driving for the first time on the left hand side of the road.
I pay close attention to the shuttle bus driver and traffic in general. In my mind, I’m telling myself “Think left, left, left, left, left . . .” We arrive at space 148 to greet our car, an Audi A4. I instinctively walk to the left side, then catch myself and walk to the right side. After several minutes of getting to know the car and our new GPS, we’re off.
Getting out of the airport is a bit of a trick. We are trusting the GPS so I can concentrate on the car. We then come to the dreaded roundabouts. We’ve had bad experiences with these and a GPS before. It takes a few u-turns, but we finally get out of there.
It’s a little bit of a white knuckle experience driving to Windsor, our first stop. I’m concentrating so hard, my hands start to cramp. It doesn’t take too long get in the mode of driving in the left lane and making the correct kinds of turns. The real trick is keeping the car centered in the lane. Sitting on the right side of the car, it’s just hard to gauge.
It isn’t long before we arrive in Windsor. We figure out the parking situation (it doesn’t take credit cards and I have to hike to find change for the machine) and walk toward Windsor Castle. After all of this, it’s still only 9:00 a.m. Windsor Castle doesn’t open until 9:45 a.m. It is time for breakfast anyway, so each of us dine on a great BLT at the Cinnamon Café down the street from the castle.
The town of Windsor with the castle on the hilltop:
It’s finally almost time for the castle to open. It draws quite a crowd as you can see:
The tour is very interesting and impressive. The Queen spends many weekends here, and in fact is here when we arrive. The flag only flies over the Round Tower when the Queen is in residence:
We don’t see her, but do see one of her dogs and dog handlers making their way into the castle. *Update 6.27.10 - After watching a series on Windsor Castle, we recognized this person as Annette Wilkins, the Queen's housekeeper. She oversees all of the housekeeping of Windsor Castle.
There are some amazing rooms here as you would imagine. St. George’s Chapel (below) would be worth a tour all by itself. Besides its great beauty and detail, it holds the remains of many royals, including Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.
In the Drawings exhibit, we see some of the 600(!) Leonardo DaVinci drawings owned by the royal family. The State Apartments are what you’d expect from the royal family – grand, spectacular, and on a scale to impress.
We also see the changing of the guard.
After four hours of sightseeing here, we head for Stonehenge. About thirty minutes into the trip west, the landscape begins to change, from flatlands to rolling green hillsides. It is beautiful.
It’s difficult not to be impressed by Stonehenge. I have seen it before and am still staggered to imagine that men moved these stones to this place, some estimated at 50 tons, stood them up, arranged and stacked them, beginning around 3,000 B.C. It’s an amazing feat in a beautiful place.
It’s time to head to Bath for the night, about an hour away. We get within ten miles and are stacked in a logjam of cars. Finally, we have to pull out of traffic, backtrack, and find another way there. The GPS is not much use. Whatever we do, it wants to point us to the way we were going. More than an hour later, we finally reach our stop.
Our stay tonight is at the Cranleigh Bed and Breakast in Bath. It is a beautiful Victorian house. Denise, one of the owners, has everything ready for us. By this point, Teresa is completely toast. She is asleep within five minutes of getting in the room. I work on some photos of the day a bit, then need some dinner. Denise here suggested a pub called The Weston, about ten minutes walk from here. I start walking there at 8:45 p.m.
I reach the pub, a cheery place, about 9:00 p.m. The kitchen just closed, but they’re kind enough to make me fish and chips with some mushy peas. The place is full. It’s Quiz Night here at the Weston, like it is every Monday night. It’s quite entertaining. Tables of people with sheets of paper write down answers to questions called out by a gentleman with a booming voice speaking with all the intensity of the House Sergeant-At-Arms announcing the President for the State of the Union address. The only available table is out of sight of all the action. The waitress comes over, moves my table to the center of the room, and makes sure I’m included with the group. She, like everyone else we have encountered, is exceedingly kind and good-natured.
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