Tour of Stonehenge, Salisbury and Bath

Not in that particular order but there were some very interesting stories here.

So, I woke up very early in the morning at my hostel located in the deep neck of the words in a London park and headed off to the victoria bus station. For those of you who have not been to the bus station, it is located near the victoria tube station but not at the railroad station so be sure to add around 15minutes to your travel time once you get to the victoria station. I unfortunately missed the bus that I had bought tickets for on the internet and had to buy another ticket at a later time the last time I miscalculated the time it takes to get to the bus station by 5 minutes.

However, this time I was there bright and early and definitely got to be on the bus for the tour company's tour to Stonehenge, Salisbury and Bath. This day turned out to be the multilanguage tour day where our guide also spoke in Japanese for the Japanese tourists who were also with us.

So we set off on a day with wonderful weather for Salisbury's cathedral first. Unfortunately when we got there the cathedral is apparently under major constructions so you couldn't see all the glory and people bought postcards of how it would look once construction finished. With so many tourists I assume that the constructions was probably very much needed.

Then we went on to the highlights of the day, the famed Stonehenge. Which, after seeing it, I have to say, is not all it is cracked up to be. Anyhow, that must have been one of those days in the lows of tourist season since I got to take ample pictures of the stones alone. When you're there at the Stonehenge, they hand everyone an audio tour. I will definitely have to say that I prefer the actual guide tour to the audio tour just for the fact that the audio tours are veyr much long winded and although it has more details and such. I suppose it could be that I'm a visual rather than an auditory learner.



So then we went onto Bath, the site of an excavated Roman bath which dates back to 40 AD I believe. The site had been a temple of the goddess sulis before the Romans decided to expand it into a nice bath. There was also the Bath cathedral that was right next to the Roman baths and the village square where we saw all sorts of street entertainers. The Roman bath complex was huge and again we were handed audio tour sets. Well, here's where the funny story starts. Apparently I had misheard the guide for our bus for when to get together and when I came out of the baths the people from my bus had left. However, before I even had time to panic, another nice looking guide told me that the guide had told him that I could ride back to London on their tour bus since they were from the same company. Thus, it was indeed fortunate that their bus was running two hours late and I was able to ride back to London in their bus, which didn't have the Japanese language explanation but our guide and bus driver did tell funny stories of how the rich and famous lived here in Bath. Especially interesting was of how one time our guide saw Princess Diana when she was getting her hair done. He always joke to people and say "Hey look, there's ___(insert famous people name) and that one time it was actually true, they waved to Princess Diana and she actually waved back. Well, anyhow, I thanked God that everything turned out fine.