United Kingdom and Scandinavia 2018: Stonehenge to London

Time to play a Little blog catch-up on my new IPad Pro while sitting on a plane between London and Norway.

Salisbury was a lovely couple of days and nights. We found a great little thatched roof Airbnb just out of the city at Alderbury and used this as our base to explore the surrounds. The city of Salisbury is recovering from the Russian spy incident that hospitalised three people and killed one poor innocent person that happened to pick up a perfume bottle and spray the contents resulting in a rather hideous death and a note to self not to pick up any items lying in the streets. The area where the initial poison attack took place is still cordoned off with security guards and the restaurant concerned closed until next year.

We purchased some prints for the walls at home in the market, wandered through Salisbury Cathedral, checked out the Magna Carta and had a couple of pints before heading back to our lodgings. Dinner that night was at the local pub, The Green Dragon with a BBQ and band. Only a handful of patrons and us so we got chatting with the band and were adopted at their table for the evening. It was a great night with the Brown Dog Band and their rather impressive blues and roots music. Impressive given they never practice together but obviously very talented guitar and vocals. Chief groupie and part time singer Terri entertained us with her Irish humour and if you closed your eyes for a minute you could have been on the set of Mrs Browns Boys.

Stonehenge was everything we remembered and luckily we had pre-purchased tickets and arrived when it opened so were on the second shuttle bus out and in a prime position to get photos without 3000 tourists in the background. We spent 3 hours wandering around and brushing up on our history lessons before heading back to town for some more meandering. Once back at our room we found a note from our lovely French host Catherine that she was up at the Green Dragon for the medieval afternoon which consisted of a bbq and sword fighting display. It was a lot of fun and nice to catch up with some local people. The travelling sideshow was well done with the guys dressing up in full suits of armour and having a reasonable crack at fighting each other. My video looks pretty good including the occasional truck that drives by to enhance the medieval feel.

London

We merely drove to Brighton where we were to hand back the car and given that parking was pretty difficult we skipped the festivities, dropped of the car and headed to the train station to meet up with Mike and Eilis in Twickenham. I taught with Mike’s first wife Julie in 1990 and he has kept in touch since including a couple of trips to Tasmania. They kindly offered to put us up for the week and therefore give us a base, a washing machine, access to some home cooking and fair to say a few beers and wines.

It was a great week and a 30 minute train ride into London so we were able to do our sightseeing with relative ease including the hop-on, hop-off bus, the London Eye, a ferry ride up the Thames, a visit to Hyde Park, Kew Gardens and Selfridges (managed to get out without opening the wallet), checked out Buckingham Palace, customary photos of Big Ben - albeit shrouded in scaffolding and shade cloth. Kew gardens was beautiful, the different plant houses were spectacular both in size, structure and plant displays and the bee hive stucture would have been very much at home at MONA. I reckon one of the highlights was the Tower of London where 4 hours just wasn’t enough....

Other highlight included catching up with two friends from 28 years ago Martin Allen and Mark Burke. The first session with Martin and a mate of his was supposed to be beers and a curry but somewhere the curry was lost and we just stayed in the pub until closing and then a rather long tube/train trip home (made even longer by the fact I was busting for a wee!) I think we fell in the door about 1am but had a good laugh during the evening. Second lunch with Mark and Martin was a bit more civilised and I suspect it too could have been a big one if we didn’t have to go out for Dinner with Mike and Eilis. It was our farewell meal with them and our treat as Mike had picked up the bill a few nights earlier at City Social in Tower 42 ( see photos in previous post). That particular bill was £540 pounds ($1000.00) so I guess I got of lightly with the £215 pub meal......

We spent a night down on the coast at Lymington with their friends, weather was pretty ordinary but the company was great and the drive down took us through the New Forest National Park, - underwhelming except for the Donkeys, Sheep, Cows and horses that are very happy to go about their business on the side of the road and occasionally blocking the traffic due to the fact they have right of way .

We decided against Westminster Cathedral due to the ridiculous queues and were too late in the day to go into St Paul’s but maybe would’ve baulked at the over charging £18 per person! We did however get photos of Platform 9 3/4 (along with a visit to the Harry Potter Shop) which may impress some little people.