Thursday, June 9, 2011 @ 11:45 PM in 2011 London
Today was our first full day tour. We had to get up at 7 this morning to get ready and eat before we got picked up at 7:55 in the lobby. We got on the bus and ended up driving around our area for another hour before they finally took us to the station where we'd get on the real bus to take the tour. We also learned that we needed to pre-print our boarding passes, they didn't just accept our name and confirmation number. So we had to go to the ticket booth and get them to print our passes before we could get on our actual tour bus.
Once we got on the bus, we headed out for Windsor which is just west of London. Windsor is where the Queen lives and her family has lived for many many years. It's the oldest inhabited castle in the world. The initial rush was a little crazy, as we got a late start due to some people not being on time. We had to run to get into line before the entrance filled up too much. We walked through some of the castle (all that was allowed to the public), went through some of the other buildings on site and saw some of the changing of the guard. We had about 2 hours to spend there and got to see pretty much everything inside the castle walls. There was still a lot outside the castle to see, but we weren't able to. It seemed like it was mostly just a lot of shopping and tourist places.
After Windsor we went to Bath. It took about 2 hours to get there from Windsor, so we had some time to see the english countryside. This is the site where the oldest roman bath house is in Europe. We had about an hour and a half to spend here, so we did the tour of the bath house then walked around the city of Bath a bit. Bath is a beautiful area and you could easily spend an entire day walking around and relaxing. There were several old roman bridges and awesome scenery everywhere. While in Bath we also ran to an O2 store so Eric could fill up his cell phone data plan so he could use it again.
We made it back to the bus and headed out toward Stonehenge. While on our way it started to rain pretty hard. By the time we got to Stonehenge it was still raining. We got out and ran up to it and did a lap around taking photos. After the first lap around it started to let up and finally the rain stopped. We were able to enjoy it rain-free for a little while before heading back to the bus. In all, we had about 45 minutes there which is more than enough to see Stonehenge. The ride back to London was about an hour and a half.
For dinner, we went back to Covent Garden and ended up eating at Pizza Hut because it was quick and easy and we were both craving some pizza. It ended up tasting nothing like what I remember of Pizza Hut in the past and we had a beer with dinner. After that, we went to the grocery store by our hotel and got some snacks and Wagners hard apple cider.
Teaser photos:
Posted from: England