Day 4 - Sep 4, 2009 Last updated: 10/6/09 8:00pm PT
Day four, Stonehenge and Windsor Castle.
We drove a car today. The only day of the trip where we rented a car. It seemed like a good idea because we wanted more control over where and when we went vs. a tour bus. We rented a car from Heathrow Airport. Since I would be dealing with driving on the wrong side of the road, and sitting on the wrong side of the car, I thought that getting the car at the airport would allow for the least amount of side street driving, as the airport is right off the main highway. I basically just wanted to point the car in the right direction and not have to think too much. Well, I missed the entrance to the highway, so I did a little more side street driving than planned. After the error was rectified, we drove for a long time. It was supposed to be an hour and fifteen minutes, but it was over two hours because there was a massive traffic jam near Stonehenge.
On the way back from Stonehenge, we stopped at Windsor Castle. My Nokia N810’s GPS unit is worthless. It couldn’t get a fix on the satellites until it was too late (after we found the place). Since we had gone to Stonehenge first, we ended up coming in to the town of Windsor the back way, so there weren’t too many signs.
Here’s a picture as we arrived at Stonehenge. The stones of Stonehenge are large, but the overall circle is much smaller than it appears on TV. In this picture, in the distance, Stonehenge is above, behind and to the right of the white road sign that points right. The things that are sticking up to the left of the white sign are people.
It was very windy.
We took a lot of pictures like this, me holding the camera out with my right hand and hoping that it was pointed in the right direction, to capture us and whatever it was we were standing in front of. I tried holding it in the other hand once, but that just didn’t work too well. I’m not a lefty. Most of the pictures came out ok on the first take. (in the age before cell phone selfies)
Denise took this picture out the back window of the car as we were leaving. You can see the traffic jam was still in progress.
Windsor Castle, in Windsor, is one of the main residences of the Queen. It is the largest inhabited castle in the world. William the Conqueror built the original castle on this sight in 1070.
The town of Windsor
Me steering on the wrong side of the car. It wasn’t that difficult to drive because there were always other cars around to give you clues about which lane to be in. On the highway, I tended to drift left, wanting to put my body closer to the line on the left. Backing up was a challenge. Gas cost £1.08/liter which worked out to be about $6.70/gallon with the rate of currency conversion about 1 GBP to 1.63 USD.
Dinner was at Master’s Super Fish again. It was that good, we went twice. During our stay we ate fish and chips, meat pie, shepherd’s pie, sausage rolls, and pasties.
London was great. Very easy to get around. The Tube trains are always there, never had to wait more than a minute for a train – that’s not an exaggeration. It was also very clean. There were no trash cans in the Tube and not a spec of garbage could be found. Chicago’s subway has lots of trash cans and people still threw stuff on the tracks. (At least they did 20 years ago). We explored 5 parts of central London and it was clean as well.