Bath and Stonehenge

Today we went to Bath and Stonehenge. We started by walking to the London Bridge because the Tube (subway) doesn't open until 7:30. Our bus was meeting us at 7:30. Fortunately Jared and I went early to get some coffee/tea/breakfast from the McDonalds at the Waterloo Station an discovered this with enough time to make it. Barely...

So 13 of us walked quickly along the South Bank in the pouring rain for 30 minutes. Talk about fun... Anyway, we end up (by some miracle) finding where we need to go. So we get there and there's a bus from Anderson Tours, but it says it's going to the Isle of Wight. It's not our bus. 7:30 comes and goes, still no bus. At 7:35 the bus showed up and we were off. We were all soaking wet and cold, and what does the bus driver do? He has the cold air on. So we were freezing pretty much the whole way. Oh, and our bus driver was giving us a tour, so his obnoxiously loud voice was talking most of the way. About nothing useful.

We were originally supposed to go to Stonehenge then Bath, but because of a landslide, our route was blocked and it was easier to do it the other way around. So after 4 and a half hours on the bus we finally get to Bath (We did have one pit stop). When we got there, we had tickets to go on a tour through the Roman Baths. It was totally cool. They were hot springs that the Romans built baths with. The baths had been forgotten and all sorts of other cultures and peoples used the springs and built over the buried remains until in the last couple hundred years they discovered the baths. We got these strange audio tour devices that we could type in numbers posted at various parts of the building and learn about the different aspects. Unfortunately my camera died so I don't really have any pictures of the inside of the bath house.

So I guess Bath used to have a really bad smoke problem, because they would heat their houses/baths with coal. The soot literally stained the houses. But they have been cleaning up. Here's a little of the difference:

That black house isn't black- it's soot.

There was also an awesome Abby in Bath:

Then there was Stonehenge. We certainly didn't spend enough time there. But there were burrows (aka mounds where they buried dead people) and of course the henges of rocks. There's some cool cosmological and geological phenomina at the point of the stones, but in general no one really knows what they were for. If it was just calendar purposes, it seems kind of elaborate. Either way, they are specifically placed so the sun an moon have certain positions on certain days of the year and there are all sorts of cool things about the exact placement of the stones. Now for the pictures:

Mallory and Me:Carrie and Me:Greta and Me:
And this is what Stonehenge is supposed to look like, if it wasn't ruins: