Thursday, April 10, 2014

Dream Vacation - Day 27

Today was all about Stonehenge, Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in Wiltshire, England. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is the remains of a ring of standing stones set within earthworks. It is in the middle of the most dense complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including several hundred burial mounds.

This was one of the "must" see on my list of things to do while in England. Markus hadn't been since he was a young boy so this would be fun for the both of us. It's a two hour drive from Worchester and it's still funny to me that these guys over here (in England) think that it's a super long drive and for me that's nothing, I do that every other week to visit family. I tried to take a different route then what was taken yesterday when we went to Oxford as it's in the same general direction and I wanted to see something different. We took very few highways and instead did lots of two lane country roads. It was a nice drive.

You can actually see Stonehenge from the highway but of course it's forbidden to stop anywhere. When you get to the entrance of Stonehenge you're about a mile away and can't see it at all. We decided to check out Stonehenge monument first before doing the museum part. They have shuttle trams/buses that take you from the center to Stonehenge but Markus and I figured we'd walk, it was a nice day and it couldn't be that far. Yeah that was a mistake. Though the walk was very nice it took a long time to get there and we now understood why there were only a few people doing it, the majority would pass us on the tram/bus.

But we made it to Stonehenge and it was everything I had expected. It's strange standing there and looking at this thing that's been here for thousands of years. There is a path that goes all the way around Stonehenge, at one point you're about 30 feet away from it and the furthest point eight or nine hundred feet away. I took a ton of pictures from every side of Stonehenge. The weather was nice and the crowds weren't so bad.

Afterwards we headed over to a group of burial mounds (barrows) that are part of the area here. There are actually quite of few of these but these looked to be the largest. I walked to the top of one which kind of felt weird doing it but there was a well worn path leading up and over the mounds so everyone does it.

We then caught a tram back to the main center as I was not going to walk back. Once back, we went into the "museum" part of Stonehenge, I learned a lot about the history of Stonehenge and never realized there were different stages to building Stonehenge. We spent a good five hours at Stonehenge before we headed back to Worchester and called it a night.

You can check out more picture of Stonehenge HERE.

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