Day 3 - Gatwick to Bath 31/05/05
We ventured into London central, to Lloyds Bank, parking not far from Battersea dogs home to avoid the traffic congestion and tubed the rest of the way. Interesting trivia #1 - there is no price fixing of petrol prices in Britain, so you can shop around. The average diesel price was 89.9p a litre, but in shady Brixton we bought diesel for 83.9p a litre. Interesting trivia #2 - always remove the motorhome power cord before driving away in the morning; boy do you feel stupid otherwise!
Six trains, no sign of a Battersea dog and a £2 pizza later we were on our way to England’s most overrated tourist attraction - Stonehenge. As a nearby tourist said "Stonehenge is just another way of extracting large amounts of money out of American tourists".
Unfortunately two kiwi tourists paid the equivalent of NZ$30 to see a pile of rocks. For those who are a little wiser you can stand at the fence and see the same thing, because there is a rope keeping the tourists at a distance from the stones. The ropes aren’t so obvious in the photo below because Roger removed them, they were in his way. I’m not sure if the surrounding people were amused at Roger’s defiance of the rules or laughing at the old guy taking his teddies on holiday.
Stonehenge is going to get worst as they are planning to move the carpark two miles away (no kilometres in England, they are behind the times) and they will stop public access by road thereby forcing you to pay them parking and bus transfer fees.
We were a little bit smarter at Salisbury Cathedral and lived up to the expression “as mean as a Pom on holiday” by walking straight past the suggested £4.50 entry sign. Even if we had paid it would have been money well spent to see the stained glass windows, magna carta (1st English law), monks making coloured sand pictures and of course the cathedral itself.
The Roman baths were closed when we got there and my effort to peer over the stone walls cost me a finger nail, but I did get to look at gangrenous water and amused a wino. We wondered around the township and had tea. Unfortunately the Roman restaurants were destroyed by the English in AD43; we settled for Lebanese kebabs which we ate by the Bath Canal with the colourful long-boats that we enjoyed seeing right throughout England
In our best endeavours to avoid the school holidays we hadn’t. Apparently a lot of schools take the whole week off if there is a one day bank holiday. We were lucky to get a spot in the campsite, but unlucky to get the hoards of lectures from the campsite owners about what we must see. And unlucky Joe’s computer broke down in the middle of the night.
