Adventures Abroad: Week 3, All Around England

In case you didn’t read my first post about traveling abroad….to celebrate my 7 year anniversary of traveling to Europe I am sharing emails I wrote to friends and family which chronicles my 6 weeks in London and various weekend visits. Week 2 was a weekend in Paris…

My 3rd weekend, June 13-15, 2008, I kept very busy and did a lot of things around England and in London.

Friday the 13th, CAPA planned a day trip to Stonehenge and Bath, and when people say Stonehenge is just a bunch of rocks in the middle of nowhere, they are dead serious… there is nothing around these rocks…. but sheep.  I did end up getting some really nice pictures because the weather was cooperating, at least in the morning. As a group we were there for about an hour, and that was all we needed since walking around the rocks doesn’t take long, so most of the time was spent in the gift shop… Stonehenge Rocks!

Our next stop was Bath, about an hour away, which I really liked because it was in the country more. It was this cute little town with lots of little shops and small lanes so there was not a lot of traffic, making it very quiet.  Bath is known to be a town that you go to for a “Holiday” and it suits just that because its quiet and nice and very leisurely. I did have someone to hang out with that day though, Danielle. We started off in a big group of about 10 people and we were trying to find some place to eat lunch, but no one knew where they were going. This indecisiveness was bothering me, so I turned to the girl next to me and said, “Hey do you want to go find some place to go eat, because everyone else doesn’t seem to know where they are going and I don’t want to wander around aimlessly” . She said “Yeah I wanted to go to Cafe Retro”, which was a little lunch place that we were recommended to go to. I said interested in going there too. So off we went off to find it. We looked around for where it said it was on the map that we were given but it wasn’t there. So we ate at a little sandwich baguette place instead. During our little lunch we discovered that we both wanted to see places in London and could never find anyone to go with, so I suggested we should start going together.

Just the night before I finally got fed up with just sitting in my room after work and thinking that I should go out and do something, but I’d never end up going because by the time I make dinner it’s too late to go out because most places are closed. So I made a list of all the places I wanted to see before I left and was going to start assigning days I was going to go. I told Danielle that I wanted to go to a bunch of different places tomorrow and asked if she wanted to come along, and she said yes. We figured out a time we were going to met and I was excited that I had found someone to do stuff with, at least for Saturday. After lunch, we had time to kill before we had a walking tour, so we walked around town for a bit, and lo and behold about one block from where we had given up looking was Cafe Retro, but I blamed the map because it said it was on one corner and it wasn’t there!

Then we had the walking tour of Bath,