Bath, Stonehenge, Windsor, Oxford

Saturday

So I've been all around England in the past two days! Well not really... we've been on two day trips, both were about an hour drive. We left London yesterday and the early time of 8am to head over to Stonehenge. If you are not familiar with Stonehenge it's these guys:

Recognize it now? Thought so. Although you use to be able to go up to the stones and get a better perspective of them, that's not the case anymore. We had to stay about 40 yards back on a sidewalk. The history is pretty neat, basically the stones date back to around 2500 BC and there are several theories as to how the structure was formed seeing as they did not have cranes and bobcats back in those days. Weird huh? My personal favorite theory was the one about aliens lending a helping hand. This is just ridiculous.... aliens would have no interest in helping us build a stone formation. ;) It was really cool to see but I personally enjoyed our trip to Bath.

Bath is in the southwest part of London. The Romans built several "baths" and a temple around natural hot springs.. apparently the only ones in the UK. You could literally see the steam coming off of the the baths.. I would call them pools. We took a tour through the temples, unfortunately they would not let you swim in the baths. Although at the end you could pay 1 pound to drink a cup of water from the baths.. we did not find this to be necessary. After the temples we roamed around the town. They had several shops ranging from souvenir shops to H&M. The town has two universities and apparently really good nightlife.




To the right here is Jane Austen's door! She lived in Bath several years of her life and many of her writing influences came from the town. We rightfully watched Pride and Prejudice on the way home.








Sunday


Today we went to Windsor castle and Oxford. Windsor castle was BEAUTIFUL! While we waited in line for our tour we watched the royal wedding on a TV. It is actually the oldest and largest occupied castle in the world. The Queen stays there every weekend in the Round Tower...

After Windsor we made our way to Oxford. The town had a lot of history (like everything in England) and is home to Oxford University! Lots of smarties :) Our tour guide gave us a brief walking tour and then we ventured around the town on our own. My friends and I went into Christ Church College which is rumored to be the influence in naming Christchurch, New Zealand.

Here's a picture of Rebecca, Alison, and me in Oxford.

Cheers for now!