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OK, OK, a lot of the things I was interested in seeing while I was staying in Surrey were – NOT in Surrey!  But really?  I come all this way – and I can’t get in the car and travel on the wrong side of the road for an hour and a half to see Stonehenge?  I think it can be done!  There really shouldn’t be any of those one-way little roads with the hedges and trees soooo very close to the edge of the road.  I hope!

It seems strange that tourist attractions here want you to buy tickets in ADVANCE, and they are willing to give you a discount to do so.  But then – they want you to book the exact time you will magically appear for your tour.  So heaven help you if there was a traffic delay, especially if you are driving a long way! 

For most people living in the UK, it sounds like having to travel a couple of hours to go somewhere is considered really far.  For us Canadians – maybe not so much (unless it involves a drive that also happens to involve making your way through Toronto rush hour traffic, and then YES IT IS TOO FAR!)  And yes, Canadians report distance in time, not in km.  (ps a note – our friends were able to help us change the setting on the rental car to actually show the speedometer in miles, not kilometres, yay!  And the car still had the magic little red line showing on the speedometer which indicated the speed limit.  Pretty cool trick!)

We booked tickets for Monday at 11am, cautiously optimistic that traffic will have cleared by the time we start our drive at about 9:30am.

 

Our friends here told us the weather would be just rubbish for February, and maybe we might have a wee bit of sun.  Our first two days here were sunny, and we have had quite a lot of overcast days that were dry, and the whole of next week is calling for – yup, more sun!  So maybe our friends lie.  Hahahahaha!  (They’ve been saying we are just really lucky, but really?  Lol)

We bought advance tickets to Stonehenge – and were able to take advantage of our pet parent’s membership to National Trust, which meant one of our admissions was free.  We booked for 11am, so we didn’t have to be on the motorways at peak traffic time.  Great!  The driving instructions were pretty clear, and we were actually pulling into the Car Park right on time!

BUT THEN – they don’t have parking attendants – they have an app.  So we are standing outside in the wind, trying to download the app, open the app, put all our car info in, put all our payment information in, while our fingers start to go numb.  It was supposed to be 4 degrees!  Anyway, we finally get that sorted, and headed over to the entrance building, to find now we had to stand in a huge queue! 

We thought by getting advance tickets, we would be able to skip the lineup.  Nope.  So there we stood, and waited and waited.  Then we spoke to the people in the line in front of us, to find out they were visiting from Argentina, where it is summer!  (temperatures there are 30 degrees Celcius or warmer!)  They were feeling the cold much more than we were.

When we got to the front we presented our QR codes for admission – a half an hour late – just to find out I had bought the tickets for TOMORROW!!!  OMG.  Thank goodness then she said No problem, I can fix that for you!  Whew!  I think their online booking calendar must have started their week on Monday instead of Sunday, and I booked this at the same time as I had booked Hampton Court tickets, and I didn’t even notice.  The devil is in the details!

But at least we got to go in.  They have a lovely exhibit inside, explaining the history and timeline.

And then we have the option of walking to the monument (30 minutes), or taking their free shuttle – 3 minutes. 

Hmmm, decisions decisions… walk alongside a sheep’s pasture for a very long while, facing into a biting cold wind, with our extremities getting frostbite, or taking the free heated bus?  We grabbed the shuttle.  The shuttle driver let us know there was a QR code on our admission bracelets to download the audio tour.  Pretty cool trick.   It let us know which way to go, and where to stop to play each component of the tour.  Things that surprised us – those little mounds out in the fields surrounding Stonehenge are burial mounds.  And they keep sheep!  They are tending the pastures all around to keep the area as a grassland, as it originally was.

 

There were a bunch of these little round things here and there in the grass.  They were actually markers for cremation remains!  Some very important people were able to have their remains buried at stonehenge.  One of these little spots was excavated adn there were hundreds of people's cremains located inside it!  (Such interesting information in the audio download.  And watch where you step - some of these circles are right in the walkway!)

The downside to using the app on our phones was that we had to keep taking our gloves off to tap the selection buttons, and of course to take a lot of photos.  So pretty soon my fingers were painfully cold…  and I started fantasizing about steaming mugs of hot chocolate.  They had a lovely café there, of course, right after the tour shuttle dumped you out at the door for the gift shop!  (We won’t talk about the interesting things that we found in that gift shop that may or may not have happened to follow us home, nor will we talk about what they cost us.  Nope, not going there…)  We headed in the direction of the cafe, and got those hot cups of hot chocolate, plus a meat Cornish Pasty, and a sausage roll.  So, those 4 items came to 17 pounds 55.  Do you know what that translates to?  Just over $31 Canadian!  Bahahahaha!  At least now we can say we have tried a Cornish Pasty.

  (ps it was awfully heavy on the onion – if I was making a handheld meat pie, I think I would try to balance it with more meat, and different root vegetables with a milder flavour.  That will be something I will have to experiment in the kitchen with!)

 

The drive home to the cottage was mostly uneventful - just one missed turn!  But we did have to mention the very interesting roadsigns...