Day 8: Stonehenge

Our driver for the day, David Easey, picked us up at 3:30 AM!!! to get us to our special access visit at Stonehenge. As I really don’t like crowds I arranged this visit last year since only 25 people get to go beyond the ropes each morning and night when the site is closed to the public. Last time we visited at sunset so I decided to do sunrise this trip. Much to our surprise the 4 of us were the only ones for the extra early visit with 25 arriving as we left for the next visit. Upon arrival the rain we had along the way stopped. The sky turned beautiful colors of red and blue as the sun come up. We walked in among the stones and were in awe of the huge stone formation. As we explored and took pictures the security guard was giving us information about the henge. He told us that on the summer solstice, June 21, there were 21,000 people there. As we wondered through the stones we all had an odd feeling we were not alone, you could just feel the energy of the place and knew that it was somewhere special to someone at sometime in history. As we were leaving another special access group was arriving which was mostly a female group from the Netherlands who were there for what appeared to be a religious ceremony.

We then drove to Avebury and had a look around at their huge, less elaborate stonehenge before driving back to London and stopping by a Portuguese patisserie for some Belem tarts and coffee. We then stopped by Abbey Road for a photo at the crossing.

About the time we got back to the hotel it started raining again, but that was ok. We were pretty tired and just relaxed the rest of the day away except for when we went for afternoon tea and dinner. We are to the point of “Do we have to eat again!!!???”

Avebury stone circle

Abbey Road

at Buckingham Palace