July 14-16

Whoops, it's been a few days since I've updated.  I'm not so sure anyone is reading this anyway, but that's ok...

On Monday, we picked up the car.  Dad has been doing a good job of mostly driving correctly.  Better him than me...  We did almost hit a bicyclist, but that's because he inexplicably fell off his bike and fell into oncoming traffic.  That was really scary, but thankfully there was no one in the lane next to us when we swerved over...  Driving in London is a pain.  It seems like to get to any place on the other side of the city, one must drive through the city.  That process takes about 60-90 minutes alone. It's painful...

Driving over Tower Bridge

Anyway, getting the car took awhile, so our initial plans to go to Dover were scraped and we went to Hampton Court Palace, the home of Henry VIII and many others.  We didn't go inside due to time, but it has extensive gardens that were beautiful that we explored .  There was also a hedgerow maze, which was fun to go through.

On Tuesday, we again ventured through the city by car, this time to go to Windsor Castle and then to Stonehenge.  Both were very impressive.  I could have easily spent more time at Windsor exploring the castle and looking at all of its various treasures.  We even got to have our picture taken with a palace guard!!!

Stonehenge was also very impressive.  It is just sitting there in the middle of the fields.  Very cool.

This morning, we left London for good and drove north to York.  Thankfully, we didn't really have to go through London, so most of our trip was on the highway.  In York, we went to a Viking museum.  It was small but had a bunch of skeletons and artifacts from the Jorvik settlement that existed in that location.  York itself (at least the old city) seems like a neat little city, with a lot of older things that would be fun to explore.  Alas, we do not have the time.  Tomorrow we are off to the National Train Museum (dad's excited about that one) and then onto Edinburgh for the next several days.  Steve joins us tomorrow, as well.

Sheep seen from the window of my hotel room.  Baa!