We left at 8 in the morning. We were told to anticipate a long drive and not many opportunities for food. So I brought some banana bread. I was at the little convenience store that is roughly 200 feet from my room and they had several bunches of old bananas for free. I don’t know about you, but even when something seems old or useless, free is hard to leave behind. Naturally I grabbed 3 bunches. I bought flour and baking soda and vanilla and all the other stuff I needed to make the bread. Let me assure you that making banana bread with one ceramic bowl that also served as the actual baking vessel and no whisks, spoons, or measuring devices is no easy feat.
Anyway, the banana bread was a hit on the way to Avebury. The girls were heartily impressed. I have requests for future loaves already. To the trip though: Avebury and Stonehenge. Surely you have all heard of the latter, but I found the former to be far more interesting. Avebury is actually the largest stone circle in the world. It is over a mile in circumference with a series of concentric layers. The stones vary in size, and indeed many are missing. The guide kept going on about the mystical powers of the place, which was very interesting. The area, they have found, has very high amounts of magnetic energy. It is speculated that the ancients, some 5,000 years ago used the area to cure and help abate arthritis. The magnetism supposedly helps, so if it ails you, Avebury is very pretty and has a couple of pubs and a lovely church and village.
Sophia was ecstatic about the whole thing, after all, she wants to be an archaeologist. She wanted to see everything and walked faster than I have ever seen her walk. It is usually me that has to look back and wait, but the role reversal was fun and to me, funny. I was interested in stopping to see a pub and talk to some natives, she wanted to go see the churchyard. We split up for a while to satiate our different thirsts, mine of course quite a literal one. I even ordered a goat cheese dish with my ale, and fortunately the cheese was the saving grace of the Lionsgate Pub in Avesbury. The ale was way too hopped and bitter for its own good, and its head was more similar to bathwater foam than the creamy froth I have grown to know and love here. The cheese, battered and fried, was served with pineapple chutney, which really helped because the
cheese was quite fresh and ‘goaty.’ A good experience in Avebury, I would say.We all climbed aboard the charter bus to travel the 45 minutes to Salisbury, the home of the famous Stonehenge. From the first glimpse from the bus, I was surprised at how small it was. Don’t get me wrong, the stones were very big, and at closer inspection in fact huge. However, the size of the circles in which they were arranged was much smaller than I anticipated. The audio devices told of the various stages in the development and use of the henge, but getting close to the stones proved impossible. Ropes and a few guards kept us at least 20 feet from the stones
themselves. This still permitted quite a few good pictures, but I had no idea how popular the attraction was. Hundreds of people aside from the 50 students on my particular trip were there, slowly milling about the circumference of the ancient site. In typical fashion, there was a herd of sheep in the pasture directly across the site too. The tour around was fun, but short. We then walked to the barrows. They are huge mounds of earth with one person underneath it all. There is actually stone structure to each of them, they occasionally excavate one at a time. They find daggers, gold earrings, shields, clothing, and all sorts of ancient goods in the tombs. Pretty cool. It was fun to see kite flyers and kids running around, though they were somewhat loud and obnoxious for the “polite English” I was told to expect. Unruly little boys, it seems, are not limited to my house alone, despite my mother’s rants to the contrary from my youth. Ha. 
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