Focus. Determination. Single-mindedness. Dedication bordering on obsession. Such is the drive of Meredith’s touristic need for completeness. It also seems to help if your largely unknown people group want to move slabs of rock miles and miles.

Today we started by driving over to Stonehenge. “But,” I hear you dedicated blog readers say, “you were there about three years ago in 2019.” Right you are, and points for good memory. You need to realize that when we were there in March of 2019, we had taken a bus to get to the stones, and we only had two hours to see things there. Clearly, that piddly amount of time wasn’t enough to see everything, so back we went. Where we spent four hours seeing everything.

We started with the monument itself. It was a perfect day, with puffy clouds in a blue sky. We were there before 10:00, so the bus tours hadn’t really arrived yet, so the site was uncrowded; we often had space on the walking area to ourselves. We wandered around the outside of the stones (the interior has been off limits since 2013 except for special tours), taking our time and several pictures. We chatted with a recent university graduate who was a docent, and in all we took about an hour there. We decided to walk back to the visitor center, which is about a thirty-minute stroll. The walking path takes you next to three burial mounds out of many that are in the area and along gently rolling farm fields.

Back at the visitor center, we took in the museum there. The docents there were very nerdy and friendly. One docent took the time to explain the evolution of the stone circle over time while we watched it happen in a simulation. Another guide told us about the skeleton of a man that had been unearthed in the area. He had remarkably good teeth, even to untrained eyes such as mine. It seems teeth were generally good before sugar and stone-ground grain (the stone would pulverize into the grain and grind teeth away).

There was a wall with quotations from famous people about Stonehenge, including the smile-worthy one from the fictional Nigel from Spinal Tap. There was a special exhibit of photos people had sent in from their visits to Stonehenge, dating back to the early 1900s. There were several reconstructed huts that are a best guess of how the workers would have lived based on archeological evidence. I also learned that the monument took hundreds of years to get to the final form as different generations added to or even changed the circle.

We ate lunch in the cafeteria there, and a woman asked me if I would watch her very sweet golden retriever while she ran to the bathroom. I’ve never been a man that women hit on, but it seems I have graduated to “nice sweet man” stage, or at least “mostly harmless.” She bought me a bag of potato chips as a thank you.

Back in the car and on to Avebury. I had no idea what Avebury was, but it turns out to be the world’s largest stone circle (or “henge,” used as a technical term since the 1980s). The twenty-five-foot ditch around the circle is about a mile around, and the stones are at least as old as Stonehenge, dating from 4600 years ago. We walked the whole way around, sharing the stones with some sheep, and we got to see ten or so gliders flying overhead in the pretty sky. It was very peaceful.

Avebury has more than just the stone circle, though. There was a procession way marked by pairs of huge boulders that ran about a mile out to a smaller circle that is no longer around. But there are markers in the ground to show where stones and wooden pillars would have been based on excavations held there in the 1960s. We stopped there briefly after driving out to it. We then continued on the all-things-Avebury tour by driving over to see Silbury Hill, which is the largest prehistoric mound in Europe at about a hundred feet tall. No one has any idea why people would take an estimated sixty years to build a giant hill surrounded by a moat, but there it is. Sadly, to conserve the mound, you can’t walk up it.

You can walk up to and into the restored Kennet Long Barrow, which is a burial mound. There are five small chambers inside that used to hold remains. It is also on a high point, offering good views of Silbury Hill.

We drove to see one last sight in the area, which has nothing to do with Avebury and prehistoric people. Mer wanted to see a white chalk horse on a hillside, which is a seventeenth-century fad that copied ancient chalk carvings. You would remove the turf and expose the chalk underneath. The current one near Avebury is actually a restoration of the seventeenth-century one, since the original was buried under turf in World War2 so that it wouldn’t be a landmark for German bombers.

We drove out to the horse, looking for a pull-off in which to park. Zoom. We drive by. We turn around. Zoom. We drive by, but Mer sees a sign. We turn around. Zoom. We drive by deliberately so that I can turn around to get to the sign Mer saw. Which was across the street from a pull-off which turned out to be a bus stop. Zoom. We drive on by. We turn around. We finally park at a pull-off and walk back to the can’t-be-seen-from-the-other-way sign. That was at the head of a path of an uphill walk that took us above the horse and near a monument to an area lord’s family. The horse was made up of chalk rocks, and was curved along the landscape. It looked flat when seen from below, so that was pretty clever. We admired the view from the hill and went back to the car.

Mer got us to a pub to eat, but because the pub folks were short-handed, they were only serving people who had made reservations. So we programmed the GPS to take us back home to Salisbury, a route which now led us down a bunch of narrow roads. On one of these roads, I saw a sign for the “Barge Inn” which demanded we check it out, based on the name alone. It did lead us down a truly one-lane road, and I told Mer to note for the record that this was a bad idea. Except it wasn’t. The road opened up to a large campground and inn situated on a working canal. We got out of the car just as a boat went by. Supper was cheap, plentiful, and very good, so that was a happy find.

We got back to our room and made a quick excursion for couple of candy bars. Because even single-minded touring needs energy.