Sometimes on these city trips, we stretch the city out. In this case, we stretched it by a ninety-plus-minute bus ride to go see some rocks. It’s amazing what people will pay to see.

All of us got up early and were on a bus, heading west at 8:30 am, going to see Stonehenge. A not-insignificant part of the trip was in just getting out of London to the highway. London is huge. The countryside out to the stones is very pretty in a non-dramatic way, with lots of fields and pastures. The bus drove right by the monument, so my first sight of the place was through a bus window. I had not realized how big the stones were. We zoomed on by, to the visitor center, getting off the bus about 10:30 with strict orders to be back by 12:30. The stone circle is a little over a mile from the parking lot, and there is a shuttlebus, but Mer and Brianna and I decided to walk on such a beautiful morning. In the interest of time, we did take the bus back, but the walk out was soothing. Shelby and Neuf took the bus out, so they were there for some time before we showed up.

I had not realized that the area around Stonehenge is full of burial mounds – hundreds of them within just a few miles of the stones. The stones were added roughly five thousand years ago to an area that seems to have been important from before that time (there are some mile-long dug trenches still visible that predate the stones being erected). Stonehenge is also the only existing stone circle that has stones on top, called lintels. Many of the stones are over ten tons, and they were all hauled from at least several miles away, with some seeming to have come all the way from Wales. A lot of people put a lot of effort into the construction, and no one really knows why. The stones do line up with the sun on the winter and summer solstices, but we do not know if that was the main function, as a sort of calendar.

Anyway, it is very impressive and worth seeing, even with a nearly four-hour drive round trip. You can’t get into the stone circle, but you do get to walk all the way around it, and you can get quite close on one side. There were a ton of people around, but the site is so large that you can get alone pretty easily. In fact, if we had been there with a car, I could have easily spent another three hours wandering around the burial mounds and checking out all of the visitor center. As it was, two hours pretty much covered the walk out to the monument, the actual visit, and the shuttle back to the tour bus. We got there with about five minutes to spare.

When we got back to London, Mer wanted to get a quick bite to eat an an Italian restaurant and then head over to the Docklands area of London to do a walking tour out of her guide book. Brianna, Neuf, and Shelby decided to go see a small museum and poke around some shops in that area instead. That worked for us – the Docklands is not high on the list of what to see in London for most people, but we stayed out there back in 2009 when we first visited London as a couple, and we wanted to go check it out again, and more thoroughly.

The Docklands used to be the world’s busiest port, but it got bombed out in World War Two, and then never recovered as the shipping industry went to container ships which could not come this far up the Thames. The area became one of the poorest in all of London, and was largely abandoned until the 1980s, when developers figured out it was cheap land. Now it is all gleaming glass and steel and parks and fountains, and is home to most of the high-tech office workers and banks in London. It has a very “city of the future” feel to it, which we had remembered from our 2009 stay.

What was new to us on this trip was getting into the small but well-planned parks. The designers put the shopping areas underground, and then put parks on top of them with fountains, flowers, and green spaces. They are great parks – small, but inviting. It must be working – we saw real estate advertised, and a 517-square-foot one-bedroom apartment was listed for the equivalent of about $600,000. I have no idea who lives in these places. Not teachers.

We enjoyed our walk around, and then took a fast boat back up the Thames to the Embankment dock. As such, we got to sail past all of the Docklands and see the new apartments on the river, and then go under Tower Bridge and past the Tower of London. We zipped past St. Paul’s, and all the way back to near our home for the week, where we stopped in and got reorganized before heading to Chinatown for supper and then ice cream for dessert.

I don’t usually try to eavesdrop, but the Chinese place had communal tables, and the man and woman next to me were talking though the whole meal. The man got to telling the woman many of the major stories of the Jewish Scriptures (Old Testament), and he did an excellent job. I have no idea why he was so familiar with them, and I did not know how to ask, since we had not spoken to each other during supper. Then, in the ice cream store, two men came in, and one was talking in a British accent about the New England Patriots and one of their players. It was a little surreal.

It was a fine evening, so Mer and I walked back home, getting slightly lost several times, which resulted in wandering into different parts of Chinatown three different times. All part of the fun. We made it back home eventually. The others are not home yet, so I do not know how their afternoon and evening went. More eventfully than ours, it seems. I’ll update when I know more.

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The others rolled in about 10:00 pm last night, and had a great time exploring most of London, it seems, although they had a few slight frustrations. They started their time together by visiting the Sir John Soane Museum, which is the home and collection of a major architect from the late 1700’s and and early 1800’s.  It turns out it is closed on Tuesdays. They visited a Victorian custom umbrella shop nearby, and they rode London’s double-decker buses several times.They got in a visit to Herod’s, which they said was high-end and a really quirky building. They went to Hyde Park to see the Peter Pan statue (under restoration and fenced off) and the Princess Di memorial fountain (empty of water).  After the sunset, somehow they got on the back side of Kensington Palace and had great views through the lit windows into the rooms and ended up in an area where people were swiping cards to get out of the grounds; they were allowed out. They finally looked for two different London restaurants, which were closed (one was new and not open at all yet), and so finally out of fatigue and hunger ate at the nearby Pizza Hut and then came home. They had a busy afternoon – we left each other only at 2:30. We clearly need another week here so they can see all of London, because I think they would.