More of England

3 July 2012

Leaving Bristol the next morning, we made our way to Stone Henge. No one really knows what the rock formation there was used for, but according to my handy audio guide, it could have worked as a solar calendar. My question is why on earth would someone living anywhere in the British Isles go to the effort of making a solar calendar? It ALWAYS rains! You’re not going to be able to see the sun anyway.

The amazing thing about Stone Henge is that the rocks there are not native to England. People must have transported them there from somewhere else. Again, I’m not sure why they went through the trouble, but that’s still cool.

Since not a lot is known about the site, I wasn’t overcome with excitement or anything. But now I can say that I’ve been there, which is pretty awesome!

Chawton came next. This is another town where Jane Austen lived. Her house there has been turned into a museum, so we all went inside to take a look. The coolest part about the house (I think) is the piano. It wasn’t Jane Austen’s piano, but it’s from the same time period. And they let us play it! So I got to play a piano from 19^th century! That was really cool. It was weird though because the keys were more shallow than today’s pianos, and they played really quietly. So it took some getting used to, but it was awesome.

The rest of the house was cool too, but almost none of the stuff inside actually belonged to Jane Austen. They were all replicas of types of things that the Austen family might have used. It all felt pretty distant. But the piano was still cool. :)

After Chawton, we got on the coach to go to Datchet. It was also the birthday of one of our directors, and one of the girls in my group had written a rap for him. So on our way to Datchet, we all performed this rap for him. It was pretty awesome! I tried to record it, but it didn’t turn out too well because of where I was standing. Sad day.

Once we were in Datchet, a bunch of us decided to go out for pizza. That was a lot of fun. We even got water that was “bottled at the source is Tuscany.” That’s what the label on the bottle said.

Later that night, Palmer and I were hanging out in our room. Palmer looked out the window and realized that we could climb out of the window onto a rooftop. It didn’t take long for us to decide what to do. Pretty soon, we were standing outside on the roof. I wish I could say that it was an incredible view, but it was just regular buildings. We went out again the next morning while we drank our Cadbury hot chocolate, and this is what it looked like:

Me and Palmer drinking our hot chocolate! :)

But even without an amazing view, it was still fun!