Whirlwind Trip of Great Britian - Part 1 - Up Through England

The first few days of our trip North saw us more than double the number of places we had seen together in our book "1000 Places To See Before You Die". As a couple, we have now seen five of the thousand.

3. Stonehenge. An hour or two of Pete getting used to driving in England saw us arrive at Stonehenge. The highways run right past the historic monument, so it wasn't too difficult for us to find. Royal Heritage, a organization that mainains a lot of England's historically important locations has set up fences around Stonehenge, so no one is allowed to actually touch any of the rocks. For a £5 fee, however, they would let you get within 100m of the structure. We opted to not pay, and unstead we stood 150m away and took pictures from the highway fence.

4. Stratford Upon Avon - The Birthplace of William Shakespeare. This was a place that Troe was understandly excited to visit. We toured the birthplace and childhood house of Anne Hathaway (Shakespeare's wife) and picked up a bunch of interesting facts about the bard. (For instance, Shakespeare's first child was concieved before his mariage to Anne.) After exploring the house grounds - which included an Elizabethan garden maze - we drove around Stratford trying to find Shakespeare's grave. His birthplace was clearly sign posted everywhere, but we'd just seen a 400 year old house and we in the mood for something a little more morbid. Sadly, on our own we could not find Trinity Church (Wikipedia's listed site of Shakespeare's grave), and the locals we talked to were no help. So we set off North again.

Newcastle. We made it into Newcastle fairly early in the day on Sunday. After exploring the very very large mall (probably larger than Metro-Town), we checked into the hostel there. Then we went exploring some more. On the way down to the river front, we found a small castle in the middle of the city which had some pretty cool passage ways down to the water front. .We also had a nice dinner at a Chinese/Mongolian buffet and then walked along the river front to see the Millenium Bridge. It was actually really cool. Apparently, it is the only rotating bridge in the world! Also, we had amazing views of Newcastle's Center for the Arts.


5. Hadrian's Wall. This is somewhere we learned of only since moving to England. Apparently, when England was the Northern-most end of the Holy Roman Empire (circa 100 C.E.) it was the subject of frequent raiding. Most of this was from the Scotish clans raiding south. To prevent this continued rading, the Roman Emperor of the time, Hadrian, commissioned the building of a bloody great wall across Britain, seperating England from Scotland. The Roman Empire fell before the wall could be finished, and this was almost 2000 years ago, so not very much of the wall still remains. Still, after only a mild bit of English back-country driving we were able to find a decent strip of the wall to explore and a ruined church.