Spring Break part 1: England

This past week, my spring break, has been filled with adventures, chilly temps, and beautiful sunshine. Everything started bright and early last Friday morning, before the sun was even up. Sam D and I had to catch a bus - at 3:40am! - to bring us to Pisa in order to get our 6:40 flight on time. It's only about an hour drive from Florence to Pisa, but the next bus got us there only about 45min before we were scheduled to take off, so we were up before some people had even gone to bed.

Our flight from Pisa took us to to London's Stanstead airport where we took a bus to the Liverpool Street train/tube station. From there we got a tube to Kings Cross station where we had a few hours until our train to Grantham.

We got to Grantham around 2pm, walked about 15min and checked in to our Bed and Breakfast, the Park Lodge Guest House. That afternoon we decided to venture to the neighboring town of Harlaxton which was the main reason we even went to Grantham. When Sam was younger his dad taught at Harlaxton College so Sam and his family lived there for about a year and Sam wanted to see the place and his school and the college etc.

It took us about an hour to walk there, but once we were there we discovered that we needed an appointment to be able to tour the college. We walked around to see the neighborhoods and his primary school and took lots of pictures of course. We got dinner at a local restaurant in Harlaxton that had a deal 5:30-6:30 and we got some traditional English food. It was delicious and the kind of food I had been needing!

After dinner we walked back to Grantham - we had missed the last bus. We got back to the B&B around 9ish and had planned to check out the local pub but the early morning and long day of traveling thoroughly wore us out and we were asleep by 10.

We were up at 9 for the traditional English breakfast provided with the B&B which was amazing. After that we explored the town, wandered through the local street market and then caught a bus back to Harlaxton because the weather was much nicer and Sam wanted to look around some more.

That afternoon we got our trains on the way to Bath with a couple hours in Nottingham. We went to see Nottingham Castle and just wondered around the city to see what else we could see. We then got our next train to Bath and hiked the 30min to our hostel.

The next day was Easter as well as Daylight Savings Time for Europe. We were up around 10 to attend the 11:15 Sung Eucharist at the Bath Abbey. After the service we got lunch at a local pub. There were a surprising number of stores and shops etc. open on Easter Sunday, which I found surprising, because at home, in Maine, there's laws that say practically everything has to be closed three days of the year: Easter Sunday, Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day. So, it was strange to see so many things open and so many people seeming to not notice that it was Easter. Especially because I had thought Easter was a bigger deal in England and Europe than the US, but I guess it depends on where you are.

That afternoon we walked around the local fields that are maintained and preserved to prevent complete urban sprawl. It was a beautiful spring day, granted a bit chilly, but the sun was shining and the countryside was beautiful. Following our walk to got some groceries for breakfasts and dinners for the three days remaining in Bath. Our hostel had a self-service kitchen so we decided to save money and cook our own meals instead of going out every night.

Monday was a gloomy chilly day so we spent it doing some of the local museums and things: the Royal Crescent, which was under renovation so we only got to see the exhibit and not the whole museum house; the Herschel Museum of Astronomy where Uranus was discovered; and the Holburne Museum of Art. By that time it was about 5ish and we were tired and cold so we headed back to the hostel, showered, made and ate dinner, and relaxed in the lounge where we read until some of the young kids also staying at the hostel turned on the TV and we watched some American food-network shows.

Tuesday we went to Avebury to see one of the biggest stone circles. I haven't been to Stonehenge but from what I understand it's the same concept just less complete and much bigger! To get there we had to take a bus to Trowbridge and then a bus to Avebury. We got to Trowbridge around 12:30 and discovered that, according to the posted schedule, there were only 2 more trains back to Bath: one at 2:30 and one at 9:30. We got a bus at 1:30, rode the bus for the hour-long ride and then explored Avebury for a few hours.

It was another beautiful day, however the wind was brisk, making it almost unbearable. We walked around the entire small town of Avebury and explored all we could and got the 5:40 bus back to Trowbridge. Once we got back around 6:30, we double checked the train schedule to see if maybe there was an earlier train. From what we could tell there was not, so we wandered around. We got a few things at the grocery store and were hoping to browse through the shopping center only to find out that it closed at 6pm. On a Tuesday. What? Yeah, it was strange, and the same all over town - practically everything was closed by 8pm.

We found a small food cart and got some dinner to hold us over until we could get back to the hostel to make our food. After our first dinner we wandered around some more and found a Sainsbury (similar to Wal-Mart) that was still open. We browsed through there for a while, got some random things and wasted time. From there we went into a Blockbuster! I know, I thought they were all closed, but I guess that's only in the US...So we looked through there at the sale movies to waste some more time. Around 9 we headed back to the train station to wait for out train.

We discovered that the train - coming 10min before the one we were planning to take - stopped at Bath, so we decided to take that one instead of the later one. I only wonder how many other trains came by in the 3 hours we were wasting in Trowbridge that stopped in Bath, that were not listed on the schedule...we could have had dinner at a normal hour (instead of 10:30 at night) and gone to bed earlier and gotten warm earlier. Oh well.

Wednesday we checked out of the hostel and walked to the train station to start the next (and last) leg of our Spring Break journey.