Our destination today was Salisbury and Stonehenge. I decided to take a tour with London Walks: a company that does walking tours using public transportation. We lucked out in our scheduling: usually the Stonehenge/Salisbury tour is only given on Tuesdays, but this is one of two Saturdays a year that they offer it. No reservation is necessary--all you do is show up at the designated meeting point and pay the guide.
We left the B&B a bit early to make sure we had time to buy John an umbrella (of course, since we had scheduled an outdoor destination, the forecast said rain), and leave plenty of time to find the meeting point. Naturally, since we weren't in a hurry, everything went as smoothly as possible. We quite literally strolled down the stairs and directly into the doors of a departing Tube train at both stations!
Waterloo Rail Station is an impressive place. The one thing it seems to lack is trash cans, which I imagine is a modern safety innovation. We met our guide Richard, paid the fee, and headed off on the tour.
The train trip to Salisbury took about an hour and a half through some beautiful countryside. Once we arrived, we toured the town and the cathedral.
John and I both have a new favorite cathedral! I've always liked Gothic cathedrals, and since this one was finished so quickly (38 years), it's not the mish-mash of styles that some other cathedrals are.
The cloister was lovely, too, and the chapter house contains one of the four original Magna Cartas. After a quick visit to the gift shop, we headed back to the market area for lunch.
At Reeve the Baker, I had a delicious chicken, ham, and leek pasty, while John had a tuna sandwich. We also picked up an almond croissant (John) and apple tart (me) for dessert. We picnicked under the Poultry Cross, then bought a pound of delicious little strawberries at a market stall.
By this time, the sporadic showers we'd been experiencing all day turned into a brief downpour. We ducked into a Marks and Spencer so John could buy more of the walking socks he found in Oxford. As we returned to the tour meeting point (the red telephone booth by the cathedral), the sun finally came out.
The next leg of the trip was by private bus. We drove to Stonehenge by way of back roads, where we saw adorable little thatched cottages, livestock, and Sting's weekend house.
Once we got to Stonehenge, the wind picked up (Richard warned us on advance that that would probably be the case), and the rain started again.
About halfway around the circle, the sun came out again, but by the time we reached the three-quarters mark the rain began to come down quite hard. We ducked into the gift shop, but since everyone else had the same idea, it was too crowded to do any shopping. We then remembered the tented gift shop we'd seen near the parking lot, which turned out to be not crowded at all.
The trip back to London was uneventful. I ate my apple tart on the train, and we said goodbye to Richard at Waterloo Rail Station.
For dinner, we decided yesterday to make a reservation for the restaurant at the Ebury Wine Bar. (Arriving fashionably late on a Saturday night without a reservation didn't seem like a good idea to me!)
John had an appetizer of garlic tiger prawns with Mediterranean vegetable compote,
followed by Welsh new season lamb cutlets:
I had Barbary duck breast with sweet potato dauphinoise, wilted spinach, and red onion tatin:
For dessert, John had soft chocolate pudding with Morello cherry compote,
and I had housemade sorbet in raspberry, mandarin, and blackcurrant:
Another delicious meal, once of the best we've had anywhere.
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