Travelogue 1-A

A coupla years ago I went to London on vacation cuz I wanted to see the Stonehedge. 

I'm only telling you about it now because I didn't have a blog back then. Now I have a blog and you're forced to read this stuff. In fact, I'm the kinda guy who, when I get older, I'm prob'ly gonna post all my ailments and recent operations on my blog so you'll have to read those, too. I will not be ignored.

Anyway, my point is, it cost me twenty-three-hundred dollars to find out Stonehedge isn't in London.

But I was close. I live in Wisconsin, so being in London, I was closer to Stonehedge than I'd ever been before. Prior to my time in London, the closest I'd ever been to Stonehedge was Cleveland, Ohio. If my vacation was a game you played in your backyard, I was definitely "getting warmer."

Actually, I thought I had landed at Stonehedge when I got off the plane at Heathrow. Except it was indoors and was only about three feet high. And surrounded by plexiglass. Turns out it was just a polystyrene model in front of the Marks's and Spencer's Food Hall at the airport.

So if you're looking thru my snapshots, you may wanna skip the first seven or eight.

"Oh crap, don't tell me it's in Egypt and I gotta take another ten hour flight!" I said to the driver of the double-decker bus after he informed me I had wasted two whole vacation days wandering aimlessly around London looking for Stonehedge.

"It's in Salisbury," he told me, "in Wiltshire. But you're getting warmer."

Salisbury? Wiltshire? Did Stonehedge have two convenient locations? I asked him if he could drive me to the closest one, and he said no, I had to take a train to Salisbury and then a bus out to Stonehedge. At least that's what I think he said. He spoke with a thick foreign accent and kept pronouncing it Stone'edge, without the H. Just my luck I get a foreign bus driver.

"Does your bus go to the train depot?" I asked, very loudly and slowly, and properly pronouncing "deppo" in the English way, so he could understand me. I wanted desperately to get this darn vacation officially started and to let the line of people that had gathered behind me onto the bus.

"No," he said just as loudly and slowly as I had asked him, "you 'ave to go to Waterloo Station. That's only a kilometer from 'ere." I really wish I woulda boughten a London-to-English phrase book when I was at the airport in Chicago. The Brits really have a tendency to butcher the English language. And I coulda looked up what "now piss-off" means.

After someone in the line -- or "Q" as it's mysteriously abbreviated in England -- behind me helpfully explained that a kilometer was a little over a "half-a-goddamn-mile," I took his advice and "walked the bloody thing."

England is weird. The names of places are weird. Dorking. There's actually a town called Dorking. What is there to do in Dorking? And some names of places are, like, complete sentences: Kingstone-Upon-Thames. "Do you live in Kingstone?" "No, I live in Kingstone-Upon-Thames." Thames is a river. That would be like, if here in the States, someone lived on Mississippi-Upon-Mississippi.

I walked to Waterloo Station to find out if any of the trains went to any of the busses that went to any of the Stonehedges.

Waterloo Station is cool. It reminded me of the train station from the Harry Potter movie only moderner. And no, I didn't try to run through a brick pedestal like Harry did! I'm not that stupid. I did ask a kid to try it though, just to see. 

Waterloo Station -- called 'Loo for short. Evidently named after an ABBA song.

The train was just leaving when I got there, so a lady quickly handed me my ticket and a pamphlet about Wiltshire. It was full of information like how to get to Stonehedge and the cost of admission and the hours it was open and all stuff like that there. An invaluable publication and she just handed it to me! For free! I could kinda see why it was free, though. It was poorly designed and had typos all over the place. I wouldn't have boughten it if it weren't givin away for free.

One thing I learned on the train ride is that Salisbury is in fact a village, and Wiltshire is the county it's in.  So to be specific, Stonehedge is in Salisbury in Wiltshire in England in Britain in the United Kingdom in Earth in the World in the Universe in the Sol System in Galaxy-Upon-Andromeda, etc etc etc.

I also learned it's not called Stonehedge at all. It's Henge, like in "hinge" but with a E instead of an I. Say it: "Henge." Now say it louder: "HENGE!" Now say it in Pig Latin: "EngeHay!" Okay. Shut up.

Didn't you always think it was pronounced Stonehedge? Didn't you used to think that? Some of you must've. Some of both of you reading this blog must've called it Stonehedge half your lifes. I know I did.

The embarrassing thing is that, on the whole train trip I was mocking the fact that they misspelled it on the brochure! I made a point to tell everyone on the train that I used to be a proofreader and that I'd never let a typo like that get to the printing stage.

Fortunately for me, the other tourists on the bus were all non-English speaking foreigners. I know this because when I was mocking the brochure they all kind of just stared at me with blank expressions on their faces. Clearly they didn't understand what I was saying.

You say HENGE; I say HEDGE; I was getting warmer. 

We took a bus from the village of Salisbury clear out to Aubrey Plaza, or, as I took to calling it, Middle-Upon-Nowhere. And there it was, off in the distance, where the A-303 and the A-344 split off into the shape of the letter Y, and up in the V shape of the letter Y stood the mighty, mysterious, majestic Stonehenge gift shop. And across the street from that, Stonehenge.

It was magical. Here I was, just a boy from Wisconsin, separated from his home by a thousand miles, yet separated in time from the origins of Stonehenge by some fifty-billion years. Or however long.

I lost the pamphlet, but I remember much of it. I might be kinda foggy on some of the details. I remember it said Stonehenge was built by Droids in an area called Aubrey Plaza or something like that. It was originally meant to be either a burial ground or a giant compass, pointing North during the Summer solstice and then miraculously pointing South during the Fall solstice. Stonehenge holds many mysteries.

It made me well-up (that means pee, right?) A myriad questions jumbled in my mind, like, how did the Droids lift the rocks on top of each other like that? And for what purpose? Why did they build it so far from London? Why is it so close to the street?

One of the biggest questions I had was what knocked some of them over? It couldn't have been the wind. Those stones look heavy. The lady's voice on the headphone-tour-thingy that I rented from the majestic gift shop said each stone was like, I don't remember exactly, but, like, a million pounds. Not a million pounds as in money pounds, cuz in England money is measured out in pounds; but a million weight pounds. Except in England weight is measured in stones, so I guess the stones are a million stones or something like that. I don't know. I didn't count them. It's all very confusing over there. Have you ever seen that underground railway map? That's another thing.

The basic rule when visiting Britain is this: however we do it in America, they do it the opposite in Britain. Like driving. We drive on the right side of the road; they drive like idiots.

But I digress. I'm here to be talking about Stonehenge.

Yes. Stonehenge. A henge made of stone. Sounds logical, right? But what in fact is a henge? Wikipedia describes a henge as a tasty dessert made from egg whites and sugar. Although, in my haste, I may have spelt it wrong, as I vaguely remember being confronted with a pop-up that said "Did you mean Meringue?" just before I hit "enter."

Nevertheless, once I got out of the bus and walked up beside the stones, the full reality of their full enormity became fully... um... reality-ized. I'm sorry, I'm not a very good writer. This is my first blog. I don't even know what a blog is. Wikipedia defines blog as a club-like weapon, but I think I've made clear my capabilities with regard to looking things up on Wikipedia.

They say there are two types of stones that make up Stonehenge: Sarsen stones, which the huge ones are carved out of; and Bluestones, which the littler ones are carved out of. And by littler ones, I mean the ones that are merely twenty feet tall. The Sarsen stones can grow anywhere up to thirty feet tall, in some cases. I think the tallest stone in Stonehenge is a Sarsen, and it's, like, twenty-five or thirty feet tall.

Now, keep in mind, that's sort of an illusion. The stone was probably originally only two feet high and twenty-five or thirty feet long. But somehow they stood it up on end so it only looks tall. It's sort of like when they say a newborn baby is nineteen inches long, when they mean nineteen inches tall, because babies are born laying down. You actually have to prop them up to measure their height. And to get their picture taken. Well, that's kind of the same deal with Stonehenge. Kind of. Except the picture-taking part. People there were taking pictures of the stones no matter if they were standing up or laying down. The stones, that is. Not the people taking the pictures. They were all standing up as far as I could see.

I really need an editor.

When I was there, you weren't allowed to go near the rocks. 
I guess they were afraid... I don't know... we'd try to break them?

But the really fascinating thing about these types of stones is that none of them are from anywhere around Stonehenge. Now that may sound silly (though not as silly as that whole baby thing in the previous paragraph, which I'm seriously considering whiting-out) but what I mean by that is, before Stonehenge was built, in the village of Middle-Upon-Nowhere, these kinds of stones weren't available. You had to go twenty miles North to find giant Sarsen stones, to a village called Marlborough, and while you're there you may as well pick up a carton of their world-famous cigarettes.

And the nearest Bluestones to that area were a hundred and fifty miles away in a village called Wales. Wales!

Oh there's more to come... trust me...