Pictures from Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral

Well British Telecom has fixed our little problem.  It only took nine
calls from my mobile, five attendants and two engineers to fix it. 
They had switched our phone number with someone else's, so that if you
phoned us, you'd get a fax machine, and the phone in our flat didn't
work.   Why they switched our numbers is a mystery.  I blame the
telcom gods.  Oddly enough, the exact same problem happened to Alan on
the other side of the world in the Yukon with a completely different
incompetent telecommunications company.

But on the upside, I can now post pictures of Stonehenge and Salisbury
Cathedral.  From our little flat in north-west London, Salisbury is
about a two hour trip.  Within those two hours we took five trains and
one bus.  Very exciting.  We felt like we were in "The Amazing Race"
(That reality tv show where people race by planes, trains and buses).

Once in Salisbury we bought tickets to go see Stonehenge, and after
getting some £2 pizza we got on the bus and headed off.  Traffic
started to bunch up, and we were all looking around to find out why. 
It was gawkers.  But unlike on the 401 where gawkers are looking at
car crash wrecks, on this highway, drivers were gawking at 60 ton
stones from northern Africa arranged in an astrologically correct
fashion 5000 years ago.

It was pretty weird, driving along and looking out the window we saw:
grass field, grass field, sheep, grass field, Stonehenge, grass field,
more sheep.


These stones are in fact quite big and the fields around them are all
associated in odd ways with Stonehenge.  There are Barrows (burial
mounds) scattered around the country side.  Sheep graze on them.

See the little mounds on the horizon?  Those are ancient graves from
about 2000 - 1000 BC.

After the entertainment value of the rocks wore thin, we went back to
Salisbury and happened upon a little church.


It turns out Salisbury Cathedral is the tallest Gothic cathedral in
the world (404 feet).  It only took 38 years to build starting in
1220.  Quite the little church to stumble upon.  There is, what they
claim to be, the oldest piece of working machinery.  A clock telling
time since 1386.


Salisbury Cathedral also holds the most well preserved copy of the
Magna Carta in Britain (one of four).  It's been there since 1225. 
Neat stuff.

There also happened to be a bunch of Buddhist monks doing coloured
sand art.  This was a nice surprise and is quite a time/labour
intensive process.

One day after it is completed, the monks sweep up all the sand, to
symbolize the fragility/temporariness of everything.  They also wash
the sand into running water to spread the life energy that was
generated during the creation of the picture.

After another 5 trains we were home again.

Click here to see all of the pictures.