Expedition to Europe: England and Ireland

My parents and my sister, Abbie, came for the first week of my break. Let me just tell you how excited I was to see them: whilst waiting for them in the airport, I was bouncing up and down, talking to myself, and gulping back tears of excitement, and I scared quite a few people away.

They got here on Saturday, and I was happy. We ate lunch:



(Mom was still jet-lagged), and then we took a grand tour of Oxford, which included a tour of Regent's Park:







It was wonderful to take them to church on Sunday, and they also got to see me row, which was a surprise! This is from my church:





On Monday, we went to Salisbury Cathedral:



I know, isn't it gorgeous? The cathedral is in a great setting: there's grass everywhere, and therefore picnics and dogs and flowers and frisbees and happiness. We were lucky to be there on a sunny day, so we ate lunch sitting on the wall surrounding the cathedral:

We drove on to Stonehenge. We'd rented a car, which was quite the experience. Dad, Mom, and I all got to drive on the wrong side of the road, which is bizarre. On the way to Stonehenge, we saw a Texaco, which was...apparently wonderful, because there is now a picture of it on my computer. Don't worry, I'm not posting it; I figure you know what those look like.

Driving to Stonehenge is neat because you crest a hill and see it spread out before you:


It's smaller than you think at first glance, but when you get close, you realize that people who did not have hydraulic lifts or tractor-trailers created it, and then you are amazed. Inspired, even. In fact, Mom and Abbie and I were so inspired that we tried to recreate Stonehenge using our bodies:

A resounding success, I think. Actually, we initially tried to make the part of Stonehenge that looks like a door frame, but Mom and Abbie dropped me.

The Monday that we were at Stonehenge was my parents' 24th anniversary (my parents rock (hey, a pun!)):


On Monday, we continued on to Bath, where we visited the Roman Baths. If you ever go to the Roman Baths, do the audio tour as it is fantastic. I do give this warning, though: Bill Bryson contributes to the audio tour, and as much as I love Bryson's books, his audio tours are sentimental and pretty pointless. I don't know how many times I heard him say, "It's so moving to think..." and then explain how he is moved by an interesting but not tear-jerking part of daily life, like throwing coins in the water or walking down steps. Anyway, the baths were very cool:

We all tried the water at Bath, which is supposed to be healing but was mostly gross.

Yep, Abbie and I felt the same way about it. We ended the day in Bristol, at this B&B. It is called the Coachhouse because, well, it used to be a coachhouse:

The next day was St. Patrick's Day, so we headed to Ireland! But first, we stopped at Cardiff Castle in Wales, which was really neat. It still had the ancient keep:

Plus a bunch of newer buildings that made it this a hodge-podge of different castle styles:

That's Mom and Abbie and me. After the castle, we took a ferry, because there is a large body of water between England and Ireland:

Once in Ireland, we stayed in Waterford, which can proudly claim to have the creepiest and most out-of-place billboard I have ever seen:

Seriously, why? There are no words, no explanations, just a 100-foot-tall elf-child looking depressed. In addition to this billboard, Waterford also has a fast-food restaurant called Supermac's, outside of which they had a stabbing! What a day.

The day after St. Patrick's Day, we kissed the Blarney Stone. You were wondering why this post is so eloquent, weren't you? It's because I kissed the Blarney Stone. Kissing the Blarney Stone was, by the way, terrifying: no one ever tells you that you have to lean out upside-down over a hole in a wall five stories high! Mom will demonstrate:

After Blarney, we went to Dublin, where there is an amazing pizza place and weird television shows about men who wear pink, sing, and drive Barbie cars on their way to build sets for a ballet. Very odd. We spent a while in a bank that used to be the House of Lords, saw Trinity College, and bought souvenirs.

The next day (which was Thursday, March 19, in case you've lost track), we took another ferry from Dublin to Holyhead, and then went to Chester. That pretty much took the whole day. On Friday, we visited Chester's cathedral and wall:

Chester's wall was pretty neat, mostly because it was big and old (not that England has a shortage of big, old things).

We went to London via Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford. In Stratford-upon-Avon, we were forced into a tour (okay, okay: I forced everyone else into a tour) of Shakespeare's birth home given by a man with a head the size of a watermelon and no sense of humour, unless it came to the "to be or not to be" joke ("So the question for dinner always was: 'to eat, or not to eat?'"), which he told three times. We also found this cool statue:

Our Saturday in London consisted of the London Eye:

We saw Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which was great, although Joseph was roughly the color of the orange spray-on tan. We also rode double-decker buses:

Pretty much, my trip with my family was amazing, mostly because it was a trip with my family! We missed Reid a lot, but he was acing tests and winning basketball games (or something like that) instead of traipsing around England with us. We all got to see things we'd never seen, we stayed in great B&Bs (never underestimate the power of a good full-English breakfast), and we got to see each other!

Coming up next: Italy!