Rollright Stone Circle

When we were learning more about Stonehenge, we learned that there are hundreds of ancient stone circles all over Great Britain. One interesting group is about 30 minutes from our house, so one sunny morning we went over to check it out. Of course, by the time we got there, the wind had picked up and the sky had clouded over, but we're no wimps... :)

This is the main circle, The King's Men. It's fascinating that people thousands of years ago gathered the stones and set them up like this... for worship, rituals, and as clocks and calendars. It's hard to fathom what they were thinking about what they were doing and why it was important. This circle particularly was a tranquil spot... all the visitors there whispered. Magical.

Cambria gets a lift over to the Whispering Knights stone group

Yup, it says "burial chamber"! As Meridian said, "Eww"!

There were coins and buttons (!) that had been tossed into the circle. Weird.

The age old tourist dilemma... do you smile in front of graves?? We do.

Across the modern road, there is the King Stone... part of the Rollright Stones, but separate too.

Silly kid. :)

What a trip.

Meridian noticed this little stone circle beyond the King Stone, which looked like a fire pit. :)

We realized we were close to Deddington, where there was a pub we had heard about from many people - The Crown and Tuns, otherwise known as Pudding Face.  We decided to check it out for lunch.

It was a cozy little pub, an old building with an updated interior.  It was an expensive lunch, but very, very good.  We should have split 3 meals, but couldn't decide on only 3.  :)  The menu is almost entirely pies, all kinds of meats and sauces and cheeses.  Yummy!!

One last funny... as we passed through one village, we came across this pub sign:

...not named for the Duke, but for his head.  Ha!

Cadbury World

Our friends the Gilberts invited us to come along to Cadbury World with them on Valentine's Day.  A day centered around chocolate?  Count us in!!  We made a tour reservation and gave ourselves a little over an hour to get there... no problem with our handy dandy GPS!

So they start the tour just as you could hope... with free chocolate.  They handed us each two different bars right at the beginning, and by the end I think we had collected 5 each.  I can't believe we still bought some!  LOL  Tourists.

The tour starts with a recreation of the places that cacoa is grown, and the travels it takes to get to Europe.  A bit of the history of chocolate, then some history of the Cadbury company.  Cambria liked the rainforest exhibit.

Meridian and Kayleigh read about the origins of chocolate

 The girls point to a favorite bar

We toured through where they wrap the bars and package them in boxes for shipping. We weren't supposed to take pictures in there, but it was neat to see the chocolate bars fly through the wrapping machine! 

The girls were all a little freaked out by the moving statue guy, but they gamely posed with him anyway.  :)

Writing our names in chocolate!

They had an advertising section, showing how chocolate has been marketed over time.  Funny stuff.

They had a neat interactive digital playroom, one of the coolest things involved shadow play on a big screen.  There was a shadow ball, and you could move it around with your shadow - very cool.  This was also cool:

Make yourself in chocolate!  You could buy it as a picture, but not as actual chocolate.  :)

The chocolate sculptures went by on a conveyor belt... Cambria with her arms up on the left, then Brad & Maggie, then Meridian and Kayleigh.  

Me and the girls outside, near a big playground, on the way to the other parts of the tour.

Kayleigh was so sweet, she brought Valentine's Day gifts for the girls!  Meridian's included sunglasses that matched hers - super cute!

At the end of the Essence part of the tour, we were able to choose any combination of candies, nuts, and cereals to put in a cup, which they then covered in liquid chocolate.  I asked the guy to repeat the choices, but a lot of it was British candies that I didn't recognize the names of... rice crispies and marshmallows were the most popular choices in our group!  Yum!

So many choices!!

One more thing we learned... the factory is in the village of Bournville, which sprang up for workers to live in.  The Cadburys were Quakers, and they didn't drink... so they took great pleasure in chocolate.  Bournville still doesn't have any pubs.  Poor Bournville.  The Cadburys also were social reformers, in that they paid a decent wage and were concerned with the health and safety of their employees in a time when many other companies were not. 

A fun day, partly due to the chocolate overload, and largely due to the company! 

Stonehenge & Salisbury Cathedral

In late January, Meridian said "the next thing I want to see is Stonehenge."  Good enough for us!  We quickly planned a day trip and took off that weekend, on Sunday the 24th. The drive is a little over an hour, mostly West and a little South.  Not a bad drive at all, easy peasy with our GPS navigator.

It IS right by the side of the road, but we knew that going in, and were pleased to find a decent parking lot there.  There's chain link around the field it's in, but you could just walk up and put your camera lens through the diamond shape in the fence... but we wanted to get closer so we paid our £s and went through the tunnel under the road to the henge.

We had watched a National Geographic documentary before we left the states, so the kids were more interested in looking around the grounds than I think they would have been otherwise.  The day was cloudy, and it was cold out.  So cold that we decided to come back another time to explore the grounds more, like where the wood circle was built and whatnot.  Here are the pictures:

Cambria was having a hard time with the sun... this is the best of the bunch.  :) 

The sun was out, but I don't like how I'm hiding behind Scott.  :)

Fun with Photoshop.  :)

We wanted to go see Avebury too... it's supposed to be really quite interesting since the stone circle there surrounds a village, and you can walk right up to the stones.  But since it was so cold, and we knew the weather might be an issue, I had a back up plan.  After we left Stonehenge, we drove the short distance to Salisbury, where alas, we found no steak.  :(  But that was ok, because we really came to see the cathedral.

We had lunch at a pub in Salisbury (shown behind us), it was nothing to write home about.  Unfortunately, the pub we wanted to eat at didn't serve food at 2:30 on a Sunday.  2:30 is between lunch and dinner, silly Americans! 

We walked along the river on our way to find the Cathedral.  

We thought this arch over the road was interesting... you can just drive right under it!  You can see the spire of the cathedral peeking over the top, but we didn't realize it at the time. 

Close up of the roadway arch

And here it is, Salisbury Cathedral! 

Fan-freakin-tastic.  Built in 1258!  Yeah, no power tools back then, you know.

Scott and Cambria check out the top of the spire (Britain's tallest!) with a telescope.  

 

 

 

 

Meridian asked me to take this picture, because the guy is missing his head.  :) 

This is inside the cathedral walls - there's a courtyard (ahem, graveyard) to the right, the cathedral is to the left.

So there was some service going on (we didn't see anyone other than tourists) and they had a sign out saying we weren't allowed to take pictures inside because of it.  Boo.  The inside was really fantastic, click here if you want to see it.  

We were surprised that people (famous and/or wealthy people mostly) are buried right in the cathedral, under the floor tiles.  Sometimes, there was no path between the graves, so there's no way around stepping on the graves.  This was odd for we Americans, who have been taught to never, ever step on a grave.  Meridian was a little wigged out that there were "dead people" in there, she'd jump over them when she could, and whimper Eww and jump when she accidentally stepped on one. Silly.

Also interesting is that it's not just one big room with pews.  There are many smaller praying areas off to the sides, some with their own walls even, that don't reach up to the ceiling.  It was quite surprising.  

In the courtyard, after touring the inside.  

We missed seeing the Magna Carta... one of the original copies is stored in the Chapter Room at Salisbury Cathedral.  The Chapter Room closed an hour before the cathedral itself.   If you don't quite remember (I didn't) the Magna Carta made the King accountable to, and not above, the law.  Pretty cool. 

I didn't bring my tripod, so these night shots aren't as good as they could have been.

 

All in all, an interesting and fun day trip, taken on a very very cold day.  :)