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Day trip to Stonehenge
Nov. 23rd, 2021 05:17 pmOn Sunday we decided to have a day trip to Stonehenge. Our departure was somewhat rushed, since Pellinor's alarm malfunctioned (its user failed, something sadly not covered by the guarantee) and - very unusually - I didn't wake up early. "It's 8 o'clock!" I exclaimed in alarm. "We need to leave at 8.30!" Since the start of the pandemic, ferries have been considerably less frequent, so deciding to go for a later ferry wasn't a desirable option, but we made it without too much trauma.
The weather and scenery was lovely, and traffic was very light. After a cup of tea, we headed to the shiny new(ish) visitor centre, where our chief learning point came from watching the sign language version of various videos, trying to work out which signs went with which words. We worked out "druid" and "Stonehenge" - not, admittedly, the most useful two words to have in your repertoire should one need to urgently communicate in signs, but better than nothing.
Then we walked towards the stones, where we immediately realised that it was FREEZING. I guess technically it wasn't that cold, but there was a bitter wind roaring across the plain, and it's been so mild lately that we hadn't dressed for an icy blast. We shivered our way around the stones, paused on a bench to eat our sandwiches with ice-lashed hands, then set out to walk around the surrounding landscape.
Annoyingly, it turned out that I hadn't charged my camera battery, so all I had was my phone. My camera's getting old and clunky, and I'd sometimes wondered if I even needed to replace it, given that phone camera are getting so much better. But my phone - although useful for snapping pictures of people - turned out to be useless in the extreme when it came to photographing stones. Not that it stopped me from trying.
( Rubbish pictures of Stonehenge and environs )
The weather and scenery was lovely, and traffic was very light. After a cup of tea, we headed to the shiny new(ish) visitor centre, where our chief learning point came from watching the sign language version of various videos, trying to work out which signs went with which words. We worked out "druid" and "Stonehenge" - not, admittedly, the most useful two words to have in your repertoire should one need to urgently communicate in signs, but better than nothing.
Then we walked towards the stones, where we immediately realised that it was FREEZING. I guess technically it wasn't that cold, but there was a bitter wind roaring across the plain, and it's been so mild lately that we hadn't dressed for an icy blast. We shivered our way around the stones, paused on a bench to eat our sandwiches with ice-lashed hands, then set out to walk around the surrounding landscape.
Annoyingly, it turned out that I hadn't charged my camera battery, so all I had was my phone. My camera's getting old and clunky, and I'd sometimes wondered if I even needed to replace it, given that phone camera are getting so much better. But my phone - although useful for snapping pictures of people - turned out to be useless in the extreme when it came to photographing stones. Not that it stopped me from trying.
( Rubbish pictures of Stonehenge and environs )
