From Brighton to Salisbury (Salisbury day 1)

We begin the day with breakfast at the hotel. After breakfast we pack up and get an Uber from the hotel to the car rental company. Of course they try to persuade us to take even more insurance than we'd already taken (as in: insure it with us as well so save you trouble should something happen....). We have already taken out insurance, so no thank you kindly. Despite our answer, he kept pushing, but we held firm! No cheating us today!! 

Sophie was a champ driving us to Salisbury. The first few miles were somewhat scary for her, but after a little bit she felt fine. Mad respect, seriously! She drove, I navigated and that worked very well. It was pretty busy on the road, but we still made pretty good time. We parked the car, grabbed ourselves a snack and something to drink in record time and made it to the bus stop just in time to catch the bus. If we hadn't caught that bus, we wouldn't have been able to visit Old Sarum. 




The weather today is great by the way. This also shows in the photos we've made today. In this photo, it almost looks like a postcard, but I swear I took this photo myself. Like last time, the area felt special. It's something you can't name, but if you succeed to ignore the tourists, you can feel it. It isn't just the grandeur of those huge stones, there's something more, something that's hard to put into words. 

Next to the visitor's center they've built a few roundhouses you can visit. And they are building a bigger one at the moment. They're building it using the old techniques, so with stone axes and bone antlers and things like that. Really cool. 




After Stonehenge, we've visited Old Sarum. It is really hard to capture the majesty of that site properly in photos. The first real castle there was built for William the Conquerer. It's surrounded by an earth wall and a really deep ditch (not a moat, since it didn't hold water). The views from there were lovely, but only imagine what they would have been like if the King's tower still stood! Or the other orignal buildings. What you see now are basically just the foundations of what once stood there. 

The bus driver had been very kind in explaining to us that we didn't have to wait for the last tour bus to pass. We could just take one of the red busses back to the center, so that's what we did. We got our suitcases from our car and made our way to our hotel: The King's Head Inn. But.... when we came there, we saw a man sitting on the steps to the hotel. He told us there was a fire and the whole building (pub and hotel) had been evacuated. Down the street we could indeed see the fire engines and lots of people that had been inside waiting to see if they could go back inside. Long story short: the fire hadn't been very big, but it had gotten into the electrical system, so the whole building was dark (power was out everywhere but in the alarm system). Sleeping there tonight would not be an option. We were told we could try to find something else ourselves, or they would do that for us (but that would be a while since they were sorting things out). Everyone would automatically be refunded within 2 days. We made a snap decision to quickly book something else. It was fairly close by and seemed okay. It turned out to be an apartment with a kitchen and full bathroom (including a bath!) and the best surprise was that they'd provided a complimentary breakfast. So, breakfast is sorted for tomorrow. 


For dinner (and a pint) we went to a little hole in the wall pub just down the street. The place was really busy, with lots of locals grabbing a pint (or a glas of wine or something else). They also served burgers and chips (fries as the Americans will call them). To call these burgers 'just burger' would be a disservice. I swear these rank at the very least in the top 5 of best burgers I've ever had. The fries (ah sorry, chips) were also really good. Add to that my favorite cider (Thatcher's Gold) and I was in foodie-heaven. 

Now to grab some sleep (have I mentioned the great pillows yet??) and tomorrow we'll put our suitcases in the car and visit the Salisbury Cathedral before we go to Bath. 

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