Weekends away in the UK by train

English Heritage is not bad.  There's Stonehenge and Dover Castle near you.  DC is on the to do list, friends have told me it's great. 

Stonehenge is a mix of all that is good and bad about the British.  The rocks themselves are really cool, even if you can't get near them.  The typical bad things are that you can't get anywhere near them unless you pay some huge amount for a special tour.  For some reason the horrible impact of visitors being near disappears if they are paying a ton of money. 

Also, they force you to park at the visitors centre and take a horrible smelly old crap bus to get to the stones.  Walking is better if the weather is nice. 

You'd think they could do better than a fleet of old desiel buses that ruin the feel of the place.  Electric buses would be a start, and easy to do.  How about a deal with Google for self driving cars?   Google would probably happily pay for it so that we forget they don't pay taxes. 

The hubster and I have an English Heritage membership and we love it.  We make sure to visit enough sites a year to make the membership worth it (it's a shame that there aren't many paid sites in Southern Essex).  Admission to Dover Castle itself is nearly £20 so it would just take a couple of visits to pay for itself (we signed up as a family and got my 18-year-old sister in for free).  If you do go on weekend trips around the UK, swing by any local sites.  There are lots of places in Kent to explore!

English Heritage is not bad.  There's Stonehenge and Dover Castle near you.  DC is on the to do list, friends have told me it's great. 

Stonehenge is a mix of all that is good and bad about the British.  The rocks themselves are really cool, even if you can't get near them.  The typical bad things are that you can't get anywhere near them unless you pay some huge amount for a special tour.  For some reason the horrible impact of visitors being near disappears if they are paying a ton of money. 

Also, they force you to park at the visitors centre and take a horrible smelly old crap bus to get to the stones.  Walking is better if the weather is nice. 

You'd think they could do better than a fleet of old desiel buses that ruin the feel of the place.  Electric buses would be a start, and easy to do.  How about a deal with Google for self driving cars?   Google would probably happily pay for it so that we forget they don't pay taxes.

What?!

The first time I went in 1987, you could drive right up to the stones but the last time I went to Stonehenge in 1996, we went four times in a month ferrying US friends there and we could not touch the stones but we could walk up pretty close to them. There was a rope around them. That's a bummer that you can't do that anymore.

My favorite place was Old Sarum near Salisbury Cathedral where I would roll down the hill with my four-year-old son. He's 25 now and I'm pretty sure you can't do that now either. There's always Avesbury...


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Right on, Avesbury is fantastic and usually where I tell people to visit rather than Stonehenge.  It's National Trust but still more or less free.  It's a whole village with stones all over the place, none as big as Stonehenge but there's more of them and you can commune with them however you like.

I don't know if it's still there, but there used to be a bakery in Avebury that made the most fabulous scones. I think it was called Stones. My mouth waters at the memory--- they were delicious.