Ridgeway Trip II: To Avebury!

 Kim arrived about 10pm, by which time I was zonked out.  But she had to wake me up, because she'd left her phone in the taxi and needed to use my phone to call it.  She had to wait quite a while for the taxi driver to bring her the phone, as he forgot to do it after finishing with his fare.  We both had a hard time getting to sleep after that and made up for it by sleeping quite late.  We had a reasonably nice breakfast (fruit salad!) and walked to the train station.  Teresa's suitcase wheels were dying and we passed a little shop that sold and repaired bags, so she made a deal to get new wheels.  Then she just got a new, almost identical suitcase instead for not a bad deal.  We showed Kim the town hall and church, and got tickets for Swindon.  The railway station is a lot bigger than we expected, and our train went from platform 8.  These were all Great Western Railway trains, with an engagingly old-fashioned logo and dark-green cars that made me think of Thomas the Tank Engine.

The train was packed.  Kim and Teresa got seats, but Mom and I spent the trip standing in the end space by the doors.  This was fine with me because I snagged a spot directly below an air vent.  It wasn't all that far, and we could see lots of countryside.  We got off the train in Swindon and it was raining for reals!  We walked a block or two to the bus station and had less than half an hour to wait for our bus, #49.  It cost two pounds and took us quite a way around Swindon before dropping us off in front of the Red Lion pub in Avebury.

Luckily the pub folks were willing to store our luggage while we wandered around.  I should have left my backpack too!  My shoulder was tired by the end.  We walked around Avebury, but first we needed a little lunch, so we stopped in the museum cafe and got pasties to share.  Our timing was pretty good; an absolute downpour started up and we could sit it out with our snacks.    When it slacked off we zipped over to the visitors' center, which was the museum last time I visited.  I'd never been to Avebury Manor, but you can usually visit it these days, except in January it was flooded after massive rainfall and so they're restoring it.  It was sad to hear about the devastation.  

We went over to the new museum, which is quite nice, and chatted with the lady there (she had been on the bus with us).  We took a peek at the manor garden but didn't go in as it's another ticket, and visited the church.  It started Saxon and was expanded over the centuries, so it's got something of everything, including a Saxon stone baptismal font that was carved with images of Jesus trampling dragons in the 1100s.  It started pouring again, and when we thought it was letting up we made a run for the lychgate.  It was not letting up.  There was thunder and yet more pouring rain as we stood in the lychgate, and when it wasn't so bad we made another run for the Henge Shop.

Avebury Manor, sadly flooded

The churchyard

View of the church in the rain from the lychgate

The Henge shop is full of woo as well as regular touristy stuff -- my oldest loved it last time.  I bought fridge magnets for both kids there.  The yin/yang dreamcatcher was pretty egregious though.  We also spotted a postbox topped with a massive knitted Green Man.   We stopped in the secondhand bookshop, which is the Avebury equivalent of the Friends of the Library booksale, and I got a pin and a lovely book of tales by Arthur Quiller-Couch.  

By then it had cleared up enough to walk around the stones, and we had a great time wandering around and walking along the top of the earthwork.  We had to get down when we ran into grazing sheep that were fenced off, and a National Trust guy looking for an injured lamb.  Then the rain came on again, so we visited a very classy shop we'd missed before, with wool blankets, books, cards, and preserves, etc.  I bought some ginger fudge and postcards.  Out back was another set of stones, so we walked along those.  Just when I was ready to take a lovely photo of stones with the church tower in the background, a couple of hippies were climbing on the stones and not getting out of the way.  They then followed us down a footpath, disparaging car drivers all the way.  We waited for them to move along a bit from the sheep-filled meadow before we went in to look at some more stones.  (This was only a week or so before solstice, and the whole town was kind of battening down the hatches in preparation for the thousands of people who show up for that.)

By then we were getting quite cold and damp and it was almost our dinner time, so we went to the pub and got seated early.  We had a pretty fantastic meal -- Camembert to start, leek and cheese pies for me and Kim.  (Come on, I had to get the leek asparagus cheese pie.)  Then Mike came and fetched us in his van and we arrived at Dorwyn Manor, our B&B for the night.  We have two rooms on two staircases that face opposite directions, very cute.  As we were getting settled (Mom and Theresa in the Sanctuary, and Kim and I in the Henge), Mike also brought in a Japanese lady all by herself who clearly didn't speak any English.  She was going to visit a farmer in the area who is also Japanese.  We invited her down to the library to socialize a little bit and we got a lot communicated despite the near-total lack of language.    It was quite fun.  We gave her a ginger fudge and she gave us Japanese snacks, before we all succumbed to exhaustion.