Trip #1 and the zoo

So today is day 4 of my 5 day weekend. It started on Friday, when we left for our first trip, Bath and the West country.

After a VERY early start, we stopped in Avebury, home of a henge much larger than Stonehenge. Avebury's is a bit less impressive, though, because the rocks are smaller and fewer of the rocks have been excavated. It was still neat, though, and there were lots of sheep.
Our second stop was in Glastonbury. I really enjoyed that--there's a ruined abbey which is beautiful. We had a tour guide who pretended to be from the past who told us all about the history of the Abbey. We also climbed to the top of the Tor. The Tor is a big, natural hill, where you can see for miles and miles at the top. Someday the pictures will make it to Facebook and you can see what I mean. It was really cool.
Stop #3 on Friday was to Wells, home of a really impressive cathedral. It was much different from Winchester, but equally beautiful and interesting. They have "scissor" arches in the nave, something that I don't think any other cathedral around here has. Again, someday there will be pictures somewhere.
THEN we finally made it to Bath, our pit stop for the evening. We didn't explore too much; just had dinner and then most of the IC people hung out at a pub for a while.

Our lodgings at the Bath YMCA were quite good, and they fed us free breakfast Sunday morning. We toured the Roman Baths (appropriately located in the town of Bath), and Bill took us on a walk to see some of the really interesting architecture of the town. A few of us stopped at the costume museum, then we got back on the bus for our last stop, Stonehenge.
It really is an impressive place. It's sort of unfortunate that they won't let you get near it anymore, but there wereTONS of people that day (miraculously, we had perfect weather the whole trip), and it was nice to be able to get unobstructed pictures. The coach brought us back to the ICLC in time for dinner on Saturday.

Aaand then my second weekend started. :) Elizabeth, Molly and I hung around the flat for most of Sunday, getting some of our actual school work done. Today Elizabeth and I went to the London Zoo! It was really fun, and we spent pretty much the whole afternoon there. Now we're at the London Centre, and we're going to figure out what kinds of free things we can do in London tomorrow, since our internship still hasn't started.

So, why doesn't everyone do this?? Sure, we study a little, but mostly we just get to live in London and go amazing places. We just booked a weekend trip to Barcelona! It's not till December, but we're still pretty excited.