The Bus Tour

Two things really should've raised a mental red flag the day I took a bus tour:

1. Our tour guide wasn't British and had an Eastern European "Count Dracula"-ish accent.
2. And she was very obviously some kind of evil villain.

I can't remember her name but it must've been like, Eva Margaret Satan Hitlerchick. As our group of eager young college students boarded the tour bus for a foray to the English countryside to see Stonehenge, Salisbury Cathedral, and the City of Bath & Rubber Duckies, she gave each of us a good, hard look. 

The kind of look that says "I will suck out your youth and feed it to the spawn of the Devil, and we will strike down the forces of good on this plane and defy your God."

And then she was like "Pleasure to have you with us, please have a seat!"

It was bone chilling.

I'm completely convinced this woman was using her voice to devour our souls, because the entire 5 hour trip, she never stopped talking.

Ever.

Anything that popped into her head, she just said. She gave us the over-5000 year history of Stonehenge before we even got there.

"To your left you'll see a gas station," Hitlerchick said in her droll, monotone Count Dracula voice. "I don't want to hear any Americans on this bus complain about the price of gas. It may look like 3 pounds per liter, but remember in American dollars, this price is astronomical. Simply disgraceful," she said as every American on the bus sunk well into their seats, checked their phones, and practiced Canadian accents in case of an emergency.

 "As we go down this road, you'll notice to your left... far...far...into...the distance... Windsor Castle, the residence of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second. Yes, this is where she lives. It happens to be underneath a major airplane traffic area, but she has never complained... not once...."

"Well gee, that's interesting bu---" but I never finished the thought because she was still going.

"And she is well into her 80s and in perfect health. Prince Charles is taking over some of her duties," AND I KID YOU NOT I THINK THE SUN WAS BLOTTED RED WITH EVIL AS SHE SAID THIS "but you know he yearns to be King."

"Great." I thought. "I'm getting a tour of Britain from Satan."

Yeah, but anyway, pictures!

There it is! Stonehenge. 

My Dad kept telling me to keep my mind open to psychological phenomena that is apparently inherent to the site. 

I probably would've felt the souls of Druids or something, but they were obscured by the flocks of tourists trying to get photos of themselves at angles where it looked like they were leaning on the rocks and saying things like "Maybe its like, uh, uh, an early system of weather reporting because its outside and in a circle." -Hey, thanks, Al. Obviously not much going on in your neck of the woods.

"I like that boulder. That is a nice boulder."

As we were boarding the bus after Stonehenge, evil tour guide stopped me and asked, just me "So what do you think the purpose of 'the stonehenge' is?"

I, very intelligently, went "Duuuuuuuuh, the world may never know!" and ran on the tour bus, aware that I just used the Tootsie Pop slogan as an attempt to make a major insight about a World Heritage site.

This is Salisbury Cathedral, the location of the Magna Carta, the document that basically defines democracy and is at the heart of every democratic document as we know it today.



I wasn't allowed to take a picture of it for security reasons, but I can tell you it's about the size of a normal piece of paper, and whoever wrote it as REALLY neat handwriting. It's all square and blocky, yet flowy at the same time and precise and yeah I'm bored too, let's move along...

Next was the City of Bath, which did not have as many rubber ducks as I anticipated, but it was awfully pretty.



 The City of Bath is also the location of the Roman Baths, which is where this Bath-Themed city got its name from, I guess. Still no rubber ducks.

The main area of the Roman Baths. You'll notice that, obviously, the pool boy has been dead 2000 years, and they don't have it in the budget to hire a new guy.

                                                Heh. Look, Marvin the Martian.

Dead Roman, and his face recreated. ...He looks like a disgruntled elementary school gym teacher.

The kind of guy that wears a track suit every day and makes dodgeball teams with logic only known to him, because somehow all the kids with violent streaks wind up on one side of the floor and it turns into Gym Class Holocaust and the kid with the low attention span gets beaned on the side of the EAR, OUCH, WHY DID YOU HIT MY EAR?---
...
Sorry. Flashbacks.

This is the underground hot water spring that feeds the baths.

You can drink this.

It tastes like bloody mouth water you rinse with at the dentist's.