Medieval Lacock, Ashbury Henge, Dublin

Lacock Village Church
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This morning we awake to another overcast and raining day. The first task was to bath in our bath-only bathroom. The bath had a heritage style faucet with a shower head that you could switch to. There was not however a shower screen or anywhere on the wall to place the showerhead, so the shower had to be accomplished by sitting in the bath so as not to drench the rest of the room. I of course kinked my back getting in and out of the bath - arrghh!  We did however have large batb sheets to wrap ourselves in afterwards. Down at breakfast we were once again offerred a full breakfast with cereal, yoghurt and stewed fruit, eggs, bacon, tomato, mushrooms and toast. We also met the other guests at the house, a couple from Ireland. We enjoyed breakfast immensely and chatted away with our hosts about their ancesers. Ginny also provided us with instructions of a couple of things to do in the morning before we set off to the airport.

Lacock Village - old style character and charm
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After packing up, we said goodbye to our hosts and their dogs, Winnie and staffy, silva the smiling labrador and the older labrador whose name now evades me. We first headed out to Lacock village, museum and abbey. When we arrived the museum was not yet open, so we walked through this old town, over the cobblestone streets.

Seen one Henge, haven't seen them all...

We then drove on to Ashbury, the location of another Stone Henge style stone circle, but larger and still accessible directly to the public. Money to maintain the site is raised via the car parking fees of $5 pounds. We were then free to walk around the town and let ourselves into the field gates and walk up to the large stones in both the inner and outer circle. There are only a few of the original stones left, but you are left wondering for what purpose these stones where placed. We walked about halfway around the walking path, which was slippery with white mud. It was now 12:30 and time to head towards the airport.

Houses in Lacock
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This drive took us two hours through heavy rain, but that doesn't seem to worry the drivers on the large motorways. We dropped off the car and checked in about 2:45pm for our 5pm flight. It was nice to sit and relax in the Brittish Airways lounge and know that all our remaining travel arrnagements were already decided and we didn't have to think about too much. The rainy weather has also refreshed my cold which has me diving for the tissue box frequently.

The flight to Dublin went smoothly, with a light cold dinner on offer. On arrival we seemed to wait forever for our luggage to come around the conveyor belt. Finally half an hour later we were in our taxi and heading to our hotel. Our african taxi driver said not one word to us and spent the entire trip talking in some unknown language on his mobile. It took us about 20mins to get to the hotel, where we paid our driver in pounds and checked in. We dumped our bags in our room and rushed down to the Terrace to meet our tour director and fellow travelling companions for a drink. The meeting time had been 6pm and it we arrived close to 7pm, but most people were still happily sitting around and chatting. During this time we found out that Ireland is actually on the Euro, and that we have greatly overpaid the taxi driver, who of course made no attempt to correct our mistake. Our tour director Mike seems like a great guy, very easy going and eager to please.

The Red Lion Pub - love the thatch roof
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We decided that given we had a two night stay at this hotel, it was a good time to do some washing, so headed up to the room, and spent the next hour or so looking after that, and plying our drying clothes lines wherever we could in the bathroom - it looked like a chinese laundry! I was so tired I just flaked out, my travel blog once again being given a miss.