Gentlemen on the Road, Part 1: The Truth about Stonehenge

Every few years Roland and his two long-time buddies embark on a Gentlemen tour. After a fantastic visit of the Montreal Jazz Festival four years ago the plan for this year was a trip to the Southwestern part of England. Frank (right) and myself met in Germany for a very very early flight from Dusseldorf to Heathrow (the cab driver bringing us to the airport was almost complaining), while we had to pick up Stephan who arrived from Sweden at Gatwick, of course after picking up a rental car at Heatrow first.

This was in fact quite a difficult task, as I had decide to go with a cheap option that did not have an office right at the airport, but a bit outside in one of the Holiday Inn Hotels that are scattered around Heathrow. We had to take a Shuttle Bus for 5£ per person that took quite a while to get there as our tour even included a change of drivers. Then our customer service representative was obviously not used to having foreign clients, as she did not manage to open her mouth while communicating. The car was not at the expected spot, and when we found it the tank was dryer than a sandbag in the desert. So we had to get used to the wrong side of the road, find a gas station, get to Gatwick, find Stephan at one of the Hilton Hotels, and then we were on our way. We thought...

Picking up Stephan at Gatwick

Eating healthy stuff

But unfortunately we had not taken the English weekend traffic on a bank holiday weekend in account. The destination of the day was Torquay, with stops in Winchester and Stonehenge; but we stumbled from one traffic jam into the next, quickly cancelled Winchester, and continued crawling towards Stonehenge. At some point traffic improved on the two lane highway, and so did our moods, until a one mile before Stonehenge an English traffic planer had the fantastic idea to merge two lanes into one, which caused another one hour delay. But to our surprise traffic did not get better after the merge, until we suddenly realized the reason: we were able to see Stonehenge from the road! And so were all the other drivers and their families, which meant that each and every car stopped for a minute or so, people took their photographs and then continued on their ways. So when it was our turn we stopped for a minute or so, took our photographs, and then we were on our way again. So all the romantic photos of Stonehenge, with fantastic skies and setting suns, they all are fake.

Stonehenge looks like this:

But obviously - when for once there is no car in the way - you can make it look a bit better:

In consideration of the crowds at Stonehenge and our growing feeling of hunger we changed plans again and settled for a nice American diner just a few miles further, where we finally had our breakfast at 2 pm.

From there it was a rather event less ride to Torquay where the weather had improved tremendously. We strolled around the harbour for a bit, enjoyed the sun and the scenery and settled for some English pub food in a freehouse right adjacent to our B&B where we let the day fade out with some good (albeit warm) British beer.