Day Trip Days

These days have been flying by! Yesterday was our Stonehenge and Bath trip. It was really short but a good day overall. We went to Stonehenge first, where it was freezing. You can’t walk through the stones anymore because it is roped off. We took our photos around it and hung out on the bus to hide from the cold wind.
We all slept on the bus until we reached Bath. It was a really cute town and a lot of shops. For those of you who haven’t heard of Bath, it was where the Romans would bath themselves. There was a little museum and there were the original entrances, paths, and baths to look at.

We grabbed lunch at this place called Market. There was a lot of seating outside and considering it was a beautiful day we decided to dine there. We got lots of yummy food, most of us bought hamburgers (typical) and we lounged outside for awhile and enjoyed the good weather.

We went to the Olde Candy Shoppe and grabbed sweets for the ride home. Me and Brittany shared our chocolates, mine a cookie crumble and hers an assorted bag of truffles that had champagne, caramel, mocha, and all kinds of goody goodness inside. We slept the rest of the way home, which was a 3 and ½ hour ride home.



That night we ventured off to Notting Hill and went to this place my old roommate recommended to me. It is called Churchill Arms off of Kensington Church Street. When you walk in it looks like your standard English pub. There were a lot of people crowded indoor and outdoors and when you walked to the back there was a Thai restaurant decorated with vines and butterflies. It was such a great atmosphere and the food was amazing! I had pad thai and it was moist, spicy, and had delicious peanut sauce. We sat at our table for a long while after dinner to chat and then finally headed home to go to bed.

This morning we left for our Oxford daytrip. There were 96 of us, but not all from the same schools. Only a few of us from UF had signed up to go. We got off at Gloucester and hopped on our charter bus. When we got to Oxford it was pouring rain and I had forgotten my umbrella. Good thing we were on walking tour! You know I ran into the nearest store to buy an umbrella. It made me feel less miserable. We walked around and learned about the school, but we ditched the tour half way through to go to Turf Tavern for lunch which is the oldest pub at Oxford.



I finally had my serving of bangers and mash and it was tasty! Me and Lily split an apple pie with custard after. We decided to hit up the library after because that is where they filmed two different scenes from Harry Potter, one of them being the infirmary. We pretended to time travel as well, like in Harry Potter of course. Then we headed to a souvenir shop and grabbed our Uni tees for ourselves and friends.
We met at Carfax tower to meet our group at 2:00 and went to the church, which is where the Great Hall in Harry Potter is filmed. Most of our trip consisted of us getting more excited of Harry Potter than the actual school. We took our pictures, went and saw the chalk board Albert Einstein had written on, then looked at more of the colleges and then we went to the book store to buy some books to read. I grabbed The Last Song. That is the book that has the movie with Miley Cirus in it. I am already on chapter nine and I can’t wait to finish it on the plane. I also bought an interesting book called The Good, the Bad, and the Dumped, so I will have plenty of reading to keep me occupied.



When we got home we all went back to our rooms to sleep and pack. Me and Patricia blasted music in our room while we packed away our things in our air tight bags reminiscing on the trip and wondering where the days went.
Tonight we grabbed some pizza from a nearby pizza place and ate it in Courtney’s kitchen. It was very low-key and chill but also relaxing. I needed a night to just take a breather and recap our trip.

Now I am back in my room, going to read my book. Tomorrow is my last day in London and of the trip. I am very sad to be leaving. We have our dinner cruise tomorrow night on the Thames and I know it will be a cry-fest the whole time.
We are hitting up Old Dutch (the big pancake house) for breakfast, a market by Liverpool Street, and then me and Lauren are going to gander at some shops by Sloane Square and then come back to get ready for our buffet dinner and boat cruise!

I’ll try to update tomorrow night if I can. But if not, my next post will be from America!

Pip Pip,
Leah