London Part II

Right, we're in Sweden now, so time to catch up a bit...

Thursday night, we had a dinner-and-show deal to see the Lion King at the Lyceum, with dinner beforehand at a restaurant called Fire & Stone. They specialized (or specialised, as they spell it cross the pond) in exotic pizzas themed for different areas of the world. Pretty decent actually!



So the next day we had booked an Evan Evans bus tour to Salisbury (there's quite a lovely Gothic cathedral there (no, it doesn't wear black lipstick and mope around a lot)), Stonehenge, and Bath.
The trip started out great although the weather looked a bit worse. (The weather had been quite good actually.) Still, the cathedral was quite amazing.





Now they warned us not to be late to return to the bus for the next section of the tour because they only had a fixed time with the driver and it would mean they'd have to take time off of another event. Well, they were serious! We must have been 1 minute late, and as we came out of the cathedral, ZOOM! off goes the bus without us! Did they take a headcount or anything. Apparently not. So here we were, stuck in Salisbury!
We wound up having to catch another local bus from Salisbury to Stonehenge, in the desperate hope of catching up with our bus there. It was a tour bus so it wasn't cheap, 22 pounds I think. Meanwhile it was raining fairly well. OK, so we wait for the bus...catch it... get to Stonehenge and see our original bus pull away just as we pull in. I jump out, bang on the side of the original bus as it's pulling away, but to no avail.
There's another bus from the same Evan Evans tour company that's there that agrees to take us on but it's leaving in a few minutes. I run around the monument taking pictures quickly, but didn't dare take too long about it. Figure I may as well get at least something out of this disaster.




We then took the other Evan Evans tour bus to Bath and finally caught up with our original tour. They seemed entirely unapologetic about it, implying it was our own fault for being late. The other tour bus driver didn't even seem to believe us that they wouldn't wait for missing people. Anyway, we didn't really feel up to going to see the Roman baths themselves by this time and were fairly hungry, so we grabbed something to eat. Alas, we had to take it to go because there wasn't enough time and we sure didn't dare risk them leaving without us this time, because they wanted us to rejoin our original bus.

As a bit of a protest, we brought our hot food on board the bus and ate it on the way back once we hit some evening London traffic, against their rules. But hey, what were they going to do at that point. I enjoyed some slightly cold fish and chips, and Aprille had her curry. No one said anything and we staggered back to our hotel.


Arr, Roaming Pirate doesn't recommend Evan Evans Tours!