St. John's Gate

St. John's Gate is the last remaining part of the city wall that once surrounded Bristol. On top was the Church of St. John the Baptist. Queen Victoria I entered Bristol through this gate on her visit here.

On a side note, see that guy in the white shirt in the bottom left corner? He was completely drunk and annoying. He kept wanting us to take his picture until Gavin finally got him to leave.

Lost in Translation

I mentioned earlier that we had a little snafu with Gavin's work shirts. After spending time picking out what ones he wanted to take on the trip, they got left hanging in the closet at home. Fortunately, he had packed a couple in the carry on in case his luggage got lost. We went out one night after work to buy him some more.

However, the measurements are done a little differently out here. They have the same neck sizes, but instead of arm lengths, they have chest width. In centimeters. Let's just say we estimated wrong.

What's really funny is a couple of the shirts we got fit perfectly and a couple are huge, like this. We thought we were getting the same size on all of them...

SS Great Britan

I went and toured the SS Great Britain, which was a passenger steam ship from the 1800's. When it was launched, it was the largest vessel. It's home dock was in Bristol and it's main route was to Australia, but it served a brief stint in a war. It was abandoned in the Falkland Islands until 1970, where it was brought back to Bristol and restored.

This is a sign post on the harbor. It reminded me that we are a long way from home.

The ship is actually dry docked, but they have designed it to look like it is floating in the water.

Here is the dry dock room. The humidity is kept really low in there, I think they said it was equivalent to the Arizona desert. I was struggling to breath in there! I swore when I moved to DC that I would never just used to the humidity, but looks like I did!

Looking up at the water. It was really serene in that room.

A view from the front of the ship.

The original anchor.

The underside of the ship. You can see how much it is rusting, thus the incredibly dry room.

View of the back of the ship.

It is a huge ship.

Some of the original china from first class. It has the name of the ship printed on it.

Looking over the front of the ship.

Looking up one of the masts.

There were a lot of places on the ship that were for first class passengers only.

This is where they kept the animals on board. The cow kept randomly mooing at people as they walked by and there is a pig next to the cow.

Some manic guy kept wanting to take my picture and kept trying to pose me but he would take the picture before I could get into the pose he wanted.

View of Bristol.

Stairway going under the deck.

First class accommodations.

This is the quarantine room. I think this model is puking, but it looks a bit like that girl from the Ring to me.

The engine room.

First class bathroom.

First class kitchen

Steerage accommodations

The notice telling steerage passengers to behave

First class dining room.

Detail of the front of the ship

Front view of the ship

Back of the ship.

Bristol's harbor side.

View of Bristol from the harbor side.

The whole ship.

It was really cool to see something that is such a big part of Bristol's history.

Avebury

Near Stonehenge is a town called Avebury, which has it's own stone circles. Unlike Stonehenge, you can go right up to the stones and a lot of the stones are in people's back yards. They believe that the stone circles are about 5000 years old. It's the largest stone circles in England with the outer circle having a diameter of 1,088 feet and the inner circles having a diameter of342 feet.

Some of the rocks are really big.

Some of the stones in some one's back yard.

One of the things I love about England is most of the street signs look like this. Very quaint. Although, they can be pretty well hidden and it can make it hard to navigate the city.

Jeeves

Our rental car has a built in navigation system. It's really cool. It pops out of the dashboard and the controls are right next to the wind shield wipers. It's actually really cool. The voice of the navigation is this deep, proper British voice, so I have named the navigation Jeeves. We like Jeeves. He helps out a lot, especially getting around all of the round abouts and bear rights or left, but sometimes he yells at us. Once, Gavin pressed the give guidance button because we weren't on the route and couldn't figure out how to get back on the highlighted route. Jeeves answered in an angry voice, "Please refer to the map". He was done with our incompetency for the night.

Here's Jeeves.

Here's our rental car for now. We may trade it in for something smaller. It's a beast to get around the narrow streets. It's a brand new Volvo. It only had about 200 miles on it when we rented it.

The car has a cool trick. Once you lock it, the side mirrors tuck into the side of the car.