In the morning it was wind.

Thursday we took just our two girls, loaded up the rental Prius (said “PRY-us” here) and headed south toward Stonehenge. Because of traffic on the north edge of London, it took us 3 1/2 hours to get there. I think we could have made it all the way to Cardiff in that same amount of time.

We made it to the Salisbury plain and it was actually a little sunny. “Sunny” here in April means that the sun tried really hard to break through the clouds. We felt blessed because at least it wasn’t raining.

Hope listened to the audio tour the whole time and later could even recite why Stonehenge is named Stonehenge. The best learning takes place out of doors, I’m convinced.

By then the wind had kicked up across the downs, and although it wasn’t raining yet, it was very cold. We stopped for homemade peanut butter and jelly sandwiches by the “druid” near the entrance who was calling for petition signers to restore Stonehenge to its original environment on the plain (essentially, get rid of the roads and people).

Northbound, toward the city of Warwick, it began to rain. Hard. Not like silly California rain. We drove through Oxford but being that the visibility was zero, it could have been Alaska or Seattle for all I knew.

Californians don’t own Wellies (rainboots) because we don’t have a need for them. So when my sister-in-law a few weeks ago told me to bring our boots, I probably should have gone out to purchase them. I. Had. No. Idea. how wet my feet would get this week.

I’ve been soggy for 8 days.

Warwick castle (minus the creepy million step spiral staircase up and down in the towers) was amazing. We watched a falconer tame a bald eagle and I paid 3 pounds for Hope to shoot some real arrows. We walked through the halls and learned how people would have lived in Tudor times, the 18th and 19th centuries. The dry, warm insides of the castle (only warm now in 2009 because of forced air heating) were prefered to the wet, slippery courtyard.

We left Elizabethan England and headed to the McDonalds on the motorway toward home. Although a 14 course Tudor-style feast would have helped the girl’s empty tummies, the chicken nuggets and milk boxes were just fine.