Bristol

When I told people I was headed for Bristol, they almost all looked at my with raised eyebrows, and asked "why Bristol?" as if a tourist wouldn't ever bother going there. I'll admit, I hadn't really heard of Bristol before and had no idea what there was to see, but I met a few people from Bristol when I was in Thailand, and I thought I may as well take a little detour to go for a visit! It was the first time in a while that I really got to relax. I spent the first two days relaxing at my hosts' house, catching up on sleep and making plans for the next two days.

I finally met up with my friend Declan, that I met in Thailand and we went for breakfast, while trying to decide what to do. I mentioned that I wanted to go to Stonehenge at some point while I was in England, and he said he'd never been, so there it was! Our plan for the day. It was only about an hour drive away, so we headed out to see the rocks.

I'll be totally honest, it was a little underwhelming. We couldn't go inside the circle or touch the stones, we could only look, so after about 20 minutes, we'd had enough. The most interesting part was the visitor centre, which had a ton of information about Stonehenge's history, the theories of what is was used for, how it was created, etc. There was human remains that were found in the land, all kinds of other little treasures and artefacts found on the site, adding more questions and theories as to why it was created, but also diagrams and videos that showed the evolution of Stonehenge. We did a small detour on our way back to see Woodhenge, another similar site, though this one was made of wood and they recreated it with cement stumps... there really wasn't much there, but it was still interesting to see something so old still standing, that we still haven't figured out all its mysteries and most likely never will.

I spent my last day in Bristol exploring, trying to see as many things as possible. I started at the ss Great Britain, a legendary boat that travelled over 1 million miles in its lifetime! You could walk along the bottom of the ship in the dry dock, and walk through the shit, many of the rooms re-decorated to their former glory.

I also went to the aquarium, though that was extremely disappointing... It took me about 35 minutes to walk through the whole thing, and the biggest fish there was a catfish and some tiny sharks (the catfish were bigger than the sharks).... Oh well! It was something to do....

My last stop was the Cabot Tower. It was pretty high up on the TripAdvisor list of things to do, so I thought I may as well give it a try. It couldn't be worse than the aquarium! This was a beautiful old tower that you could climb and get a great view of the city. I was slightly dizzy from the spiral staircase, but the view was worth it.

All in all, Bristol was a beautiful city and it has so much more to offer than what I saw and if I had the chance, I would definitely go back and see more of the city.