Bearnard B. Behr on Route 66…an adventure across the nation!: Bike show is over, now it's time to explore England!

Wasting time in the English countryside!

After we packed up the displays from the show it was time to say goodbye to Birmingham for a bit. David and Gary got everything loaded into the car and we headed down the motorway (on the wrong side of the road) to David's in Overton. It only took us less than two hours to get a quarter of the way across the country! In the USA this would take a couple of days, not hours! After a good night's rest we had a bit of breakfast and went to go see H-C Travel and the rest of Overton, a nice little town in the English countryside.

Now that we were done working it was time to go for a bit of a walk and see the country. We walked around the little town of Overton, stopping occasionally to see the local shops and the town in general. A very nice little country town, a place even Gary said he would like to live in. Sure there aren't any mountians like we're used to but nice nonetheless.

We stopped off on our walk around town to take a look at the local church, older than almost all of the places back home in Colorado.

Gary wasn't used to the narrow, small little roads we saw all over England, good thing he wasn't driving anywhere, plus the big dummy would probably end up on the wrong side of the road anyway. After the first day of wandering around Overton we went back for a wonderful dinner with David and Penny, a bit of conversation and then off to bed for a nice night's rest.

The next day we got up, had a nice cup of tea and walked up to the train station to take a day trip down to Salisbury to see some friends and the local attractions. It was about a mile to the train station, but a very nice walk. We got on the train and were very impressed at how nice they were and how easy it was to get around the local area this way. A quick 30 minutes later we were in Salisbury and got a ride from one of our friends from a previous tour. He was nice enough to take us up to go see one of the oldest mysteries in England, Stonehenge! Just a bit out of town it was nice to go see, although a bit expensive and they wouldn't let us get within fifty feet from the actual stones. I asked why and the nice people looking after it said that they had so many people visiting that it might be damaging to them to allow everyone get that close.

But we had a good time looking around and taking some pictures and video. We then met another friend from a previous tour who was nice enough to drive us around the local area to see the rest of the countryside. After Stonehenge we drove down to a small local town to see a little oddity in front of the village church.

Apparently the locals have been keeping track of the price of bread here for over two hundred years, carving the price into a piece of stone and placing it in the wall surrounding the local church. The stones give the year and the price for a Gallon of bread, which gives you some idea of inflation over a very long period of time. We never found out just exactly why this was done, but we guessed that this was so everyone paid the same price. Those silly humans!

After a quick picture, it was time to travel onward to see another local landmark. During the second world war there were a very large amount of both American and British soldiers stationed in the area around the airfields set up in the area to defend the English Isles and bomb Germany.
While they were in the area they discovered that just under a foot or so of earth the ground was comprised of almost pure white chalk. Having discovered this someone came up with the idea to carve away the topsoil in the shape of the regimental symbol, and then all of the units in the area followed suit. It's even visible on Google earth, and is just a little ease-southeast of the little town of Fovant.