The story so far

Greetings from the bar of the De Vere Hotel at
Shaw Ridge, in Swindon. Sean and I are
currently watching the England vs. Portugal
World Cup match, and they're going into penalty
kicks. It's crazy rowdy in here. An entire wedding
reception even wandered in here to watch the match.

Let me catch you up on yesterday and today. The
Virgin Atlantic flight was relatively
uneventful (someone misplaced their passport at
security, but made it onto the flight in the
nick of time; also, someone else's instrument
didn't make it on the plane, but I believe it's
en route now). The flight attendants were the
nicest and cheeriest I have ever seen. We were
all seated in the same area of the plane, but
we did a lot of seat-swapping as the
assignments had turned out somewhat
inconveniently.

We landed at Heathrow around 7:00 AM and were
met by our guide Richard. By 8:10 AM, we had
boarded our cream-colored coach and met our
driver Terry, who warned us against using the
toilet on the bus. We were each given a number
to help Richard keep track of us.

We started our westbound journey with two
unscheduled stops - one in the town of
Marlborough, and one at the stone formation at
Avebury (which is larger than Stonehenge,
although the stones themselves are smaller.)
We passed by Silbury Hill, which is the largest
manmade mound in Europe.

Our next stop was Lacock Abbey, where we did a
self-guided tour, and some of us explored the
shops in the village. By this time, we were all hot
and tired. It is an outright lie that England doesn't get hot.
The temperature today was over 90 degrees F,
and air conditioning isn't all that common. We
were ready to head to the hotel and get cleaned
up and rested up. The hotel is nice (but no
a/c!) and is surrounded on one side by Pizza
Hut and on the other by a strip mall which
includes a bowling alley. So, you know, we
could really paint the town in our copious free
time. :)

We have dinner in about half an hour, so I'll
leave you now. Our Internet connection is
weak, so I probably won't be able to upload any
photos tonight, but hopefully it will work
tomorrow...the day of our first concert!