Southampton

Oct 26th
Southampton

I actually did something today in port!! There was an option available to go on a crew tour to Stonehenge, that old circle of big rocks standing on end, so I paid the $30 and went on it. We left around 9 AM, and after about an hour’s drive from Southampton, through Salisbury, we made it to the ancient site. Oddly enough, the entrance fee wasn’t included in the tour cost, something that I’m going to try to get reimbursed for because it’s ridiculous that this wasn’t mentioned before hand, so that ended up being about $10 with my student ID card. So our group of 31 people went in, picked up our “audio wands” so we could have a verbal tour to go along with what we were looking at, and spent a couple hours in the area. It was kind of a neat thing to do, but something you really only need to do once, cause as you can imagine, it’s just a bunch of rocks. Sure it’s cool because it’s thousands of years old and still mysterious, but it’s a bunch of rocks. So I took a million pictures of the same thing, slowly made my walk around the perimeter of the stones (they don’t let you actually go inside the circle), and eventually walked back to the bus. Something weird about the site is that they have these mystical “blue stones”, of which are supposed to be warm to the touch at all times. They did have a blue stone at the entrance for us to see if it was true, and a regular big rock like those on the site for the sake of comparison. And believe it or not, the blue stone was slightly warmer. Now, it was like 40 or 50 degrees, and they were both cold, but the blue stone felt less cold. The other stone felt damp though, probably intensifying the cold sensation, but hey, I’ll believe in mystical stones for the sake of my $30. Then we made our way back to the ship, had a passenger boat drill, played a welcome aboard show, parade, and that’s about it. Justin, the musical director, is back this cruise after being on leave for a death in the family, so its nice to see him again after 2 weeks of being down a trumpet. Two sea days ahead, then Funchal. Thanks for reading!