Stonehenge Squall

Yesterday turned out to be one of the craziest experiences I've ever had sightseeing in England.

First, there was the tube strike. The lines around my brother's hotel were completely shut down, so I was afraid that getting from there to Victoria Station -- where we planned to catch our tour bus to Stonehenge -- might be a challenge. I took a Thameslink train and got down there at 6:30 a.m. just in case we had to walk the whole way. But city buses were running and at that early hour they weren't too crowded, so as it turned out we caught a bus from Bloomsbury Square, right around the corner from the hotel, all the way to Victoria Station. We even had enough time once there to have breakfast at Starbucks.

While riding the bus, we passed this guy (above) apparently selling that very mod abstract painting outside Green Park station. Then we saw the same guy and painting outside Victoria Station, which is where I took that photo. The likelihood of seeing the same guy with his artwork in both locations -- which are not close together -- seemed quite coincidental.

We left London on the tour bus at about 8:30 a.m., and drove about two hours to get to Stonehenge.
 

When we first got there, the sun was shining. We got off the bus, the driver praised the sunny weather, and though we'd brought umbrellas we didn't think we'd need them. So we left them in the luggage rack above our seats.

After quickly collecting our wristbands to prove we'd paid admission, we started to walk to the monument, which is quite a distance from the parking area. We saw ominous gray clouds in the western sky, and I tried to go back to the bus for our umbrellas, but the bus was locked and the driver nowhere in evidence. So we soldiered on without them.

We walked through fields of sheep and even some woods before coming to Stonehenge, all beneath more or less sunny skies.

And suddenly, everything changed.

You can see the transition in this video. Dry to begin with, a shot of the advancing clouds, and suddenly crazy mayhem with rain. (There's a lot of background noise in the video because of the wind, but I wanted you to fully experience what it was like!)

And I don't mean a small amount of rain. It was pounding, drenching rain. There was thunder. There was hail! And of course, Stonehenge is on a hill in the middle of nowhere, so there was no shelter. We just had to stand there and take it. To be honest, even having an umbrella might not have helped much, because the wind was so powerful -- but I was still cursing our driver.

It passed just as quickly as it came. We wound up sopping wet, standing like hurricane victims in a line for the shuttle bus back to the parking area, which thankfully was warmish and not air-conditioned. My brother was wringing streams of water out of his shirt -- he and my niece got new shirts at the gift shop to replace the sodden ones they were wearing. I fortunately had a sort of windbreaker on that proved to be water-resistant, so I wasn't too drenched.

We had lunch (Coronation chicken sandwich for me) at the cafe and then boarded our bus back to London. And once we got into the city, that bus moved at a crawl. I was half insane by the time we disembarked back at Victoria about 4 p.m. I walked with my brother and his family to Green Park, where I caught the Jubilee Line (one of the tube lines still running) to get home. They continued walking toward their hotel and apparently got more rain on the way.

I know I wanted rain. I know, I know. But I never envisioned standing in a downpour in an open field with no protection from flying hailstones! How did we offend the pagan spirits that haunt Stonehenge?