Cornwall Trip, Day 1: Drive to Amesbury

So this past weekend a group of friends and I took a road trip to Cornwall, a county on the southwest tip of England, famous for all things "Cornish." We left Thursday night and stopped in Amesbury, which is right next to Stonehenge and the town of Salisbury, both of which we visited Friday morning before driving on to Newquay, a town in Cornwall on the coast. To get an idea of where we went, here are a couple maps of the journey (A being London, B being Amesbury, C being Newquay)

This is the broader view from all of the UK.

This is a closer view of the trip. Basically the big chunk of the country that juts out into the ocean is Cornwall.

We left Thursday at about 5:00pm. There were five of us going: me, Maeghan (Canadian), Lisa (Georgetown), Diane (Swiss), and Guido (Italian).

The trip started off in an encouraging way. Lisa and I met up at the car rental place to pick up the car before going to pick up everybody else. We had made a reservation for some kind of Toyota that I'd never heard of, something not compact but still kind of small, which we were nervous would make the trip kind of cramped. But we had made sure it was an automatic, because none of us were familiar with driving on the left side of the road and wanted to make it as uncomplicated as possible. When we got there, we found out they actually only had one automatic available, so they were going to have to upgrade us...

...to this:
A brand new (115 miles on it) Mercedez-Benz E-Class Executive SE. It is spacious, it is sleek, and most importantly, it has a dashboard navigational system that made driving way easier than it would have been otherwise. Here are Lisa and I in the front seat:

I was designated the navigator by the rest of the group, and Lisa likes driving, so she and I were in the front for pretty much the whole trip. Here's the back seat crew:

And another picture of Maeghan and Diane in the back:


So off we went, in style. As I noted in the previous post, the UK just got a bizarre amount of snow, and this barrage was ongoing as we left for our trip, which was of some concern. The drive to Amesbury was slightly treacherous, but not horrible, though you wouldn't have known it listening to the radio. Every single DJ could not stop talking about how much CHAOS AND DESTRUCTION this snow was causing. Lisa is from Pittsburgh, and I'm from northern Illinois, so neither of us thought this was that big of a deal, but people seemed to be freaking out everywhere.

We made it to Amesbury okay, and the freak-outs continued. We were staying in a small hotel run by a sweet old couple who were incredibly nice. This, we would happily discover, was not unusual. But the wife became alarmed when we told her we were planning on heading to Cornwall. "That's a really, really long way," she told us. "It will probably take you about 6 hours to drive there from here." We had thought, based on Google Map, that the trip at that point would only take about 3 hours, so we got really worried - if she was right, it would mean about a 9 hour drive back home from Cornwall. She told us that the weather was going to be miserable the whole area where we were going to be driving, and that it was only going to get worse the farther we went.

After hearing this, we walked down to a nearby Indian restaurant and had a quiet dinner. Quiet in the sense that we all stared at our food wondering what the hell we'd gotten ourselves into. We decided to go see Stonehenge the next morning and then Salisbury Cathedral, an old cathedral that had been recommended to us, and then decide what we wanted to do next after listening to weather reports. It was crossing many of our minds that we might have to turn around and head back. Then we went back to our room, as seen here:

We turned on the TV, and on came news reporters talking about the CHAOS AND DESTRUCTION taking place all across England.

We went to bed a little nervous.