Salisbury; Sunday, 28 November, 2010

The hotel had an “Holistic and Psychic Fair” taking place during the day and consequently had closed the restaurant for the morning, so everyone could either have breakfast very early, or take it in their room. Naturally, I decided I would prefer the lie in and asked for breakfast at 09:30. By 10am it still hadn’t arrived and I got the impression by the way the reception phone wasn’t being answered that there was a problem.

At 10:15 I was phoned to say it was a “little” delayed, though by this point I wouldn’t classify 45 minutes as a little delay. Unfortunately, I had to check out by 10:40 so it was looking likely that I was not going to get breakfast.

I left my room to check out and at the same moment my breakfast finally arrived, over an hour late. But as I had to check out I had to turn it away. I stomped down to reception in a pretty bad mood, which was made even worse by the flat refusal of the hotel to refund me for the breakfast I had paid for, but never had. They did offer me the option of speaking to the duty manager, but the mood I was in I thought it was probably best not to speak to them, as I was finding it difficult to keep my language civil.

I left my luggage with the hotel and wandered over to the bus station to catch the “Stonehenge tour” out to Stonehenge. The tour is a pretty hefty rip-off by the local bus company. Rather than running a regular bus route out to Stonehenge you have to catch the tour which costs at least three times what a regular bus would. Given the morning I was having I was by now composing two lengthy letters of complaint.

My mood mellowed quite a bit when we arrived at Stonehenge. Firstly because as a English Heritage member I was able to queue jump a very large party of tourists and secondly because Stonehenge is such an interesting place, made all the more special by the light dusting of snow on the ground which gave it an even more magical quality.

After looking round the site, I hopped on the next bus back down to Old Sarum and had a look round there, before catching the following bus back into Salisbury.

By now I had pretty much exhausted all that Salisbury had to offer, so, after a pleasant lunch, I headed back to the hotel, grabbed my bags and headed back to the station and the train home.