Liz's work conference in the United Kingdom was scheduled to begin on a Tuesday and then run for two more days before concluding on a Thursday. Since she had to be there for a morning start time, we had arranged to fly from our home in the Washington DC area late on a Sunday evening, arriving in London the next day on Monday and then driving west to Bristol over the course of the rest of that Monday afternoon. Our flight had a very late departure time, not taking off from Washington's Dulles Airport until close to 11:00 PM local time. Unfortunately we did not have seats together on this flight (or on the return flight later that week), and both of us struggled to get some sleep during the transatlantic crossing. I had an uncomfortable middle seat on the plane and managed maybe two or three hours total which left me feeling pretty tired throughout the next day when these pictures were taken.
We arrived on time at London's Heathrow Airport a little before noon, with the flight taking about seven hours and our travel crossing over five time zones along the way. It proved to be remarkably easy getting through customs at Terminal 5 and then we were off to pick up our rental car. Driving on the left side of the road as opposed to the right side of the road wasn't a big deal for either of us, as we both had previous experience at driving under those conditions in Australia and (for Liz) in New Zealand. However, I had forgotten just how absurdly narrow the streets are throughout England, a consistent pattern both in major cities and also out on barely-trafficked country roads. Both of us had some difficulty getting used to the constant tight squeezes when driving and our rear-view mirror took a number of bumps from tree branches and the like. At times it was almost impossible to avoid collisions of some kind given the narrowness of the roads and the need to dodge oncoming traffic from the other lane.
Traveling from London to Bristol is pretty straightforward, a drive almost due west along the M4 highway. We wanted to spend the afternoon doing a bit of sightseeing, however, and Liz thought that it would be fun to visit Stonehenge along the way. She had visited the famous stone circle about a decade earlier while I had never been there at all, this being one of my biggest regrets for not taking the time to see Stonehenge during my prior study abroad time in London. In any case, it was easy enough to drive to Stonehenge with our rental car and only marginally out of the way when heading towards Bristol. Drving on the side roads once we left the M4 did get a bit dicey at times but we managed well enough. Eventually we saw on Google Maps that we were drawing near to Stonehenge... and there it was, just sitting there in a meadow by the side of the road as we drove past. It's a bizarre feeling to spot one of the great wonders of the ancient world passing by outside the side window of your car! We ended up having to drive past Stonehenge before reaching the visitor's center which was located about a mile away.
These were some of the pictures taken at said visitor's center which was still fairly new at the time as it only opened at the end of 2013. Liz mentioned that this setup hadn't existed at the time of her previous visit when visitors were able to drive close to the monument itself. There was a small museum here which discussed some of the background behind Stonehenge's construction and the Neolithic peoples who built it. There wasn't a single period of construction for Stonehenge but rather this site was altered many times over the centuries, with the largest stones likely brought to this spot around roughly 2500 BC. Stonehenge is also far from the only such location of its kind, as there are dozens of other "henges" and barrows scattered across England which have been archaeological sources of tremendous interest. I would in fact visit another such stone circle the next day when traveling by myself.
As mentioned above, the visitor's center and its parking lot are located a little over a mile away from Stonehenge itself. Tourists can make the walk to the monument if they want, although I have to caution that there's very little to see as the road makes its way in a straight line through unremarkable fields of grass. Most visitors opt to take the free shuttle buses instead which is certainly what we chose to do; the bus was faster than walking even though we had to wait for about 20 minutes due to the crowd already in line. Once we arrived at the dropoff point, we found that there was a small walking trail which ran entirely around the stone circle. I was surprised to see just how close the path ran to the monument, as little as 30 feet or 10 meters at some points. I captured the visitors in a couple of these pictures to show how close everyone was able to get:
Not bad at all from a viewing perspective. In earlier periods, anyone could walk right up to the stones and there were a series of pagan festivals inside the stone circle in the 1970s and 1980s before the British government had to put a stop to them for safety concerns. Interestingly, several of those groups then sued the government on religious grounds and won their case, with the result that Stonehenge is now carefully opened up to limited visitors on the equinoxes and solstices for neopagan religious purposes. Even without the ability to get any closer than this, I really enjoyed the opportunity to see Stonehenge in person. The stone circle was honestly bigger than I expected it to be and the sheer weight of the monument's age was impossible to ignore. These stone slabs were approximately as old as the Great Pyramids at Giza and predated the Roman Empire, the first unification of China, almost any historical event that one can imagine. Stonehenge has been a world wonder in almost every Civilization game and now I could finally say that I had visited it for myself.
After we wrapped up at Stonehenge, we continued onwards heading west until reaching the town of Bath. This was an obvious pit stop to make due to its close vicinity to Bristol, and of course I had already previously visited both Bath and Bristol during my winterterm study abroad course at the University of Maryland. (The writeup for that trip can be found here on the website.) Liz had never been to either of these cities before though and a good bit had changed in my life between 2009 and 2024. We were arriving at Bath in the late afternoon, taking advantage of the late summer sunsets to have more time for sightseeing. Bath is famous for, well, the Roman baths that gave the city (and the English language) its name. There are natural hot springs here that the Romans took advantage of, building a small town named Aquae Sulis around them. The Romans have been gone for more than 1500 years but their baths still remain, with Bath becoming a popular vacation spot for England's wealthy classes back in the 18th century and still remaining so today. I had the chance to tour the baths on my previous trip but unfortunately they were already closed for the day on this visit; we'd have to be content with walking around the rest of the historic area.
Right next to the Roman baths was the town's other most famous structure, Bath Abbey. Officially known as the Abbey Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, this has been a religious center dating back to the 7th century although the current abbey was constructed in various stages from the 12th to the 16th centuries. Like a number of other grand religious structures, Bath Abbey had fallen into terrible shape before a major reconstruction took place under Sir George Gilbert Scott in the 1860s that restored the building to its previous splendor. While this is not one of the most famous cathedrals in England, Bath Abbey was still plenty impressive in its own right, particularly the elaborate carvings on the West Door which was the direction that we were approaching from. Unfortunately, just as the Roman baths were already closed for the day, the abbey had also shut its doors to tourists due to a service taking place inside. At least I managed to go inside during my previous trip though I didn't have a very good camera at the time.
Well, at least the outdoor sights in Bath were still available for us to visit. One of my top memories from my previous trip to Bath was seeing this beautiful bridge and I wanted Liz to have the chance to experience it as well. This was the Pulteney Bridge over the River Avon, which dates back to 1774 and still contains shops built across its full span on both sides. That was commonplace in earlier eras (London's Tower Bridge had people living on it all throughout the medieval period) but has become a rarity in the modern period. The Georgian architecture of the bridge directly above the little triple waterfalls of the river makes this an absurdly picturesque spot and no visit to Bath would be complete without stopping here. This warm summer afternoon certainly had different weather conditions than my previous visit to Bath, which took place in January and had snow flurries throughout the day. We were also able to get a great view of the river as it wound its way through Bath along with the lovely Parade Gardens situated next to the water. It was easy to see that this was a place that had been frequently visited by London's richest citizens.
It was time for dinner by this point and we decided to stop to eat at a unique restaurant a few blocks away. This was Sally Lunn's restaurant, advertised as the oldest in Bath and with the building dating back to circa 1482. This probably wasn't a restaurant dating quite that far back but records do show that people were definitely eating here in the 18th century and Sally Lunn's has mostly kept its menu unchanged for the past three centuries. This restaurant lays claim to being the origin of the Sally Lunn bunn (which is probably an exaggeration), a toasted bun that can be served in either sweet or savory fashion. For the dinner menu, we were offered various different dishes known as "trenchers" where entrees were served on top of toasted bread. This was apparently a common way to serve food before plates came into common use (though of course our trenchers were served on top of plates!) We both had a trencher and the meal was quite good, certainly enhanced by the historic dining room and the restaurant staff wearing period costumes. We were lucky to be visiting on a nondescript Monday evening when we were able to get a table without having to wait or make a reservation. We would definitely recommend getting a meal at Sally Lunn's, as it was a unique experience and reasonably priced to boot.
Once dinner was over, we left Bath and made the short drive to Bristol where we were finally able to check into our hotel. We were staying at the Clayton Hotel in Bristol which had a convenient location about three blocks north of Bristol's central harbor area. The exterior of the building was colorfully decorated and looked like a former church before turning into a normal-looking hotel lobby once were entered. We would be staying here for the next four nights and took advantage of the generous complimentary English breakfast each day in the morning. There were plenty of good things to eat although I think we were both starting to get a little tired of it by the time Friday morning rolled around. The only downside to this hotel was a lack of parking for our rental car, which I had to park a few blocks away in a shopping mall's garage. That's pretty common for city hotels in Europe though it did make things a bit tougher.
Liz spent the next three days at her work conference where she took this collection of pictures. The conference was taking place at Ashton Gate Stadium, the home of one of Bristol's two major football / soccer clubs (Bristol FC) as well as the Bristol Bears, the city's top-flight rugby squad. It felt really weird to us that an academic conference was taking place at a football stadium but apparently this is pretty common for these events in Europe. Liz later explained to me that the various conference panels and presentations took place underneath the outdoor seating area, with the logos of Bristol FC and the Bristol Bears scattered around in the background. The attendees at the conference were dominated by the military and military-adjacent groups with a heavy emphasis on wargaming of various types. This was not the usual crowd for Liz's work conferences, which tend to be people working on different types of educational games, but the event went well and Liz won an award for the game that she was presenting! 
I was glad that the event went so well given how far Liz had to travel to make it here.
Then there was the city of Bristol itself. I mentioned how I had spent a short time here with the University of Maryland study abroad group but without getting much of a sense for the city. We were staying in Bristol for about half a week on this trip and the evenings provided some time to wander around the touristy part of the downtown. Bristol is about the tenth-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population around 700,000 at time of writing when including all of the suburbs. The city dates back to the 11th century and has always been famous for its role as a port; this was the largest port in England (outside London) during the 18th century and grew explosively due to its role in the transatlantic slave trade. Even today, Bristol still sprawls across the banks of the River Avon and its feeder canal, with a crazy hodgepodge of bridges crosscrossing the many bodies of water. These pictures were taken walking down to "The Centre" which is the main public square in the middle of the downtown. This was where the waterfront began and where the theatres were located as we saw one place advertising for a performance of Hamilton.
Up a hill from the harbor and over a short distance to the west was the city's largest religious building, Bristol Cathedral. The cathedral was founded in 1140 in the earliest days of the city but most of the current building dates from the 14th and 15th centuries. The cathedral extends to a length of 300 feet / 90 meters and stretches to reach a height of 50 feet / 15 meters at its tallest extent. Because Bristol didn't achieve its trade-driven heyday until after the discovery of the New World, this was a bit of a backwater location during the medieval period as Bristol was not a major city at the time. Thus the cathedral didn't completely finish its construction until long after the medieval period was finished, not until Bristol was a much wealthier city in the 19th century. Interestingly, there was a statue dedicated to Rammohun Roy outside the cathedral, an Indian who traveled from Bengal to Bristol in the early 19th century and was one of the founding fathers of the Indian Renaissance. Rammohun Roy was a good example of how the British Empire unintentionally created cross-cultural links between very different parts of the world; I used to mention him in my classes when I taught about the British Empire.
I initially visited Bristol Cathedral on Wednesday evening after it had already closed to visitors for the night. Liz and I came back together the next day though and our arrival was shortly before closing time, allowing us to slip inside and take a few pictures. Bristol Cathedral had the standard Gothic template for its design, with a cruciform layout and two rows of stone pillars holding up the weight of the ceiling along with stained glass windows adorning the walls to let in the late afternoon sunlight. While Bath Cathedral wasn't quite as grand as the most prestigous medieval English cathedrals (two of which I visisted on this trip and are discussed on the next page), it was still quite a spectacle to behold. There was also a small exhibit here named All God's Children which discussed the role that the wealth generated by the slave trade had played in the construction of the city of Bristol and this cathedral more specifically. Almost all of the cathdral's major patrons in the 18th and 19th centuries had connections to the slave trade in some way; the whole city of Bristol was practically built on the immense money that it produced. This was important context to provide for visitors to the cathedral, not least because it highlighted the quite substantial non-white population that lived and worked in Bristol during that period.
After finishing up visiting the cathedral, we walked south past Bristol's aquarium and through Millenium Square, an open area with fountains featuring a casino and a science museum named We The Curious. The waterfront was immediately next door where we could look out across the river at the shops, restaurants, and apartments on the other side. Right away I spotted the replica ship of the Matthew, the little ship that explorer John Cabot used when visiting the coast of North America in the final years of the 15th century. This was a reproduction of the original ship which had long since fallen victim to the ravages of time, and in fact I had taken a tour of this same ship with the Maryland student group back in 2009. We were on the other side of the river this evening and there was no easy way to cross from here for a better look; if we had continued downriver for a little bit, we would have come across another historic ship in the form of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Britain. We were content to enjoy the views for the moment before heading off to get some dinner.
These are a few more images taken from the waterfront area heading back towards Bristol's Centre Landing dock. The former warehouses that ran along the water have mostly been turned into restaurants and this is now a pleasant place to have a meal, especially after a long day at a work conference. We were passing through this area on Wednesday and Thursday evenings so it wasn't too crowded but I imagine that the whole area is bustling with patrons on the weekends.
Speaking of food, these were some pictures from the dinners that we had together in Bristol. During our first full evening on Tuesday, we had dinner at a restaurant named the Cozy Club which featured these elegant surroundings. We both guessed that the building had originally been a bank and it turned out that our hunch was correct, this was indeed a former bank converted into a food establishment. Liz ordered a burger while I had a steak with fried tomatoes, both of us enjoying this meal immensely. We did not have dinner together on Wednesday as Liz had a dinner event at her work conference (which didn't start until 8:00 PM when everyone was starving!) and then on Thursday we ate along the waterfront at a place named the Bristol Stable. We didn't quite understand the name but it featured ciders on tap along with sourdough pizzas, two of my absolute favorites. There were at least two dozen other places where we would have enjoyed getting a meal in Bristol but you can only visit so many places in a couple of days.
Finally, the last place that we visited in Bristol was a stop on Friday morning as we were literally driving out of town to head off towards Cardiff. This was the Clifton Suspension Bridge spanning the gorge created by the River Avon, located just to the west of Bristol a few miles from the center of the city. We were actually trying to make it to Clifton Observatory (visible in the second picture above) but couldn't find a place to park and accidentally found ourselves forced to drive over the bridge, then parked on the western side of the cliffs and got out to take these pictures. Clifton Suspension Bridge was based on a design by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and was opened to the public all the way back in 1864. It took decades to build the bridge and its completion was a major engineering achievement of the mid-19th century. The bridge has remained in constant use since then, with more than 4 million people traversing it annually. This was the site of the first modern bungee jump in 1979 and, more unhappily, has been the location of dozens and dozens of suicides over the decades. In any event, Clifton Suspension Bridge is celebrated as one of the major symbols of Bristol and we definitely saw tourist merchandise with the bridge on it for sale in the city. It was a nice way to close out our time in Bristol.
This page has been a bit of a mixing pot combining our travels from the first day of this trip together with some of the sights in Bristol that we captured in the evenings between our main activities. The next few pages will back up and cover the sightseeing that I was doing while Liz was in the middle of the real work for her job. I was tagging along for the ride and now had the chance to visit a number of places in southwest England that were a bit off the main tourist track but nevertheless very much worth seeing. The first such day would take me to several of England's great cathedral towns: Salisbury and Winchester. If these names don't mean anything to you, well, they would have if you'd been living in the 13th century!
