Ewwww. You got Solstice in my Stonehenge!

Last weekend we attended the summer solstice celebration/all night party at Stonehenge. No, Stonehenge is not the name of some hip new club. We mean Stonehenge, as in the giant stones planted in a circle in the ground by druids 4000 years ago. We got to touch it and everything!! But, we are getting ahead of ourselves. The evening went as follows:

• Met up with our new Canadian friends Ancilla and Erica at the bus stop in downtown Bournemouth around 1030 PM.We were heading to Salisbury, the town closest to Stonehenge and the pick up point  for the solstice bus.
  

  Check out our sweet ride.

  The bus was entertaining.  The moment we were aboard, a group of drunken university students started downing their drinks chanting “chug! chug! chug!” and screaming “SOLSTICE!” while cheering there little heads off.  They sang  a rousing rendition of The Wheels on the Bus (At David’s psychic suggestion) and started the wave, which they called the Mexican Wave.  One girl came up to Dave and I and said hello. When we replied “hi” she squealed with delight and said “Oh you have accents!! Please just talk to me for a bit, I just loooove people from different places!” and then stumbled back to the rear of the bus to rejoin her friends. About 30 minutes in, a bunch of girls demanded a pee break in the middle of nowhere…the bus driver complied.  Guess he didn’t want to have to clean up any messes.

• From where the solstice bus dropped us off, we walked about a mile and a half in the dark, though fields to reach Stonehenge….then we passed Stonehenge and finally got though the gates a few minutes down the road on the far side of the complex.  As we got closer we could hear cheers. At this point, we stopped at the port-o-potties and established that the meeting place would be at the vegan food cart just in case we lost each other.  We were eager to get up close and personal with the ancient stones so, we decided to go walk though the center of Stonehenge….Only we didn’t really walk.  We squeezed/muscled our way into the center. There was barely any room to breathe let alone move.  We navigated the center though osmosis more the anything else and were birthed out the other side a few minutes later. We got separated from Ancilla and Erica during the birthing process and utilized the aforementioned vegan food cart meeting point.

• So began the waiting.  By this time it was about 2 hours until sunrise so we found a small piece of ground to lay out our blanket and
  

  Erica, Ancilla, Courtney, David & Stonehenge

  began taking in the scenery.  It was filled with people!  People doing drugs, people dancing, drunk people, and ad hoc musical groups playing drums and flutes. One very special person sat next to us and became David’s friend. His name was Stephen and he was covered in sparkles, so from this point I shall refer to him as Sparkle Stephen.  He was 42 years old and lived down the road, but he had never been to Stonehenge in his entire life.  He introduced himself by asking for rizlers, to which we responded with confused looks. Rizzlers it turns out are rolling papers for hand rolled cigarettes. He was run out.  He told us that he had lost his sister and her friend at some point (too bad they didn’t think to meet up at the vegan food cart) and kindly informed us that he was 42 and this was his first time at Stonehenge and he lives just up the road but had never been here before. After an excruciating hour of conversation, he finally found his sister and then promptly lost her again…did we mention that he is 42, lives really close to Stonehenge and this was his first time visiting the site?

• Sunrise! Sorta. We saw the gradual progression from light to dark, but didn’t really see the sun, it was too cloudy.
  

  Hey look! I think I see some Sun!

  We did however get to walk around the center of Stonehenge again, this time in relative comfort because it had emptied out some what. We got some spiffy pictures of the stones and listened to several groups of musicians. We then walked across the liter covered grounds (the amount of garbage left behind at this historical site really was appalling) and began our trek back to the buses.

So that was it!  Pretty neat experience all in all. We even got to capture some supernatural light trails on camera.  Trick of the light, David’s psychic energy, or the spirits of the druids returning to sacred grounds to celebrate the start of summer? You decide.