After Thorpe Park...

Hey everyone,

Ben here (well actually I'm dictating to Mom again 'cause it's too late and I'm too tired to type). I forgot to talk about a few other rides in Thorpe Park that I just have to mention. First, there's Stealth, a roller coaster which is a racing themed roller coaster that gets power boosted from it's station (that means it doesn't need a chain lift) and you're thrown forwards on in intensely high hill, just curve around, and then drop back down to go up a very small little hill (small compared to the humongously high initial hill. As soon as you start to get boosted, it takes a picture of you. I uploaded a picture of it so I don't have to do any more explaining (also, the building you see to bottom right is just the loading station, not a part of the ride itself. The actual gigantic hill is at the top left).

After that, we went to stay in a hotel in nearby Chertsey.

The next day we drove to Hampton Court Palace and Palace Gardens. Hampton Court Palace is a Palace that Henry VIII built. A few generations later, William III and Mary II redid part of the palace for themselves. The Palace Gardens are gigantic, about 3 times the size of the Palace itself (and the Palace was pret-ty huge, I can tell you that!). My favorite part was the hedge maze. Not only was it my favorite maze, but it was also my first hedge maze.

After that, my parents used the GPS (which came with our rental car) to reach our apartment (which is much larger than our one in London) in Sandbanks, at the tip of Poole on the coast of Southwest England. Speaking of my parents' GPS, they got so attached to it, they named her 'Elspeth'. They even talk back to her when she might say "After 400 yards, bear right, then, cross the roundabout, second exit." But sometimes they take a little detour, but Elspeth doesn't really like it. I get annoyed hearing her say "When possible, turn around" every few seconds. (Typist's comment -- the driving is actually going really well, between the help of good road signage and, of course, Elspeth -- not to mention my [Gwen's] navagating and M.E.'s good driving).

Yesterday we took a short chain ferry a block from our apartment across to the other side of Poole harbour (near Swanage). We went to the beautiful Jurassic Coast and it was really cool and beautiful.

Today we stopped at Salisbury Cathedral. It has awesome blue stained glass windows. After that we visited... STONEHENGE! I took so many pictures at so many angles at so many zooms from so many locations that it pretty well filled up my moms' hard drive on the computer when we uploaded them. It's cool to finally visit one of the world's greatest mysteries. There was an audio tour. My Mom listened to that for the entire time since I was using her camera to snap so many photos. Mimi didn't need it since she was snapping photos with her camera as well. After we uploaded the photos on the computer, my parents really liked my pictures. I've uploaded one of my many photos.

We drove home through The New Forest and luckily happened to see a pony that looks like it could have come out of a fairy tale. I'd upload the picture of the cream colored pony, but my parents think the only picture they managed to capture of it is a bit too blurry to post up here.

Well, it's time for me go. According to my mom's computer, it's 1:22 pm. I know it's actually 9:22. Well, now it's 9:23. You get my point.

"Where's that darn publish post button?"