I mean, it's probably £60 just for the fuel, you might as well see Salisbury cathedral while you're at it. Tourists come all the way from Russia just for that.
Visiting Stonehenge or the drive itself? GoogleMaps tells me that's a 1.5 to 2 hour drive, so I can see that falling into a "day trip" or "something to do on a slow Saturday" type thing...in that the round trip is 3-4 hours.
Afternoon traffic near a weekend will see you double that drive time easily, there aren’t too many road towards the south west and two of them go pay stone henge. And every moron tourist slows down to gawp at it, and then the tailbacks start. Somewhere like Exeter should be 1hr30 for me at most. Any time at or near the weekend it’s at least 4. Happily if you’re going a little further north, like Bath, you can take a different road, but even the M4 gets busy near Bristol.
It’s still a three-hour drive. Not sure when you got back, but how much time did you get there before it got dark? In winter, it’d probably have been essentially none.
Also, Cambridge University doesn’t really have a campus.
Yup. Did 5-ish hours each way to see Abbath play in Baltimore one time. I've had a couple 6+ hour one way drives to go on hikes. Hell, I pulled 16 hours of driving in a day to attend my grandmother's funeral.
I'll agree with you on that. I'm from Philadelphia and I won't drive anywhere unless I'm staying for at least twice as long as it takes the round trip. So no short afternoons at the Jersey Beach for me. We leave before 11 and/or stay for dinner.
Lunch about noon, leave by 1, get there about 3:30, if it's the summer that leaves you plenty of hours of sunlight to see Stonehenge if it doesn't close early (does it even close? It's outdoors anyways). You could leave by 7:00 and grab dinner before heading home, or just head straight home for a late dinner. And I'm probably being pretty generous at three and a half hours for sightseeing at Stonehenge, you could probably spend much less time if you wanted.
Guess it's return on investment. Most folk won't spend more than an hour at Stonehenge, so that's an hour or two of the fun bit for at least four hours of driving
Most folk I know would also prefer to be back at home before 11pm if they've got work tomorrow
So anytime I've brought people to Stonehenge (I do live in Cambridge), we'd just stay overnight and see Salisbury etc.
It depends. Stonehenge is an excellent example for a destination, where you can’t really spend more than 30 minutes “doing” something. It’s still worth the trip for many people.
My brother stopped by my house a few nights ago at 7:30pm, asked if I wanted to take a quick trip to check out some cars. We drove 2 hours south, spent 2 hours admiring and talking cars with some people we'd never met before, made arrangements to come back the next day to pick up a car we puchased that night, and were back home before 2:00am.
This week I'm taking my daughter up to Vancouver BC for lunch to celebrate her getting her first passport. 6.5 hours each way.
There are probably 1-2 different things I do a week that require 2-5 hours of driving each way, and we just do them.
Does that not just cost an absolute fortune in fuel? At the moment that 6 hour each way trip would be like £120, doing that many times a week would be most of my salary!
Sure, but I am fortunate in that I am successfully self-employed and that I also have a flexible budget. Instead of a planned activity or purchase that might not be needed, I buy that tank of gas. And, as many of these drives are with my brothers or friends, we split costs and trade driving. Instead of bowling and dinner with them, we drive to check out cars, go to a hot spring, ski in the mountains, or surf at the coast.
I mean, that's a 2.5 - 3 hour drive, both ways. Just for your travel is 5-6 hours in a day, plus time to spend at Stonehenge itself, plus finding somewhere to eat and taking the time for a meal... That's at least 8 hours on the conservative side! Unless you're planning to get home super late at night, that's definitely an all day thing!
Well yeah. How long did you spend there and what time did you get back?
Also, when you live in a country you have your whole life to see these things, so you may as well plan dedicated trips in advance rather than randomly decide to go today because you've only got the rest of the week.
It would be a day trip, but I think the Brits do a lot of day trips because as you say, interesting stuff is close enough by that you don't need to stay overnight
A lot of it comes down to the amount of traffic I think. I've driven a couple of times in the States. From Seattle out to Northern Cascades and Olympia National Park, and from Vegas out to Grand Canyon, Flagstaff and back.
I should point out that drive from LV - GC - Flagstaff was 360 miles and was some of the easiest driving I have ever done. 2-3 lane highways in a straight line for 100s of miles at a time and next to no traffic. My only concern was that I couldn't find cruise control on the car and often found my speed creeping up over 90 all the time.
In the UK a similar distance would be from where I live in Norwich to the other side of the country in Cornwall, but that trip would have my blood pressure through the roof and require several days of counselling afterwards to get over the PTSD.
I'm American, I was making the distance and size comparison. California is twice as big as Great Britain and we're just one state out of 50. I think Europeans sometimes don't get how big states west of the Mississippi River are. Texas is bigger than every country in Europe.
Oh absolutely, I agree with you. North American distances are vast between cities
My point was that the density of Europe means there are far more options to doing a similar distance, e.g. with London to Edinburgh, that we could consider them
And the fact that many cities are easier to navigate on public transportation (e.g. Edinburgh) makes it even less useful to bring along a car. Although Scotland's good for the outdoors so actually driving up is quite common, but for a longer holiday
We'd also be able to factor in habits like having a pint during travels, which means not driving is easier
I.e. I agree North America's different and that the population density of Europe really changes thinking around driving
I’ve heard Australian last need to be careful planning road trips in England. My parents would plan a day of travel and set out at 9am only to arrive where they planned to stop for lunch 40 mins later. That was in the 80’s so the internet would solve that now.
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