You would not believe what I am listening to as I write this… But we will get to that…

Nana on a mission. After sleeping in half an hour too long, we scurried to make it to our 9:30 tour of the Roman Baths (hence, the name of the town we are staying in called Bath).

Built 1500 Years ago, by, you guessed it, the Romans, an amazing complex was created around the natural hot spring that bubbles up in the middle of this town. For centuries, the highly mineralized water has been considered healing and holy.

Next, we had a 3 1/2 hour drive ahead of us, so I was thrilled when we decided to break it up by stopping at Stonehenge.

4500 years ago, during the Bronze Age, stones weighing from one to 30 tons came from up to 130 miles away. “How did they get the stones here?” “Why are they in a circle?” “What is it for?”…my grandchildren peppered us with questions.

“Exactly! They create more questions than they answer,“ I replied. “That’s why they are one of the Seven Wonders of the World.”

I took off my shoes and walked around in the soft grass to soak up some of the powerful, ground energy that must surely be in the vicinity. And of course, had to endure some lighthearted ribbing from my family… that’s OK, I’m used to it.

And this marker on the ground shows the trajectory of the sun during the summer and winter solstice, where it shines through the two stones ahead.

Chelsea remarked, “were they like, can you move that stone just a little to the left… yeah, there you go, that’s it right there.”

Seriously, when you see the size of these stones and the precision with which they were placed, it just boggles mind.

We made one more stop on the way to Brighton for the worst meal of this trip. But even that could not dampen this beautiful day, we just decided ‘you can’t win ‘em all’ and moved on.

As we pulled into the large, bustling, seaside town of Brighton, Lylah was the first one to notice. “Why are there so many gay people here?”

“What? Are there?” I looked around, but didn’t really see it yet. What I did notice, however, was that we were very close to the address of our next accommodation and it was looking decidedly sketchy. We turned the corner onto our street and Jai exclaimed, “Right on!” I turned to where he was looking, and a girl was bent over vomiting on the sidewalk. Niiiice!

We stopped the car on the narrow street, scrambled out with all of our luggage and abandoned Chelsea to the impossible task of finding a parking spot.

The ad for the apartment said it was across from the Marine Tavern. I had naïvely said on the way down, “Oh good, maybe we can go there for dinner.” Assuming it was a British pub.

As we let ourselves in, we were being watched by a drag queen, standing on the sidewalk in front of the tavern, dressed in red from her hair to her shiny, high heeled shoes. OK, maybe not an eating establishment.

We found a jar of these, earplugs, in each of the bedrooms. Oh dear…

Exhausted, we decided to go to an Italian restaurant for dinner, one street over.

Now, even my naïve eyes could see the streets were full of mostly gay men. An open sign for a business was in rainbow colors, a rainbow flag hung from a window… There were rainbows everywhere.

As we waited for our meal, Chelsea got on her phone and googled Brighton. We discovered it is considered to be the gay capital of England.

No big deal, except that In five days, it will be a very big deal as they are expecting over a half a million people from around the UK to participate in a gay pride parade… and we’re going to miss all the fun by three days.

There is no doubt by now that we have arrived in a party town.

We went for an evening stroll after dinner across the street at the pier, Which turns out to be a year-round carnival. Looking down at the beach it was full of people, a very loud rock concert was happening, not far down the beach that competed with the various Honkytonk tunes played by the different rides. To say this felt like a different universe from where we had spent our morning would be an understatement.

Chelsea and Lylah rode two roller coasters and this crazy ride, while Jai and I shook our heads and took pictures.

The sensory overload was finally more than any of us could handle and we returned home at around 8:30 and discovered what the earplugs were for.

I am writing this blog, being serenaded by a cross between drag queen karaoke and a Kermit the frog sing-a-along.

This juxtaposition of opposites today was just a little crazy.