My girlfriend came to visit me in the UK before I made the big move, the emigration south. As she was very interested in the spiritual side of life, I was excited about taking her to one of the most spiritually inspiring monuments in the world, a place which I had grown up very close to, Stonehenge. Great idea you may think but little did I take into account the predictably terrible English weather and the fact that we were in the grips of winter, the end of December, not a good combination.

Now I've been to Stonehenge many times in my life and it is stunning place. The only frustration that I've experienced is related to the atmosphere, and lack there of. These ancient mysterious stones are situated right next to a busy main road and with the roar and rumble of heavy traffic it's quite difficult to appreciate the grandeur of this huge monument. There are plans to move this road into a tunnel allowing the scenery to be restored to something closer to it's original beauty. If it goes ahead it's still going to be a few years until this project is completed so in the meantime it takes a well concentrated mind with lots of imagination to shut out modern day noise pollution and picture Stoehenge as a fully working temple.

I had warned my girlfriend about this but she was still excited and determined to experience this ancient wonder. By the time we left our car and trudged through to the visitors centre our clothes were already soaked through with the cold starting to make our many layers of clothes pretty pointless.

We gritted our teeth, convinced that this was going to make a great romantic story to tell our kids someday. Paying our entrance fee we grabbed an audio guide each (big mobile phone type things) and walked towards the stones. Now if you listen to all the information that the guide provides, which is actually very interesting, informative and comprehensive, then the tour will take around an hour. We lasted, despite our determination, for a mere ten minutes before we turned back to the relative comfort of our car.

The worst thing about the whole experience though was not being wet, or cold, no it was the coffee we had afterwards. We were on the way back to London and decided that we needed something to warm us up, and quickly. Only a few kilometres after the stones we found a little service station, the only coffee on offer however was from Burger King (only slightly better than MacDonalds). We reluctantly asked for two large ones. It was disgusting. It didn't even warm us up.