Day trips from London
 

Hi,

We are travelling to London in August and wanted to see Stonehenge and Stratford. Is it better to go through a tour group as a day tour or could it be done on your own? How much is it to do on your own? Is it very difficult? Thanks for your advice!!!

Hi, I haven't done these day trips by public transport, but have some info on them.

Stratford is a train ride from London, and most of the usual attractions in S. are in town, except for Anne Hathaway's cottage
www.stratford-upon-avon.co.uk

Stonehenge
For one article:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...=30&per=11

Take an organized tour or do it yourself: You can take the train from Waterloo Station to Salisbury (trip takes about 90 minutes) and then take a bus (runs hourly) outside the train station (buy tickets inside the train station).

Stonehenge is open daily
www.english-heritage,org.uk

The bus runs at regular intervals, all day long, so you can catch one back to the Salisbury station at your leisure. Also if you have time, Salisbury Cathedral is only about a 10 minute walk from the station.


trains leave from Paddington Station
www.chilternrailways.co.uk

Guide Friday Stratford Tour: Open-top buses leave every 15 minutes in season on a step-on/step-off basis from Bridge Foot and other stops along the route. They go outside of town to Anne Hathaway?s Cottage and Mary Arden?s House. Buy tickets on the bus or at the Tourist Information Centre. Tickets valid all day.

sorry I messed up my cut and paste, but you have the gist

just to clarify, the Paddington and chilterns railway info goes with Stratford

I self-toured quite a bit on public transport (trains - British Rail). It's very convenient when you have the time, but you are always at the mercy of British Rail. The train system in England is not exactly the well-oiled machine you might have been led to expect, and you could find yourself in a broken-down train, sitting on the tracks for hours w/no air-conditioning and no one bothering to tell you what's going on. If your time is limited, i'd play it safe and take a tour bus from London. There are all kinds of tours - just search on Google under "tours from London to Stonehenge", and it brings up dozens. Your hotel can also arrange that kind of tour. Just try to arrange ahead of time, as August is high tourist season in England.
(I never drove the whole year I was in London, but that is because I was scared of driving on the left, and because I am directionally-challenged, so can't give you any info on driving.)

It sounds like you are asking about doing Stratford and Stonehenge on the SAME day. Am I right?

If so you can forget about that. You can find organized tours to Stratford/Oxford, Stratford/Warwick, Stonehenge/Bath, Salisbury/Stonehenge/Bath. But no day trips to Stratford/Stonehenge. These two places are quite a distance apart. In fact London > Stratford > Stonehenge > London would be difficult even if you had a car.

Just pick one of them and take the train - no real need to pay for a group tour.

Don't know about tours. But this is what you can and can't do, in a day, by yourself:

1. Get a train to either place. Forget about Chiltern Railways, which goes neither to Stratford nor to Paddington, but would be a splendid way of getting to all sorts of places (like High Wycombe or Princes Risborough) you've probably no interest in. Forget about British Rail, which doesn't exist. Forget about tabloid fantasies of journeys from hell, which are a bit like using the movie "The Out of Towners" as a reliable guide to travelling round the US.
The direct trains from London to Salisbury (for Stonehenge) or Stratford are reasonably reliable - which means you should assume they'll be 10-15 mins late. Use one of the sites (like www.nationalrail.co.uk) that list all UK railway services to plan your journey.

2. As Janis says, it really is impractical to try to do both by train in a day. It's three and a quarter hours from Stratford to Salisbury by train, with two changes and the journey depends on Virgin Trains, whose cross-country operation is Britain's least punctual. If (actually, when) the Virgin train arrives late, you'll be stuck on Basingstoke station for another half hour at least waiting for the next connection to Salisbury.

3. At a pinch, you COULD do it by car. Collect a hired car from, say, Heathrow and it's a relatively painless 90 mins to Stratford. A slightly trickier, but generally very pretty, 90 miles (150 mins) to Stonehenge. A painless 100 mins back to Heathrow.

Stonehenge closes at 7pm in August, but is accessible by private arrangement during daylight hours before 8.30am or after 7.30 pm in August.

Do all this in reverse and you can see Stonehenge, pop into Salisbury for its glorious cathedral, and get to Stratford with little time for its Ye Olde Worlde theme parkery but in good time to see a play at one of Europe's best (though tattiest) theatres

For out-of-hours access to Stonehenge see http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/d...e%26wce%3D6491