Our First Week in England!

First Week in England
Thursday the 26th we flew from Dublin to London, it was only an hour flight but it’s still a bit difficult getting all of us and our luggage into the airport and checked in. When we arrived we drove about an hour 15 minutes to where we are staying in Swindon. We are renting a home here for a month. It is very expensive here! It is a 3 bedroom 1 bath home fully furnished in a gated neighborhood and we get a grass backyard. We are close to a couple nice parks and the town center. We are very close to Intel so Brett has been riding a bike through a forest like park to work every day.
Our first Saturday here we explored our city. We found a couple of really nice parks with great playgrounds, lakes, ducks, and lots of trees and grass. We went to the Coate Water Park and the Lydiard House and Park. The kids enjoy running around playing and feeding the ducks.
On Sunday we found a church to go to and the people were again very friendly and welcoming. We even got invited over for dinner and made some new friends.
I am getting very comfortable driving on the left side of the road now and much better at driving a stick too! Then we’ll leave here and be driving on the right and I’ll have to get used to that again.
There has been a lot of flooding in a city about 45 min from us and the people have not had running water for about a week. The church was doing a little service project asking people to donate drinking water so we volunteered and helped deliver a bunch of water on Monday night.
Tuesday night we found the Asda (it’s a Wal-mart) I guess it’s the biggest in Europe it was like our super Walmart at home.
Wednesday night we went out exploring and drove down to Avebury and Stonehenge. Avebury is a lovely town and it also has a stone circle similar to Stonehenge but the stones are much more spread out. Then we drove down to Stonehenge it’s pretty cool to see all those gigantic stones stacked up and in a big circle. We ended the night in a small town called Devizes where they have a canal with a series of locks so that boats can go up and down a large hill by adjusting the water level in small locks to raise or lower this boat to the level of the next lock. It would take a long time to get up the hill on a boat.
Thursday the kids and I went to a butterfly garden the girls really enjoyed seeing all the butterfly’s up close. They also had a few farm animals, there was a big turkey and Alana said: “Mom look a ham” I giggled. They also had an indoor play area with balls and slides and mats so even Allden got to crawl around and play.
Friday evening we drove down to Lechlade it’s also a lovely town right on the river Thames. We walked around a park area right by the river, the kids liked the big swans and ducks. Then we drove on to Cirencester, it’s also a neat town and of course we found the huge park with lake, ducks and playground and enjoyed walking around in the nice weather.
There is so much to see and do and not enough time to do it all!