So I was supposed to go on my tour of Bath, Stonehenge, and Windsor Castle today.

I did everything right, even getting up at 7 AM so I could get to the bus station well before I was supposed to be there (it's a half-hour trip from home. I've timed it before). Unfortunately, rush hour plus the anger of the tube gods (delay after delay on line after line) meant that I arrived at the bus station well after the bus had departed. Or would have arrived, because I was still so far away from the bus station at the time the bus left that I didn't even bother going the rest of the way.

I was a little pissed about the waste of money, but when you travel, you have to be prepared for a change of plans at any moment. It was 9 AM, I had seven hours of daylight left, and a lot of other places I wanted to go, so I grabbed some breakfast in the train station and sat down with a guidebook to figure out where I'd end up.

I toyed with the idea of going up to York, since I've heard it's really cool, but it was such a long train ride away that I'd probably only have a couple of hours of daylight to explore if I went up there. (In the winter in England, these things must be taken into consideration.) I didn't want to go to Bath, either, because I didn't want to pay twice for a place I'd only see once*. So my decision came down to either Oxford or Cambridge, and since Rick Steves and Bill Bryson both prefer Cambridge and I find myself agreeing with them on a lot of other stuff, I picked Cambridge.

I didn't regret it. Cambridge is a really beautiful little city with a lot to explore, and its 31 colleges lend themselves nicely to wandering. It was really cold here today (hovering around freezing, but that's really cold for here), so I got a hot chocolate to go, and broke my rule about not riding on hop-on-hop-off tourist buses. I did the circuit once around to get myself oriented and figure out what I wanted to see, and then walked through the main colleges and parts of Cambridge.

The colleges themselves don't open much to visitors, but King's College was open, which was fantastic since it was the one I most wanted to see. King's College Chapel has perhaps the most famous English boy choir outside Westminster Abbey, in addition to being one of the best-preserved examples of Tudor architecture. It is beautiful. If you were allowed to take photos inside, I'd have come back with about three times as many as I did, because there are so many details worth photographing, but I had to content myself with the outside. It has the world's largest unsupported fan-vaulted ceiling, and little Tudor details everywhere, including the entwined initials of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn carved on the organ screen. (For someone who's as much of a Tudor history geek as I am, this is cool stuff.)

After King's, I basically just wandered up through the centre of town photographing things and ducking into interesting-looking shops (including one purporting to make the world's best fudge, but Souvenir City in Gulf Shores, Alabama, still does it better. This fact did not keep me from bringing home a slab anyway). I also found a bookshop having a liquidation sale and snagged a 2005 UK road atlas for five pounds. It was a great day, even though I still haven't thawed out entirely.

(*: Yes, I realize I still paid for someplace I didn't see and again for something I did. It makes sense in my head. No, really, it does.)