Sometimes we like to see the iconic, and sometimes we like to see the obscure. When Angela and I can visit both on the same trip, that is a great day indeed.

So it was during our driving loop through England. After a wonderful day wandering the gardens at Kew, we drove south toward the coast, trading order and the living for things wild and long dead.

I have mentioned previously that I am, at my core, a history teacher. The older, the better. Give me pre-history and ancient societies shrouded in mystery and speculation. Give me bones and stones and rust-eaten axes. Let me walk in the footprints of extinct giants and watch the earth turn forever through rock windows that count the stars and commune with those that raised them.

Let me speak my mantras at Stonehenge and invoke the old gods, now come as rooks and ravens to eat from our hands. Tame, evolved dinosaurs scrying us with the black eyes of diminished kings.

Let me stand on the petrified shoulders of predators still buried six hundred feet down and waiting to be found.

Let me peek through the Durdle Door and glimpse a world forgotten, worn away, and revealing itself to us. Slowly. Ever slowly.