A couple of years ago, a band I was in toured the UK. This was our 3rd tour in the UK and we had played about 23 shows around the UK and Ireland for a little over three weeks. We had gone on this tour with another band from Florida, the members of which I had been friends with for many years. When the tour came to an end, my friends' band was not leaving for the US immediately. Our band was moving on to continue to tour mainland Europe, but we were all sitting in Cardiff for a few days.
We had rented a van from a local Cardiff van rental agency for the tour, and had the van for a couple more days after the last show of the tour. While driving a 15 seat passenger van with right hand drive and a floor stick was a bit tricky at the beginning of the tour, after three weeks of maneuvering through small British roads, a couple of us had become inured to the constant terror of driving into the side of picturesque British cottages. And so, with a couple of days off, an available van and a bit of undeserved confidence in the driver's seat, four of us decided to drive over to the Salisbury Plains to see Stonehenge.
The drive up went smoothly and uneventfully. It was a beautiful early spring day and the skies above the plains were deep blue streaked with white trails of cloud. The four of us were in particularly good moods, as much of the tour had been plagued by gray skies and an all-too-common drizzle of rain. As we arrived at Stonehenge, we parked the van and headed for the ticket counter. If you have never been to Stonehenge, it is useful to know that English Heritage, the body that maintains such historical sites in England, has the entrance to Stonehenge on the opposite side of the roadway. In order to enter the path that leads around the site, one has to park and pay on one side of the road, then enter a walkway that leads beneath the road up to Stonehenge.
Upon seeing the price for entrance, I became painfully aware of how little money I had, and that I needed to hold onto to every penny that I could in order to survive for the next few weeks in Europe (it should be pointed out that while both of our bands were enjoying a tour of the UK, neither of us made much of anything - I don't think that we even covered the cost of our flights). The rest of the guys in our current group of four were in the other band, and were thinking of being broke for the first few weeks of their return to the US and so wanted to keep expenses to a minimum. After a few statements from each of us to the effect of, "I ain't paying to see a bunch of rocks," we decided to park on a small road that runs next to Stonehenge, off of the main road.
Getting out on this small dirt road, we were able to walk up to the fence that surrounds the site, and admire Stonehenge from around 50 feet away. For some, this might seem a bit of a loss, to come so far to stand that far away; but to be honest, having paid to walk inside the fence in the past, I felt that none of us were missing out on much that an extra 50 feet could have brought us. So we stood there for a while, admiring the rocks and feeling better and better about the money we hadn’t spent.
Once we felt collectively satiated with our absorption of the magical powers of a circle of big rocks, we decided to head back to Cardiff where we could cook up some pasta. Getting into the van I looked forward and wondered to myself where the dirt road we were on led. I looked around and one of my friends voiced my thought. "You think this road will lead us back to the road to the highway?" I looked forward and saw a sign. "That sign says that the highway is this way."
This seemed to be enough for all of us. I began to drive away from the main road that had led us to Stonehenge from the highway, and drove along the dirt road into the Salisbury Plains.
What had began as a solid-looking dirt road quickly devolved into a rutted and broken road out of some bad horror movie. At times I had to slow the van to a near stop in order to go through or around a particularly deep rut or cleft in the lane. After a while, and quite a bit of speculation as to the health of the van's suspension, we noticed that the road led inevitably into a tight copse of trees. This is all that we could see; the empty plain for miles around us, and that copse of trees rising up in front of us.
We had passed a couple of signs that professed that we were passing items of historical importance, but we didn't notice much but a medieval wasteland. I began to have flashbacks to childhood days spent watching movies like the Wicker Man and the human sacrifice always present in such fare. This is not to say that the landscape wasn't beautiful, but by this time we were too busy laughing at ourselves and our ability to have gotten ourselves stuck out in plains in the middle of a rather small country to truly appreciate the sights.
As we continued on, the signs indicating the way to the road ceased to appear. All that was left were the plains disappearing behind us and the trees filling up the entire horizon ahead of us. As we passed the outlier trees, we came to what was the worst break in the road that we had yet come across. It spanned the width of the road, and ran at a slight angle to it.
I stopped the van and looked back at the rest of the guys. “Well, either I try to get through it, or I try to back up and turn around somewhere.” Everyone looked out the front window. I finally said, “We can get through this; no problem.” My outward confidence in the van’s suspension abilities were not a particularly strong reflection of my inner feelings about the situation.
Again, I remind you that none of us were all that well off financially. To say that all of us were close to being broke would not be far from complete accuracy. We had yet to pay for the van in full, and had an enormous security deposit on it that we were in desperate need of refunding. Still, we had come too far to go back now, crossed too many potential strut-busting small ravines to pass on one more. Not to mention that backing the van up and turning it around was not a given.
With a collective shout of, “Fuck Yeah!” we moved the van into and through the deep rut, the bottom of the van letting us know that there were some rather large rocks hidden in the cleft below us. Once we had passed the rift, we all burst out with yells and near hysterical laughter, at the thought of how close all of us felt we had just come to walking through the trees in front of us to some kind of civilization in the hope of finding a ride back to Wales.
Of course, we were now left in the middle of the copse of trees, which, as the sun was heading on its downward run, began to look far more sinister than was necessary for any of us. “Seriously, does this place need to look quite so much like it’s a den for some crazy human-sacrifice?” If we hadn’t been laughing quite so much, the creep-level of the place would have probably brought out all manner of childhood fears of being lost in dark woods (if you have never been lost in the woods on a dark night as a child, congratulations, because it can truly suck).
Deeper and deeper into the woods we drove. By this point the dirt road was looking like little more than a swath of woods with fewer trees. On a number of occasions I was forced to stop and ask, “Does that look like the road to you, or does that?” while pointing at two somewhat clear areas in the ever darkening path.
After a while of this, we spotted a farmhouse off in the distance. We began to discuss what type of mass-murdering, inbred cannibals lived in such a place, when we noticed the road begin to widen out. After a few more trees, we could clearly see a genuine, paved road crossing ahead of our dirt road.
The cheers went up and we realized that we had survived yet another non-life threatening situation in our lives. We had taken on a small, poorly kept dirt road in a large van and had driven through it from beginning to end. Four grown men had managed to live through a situation that had a mild potential for inconveniencing us. What a thrill; and only another three to five hours back to Wales for about the 24th straight day of pasta-based dinners.