It’s strange to think that just a few days ago we were sitting anxiously in the Des Moines airport waiting for our flight to board to begin this whole affair.  The memory of the turbulent nine-hour plane ride seems so fresh, yet so distant. To experience the sights, sounds, smells, and society of England has truly been an incredible opportunity that I will never forget, and I’m sure everyone on tour will agree with that sentiment.

When talking about England, I notice certain words that keep popping into our vernacular. Awesome, incredible, amazing, and countless other synonyms swirl around the bus and throughout tours. This isn’t because we lack good vocabularies – it’s because there simply is no other way of describing the places and things we’ve seen or done.  Trying to express how we felt when we looked up into the lantern (the colossal octagonal window in the tower) at Ely Cathedral for the first time (and any subsequent times after that) or what it was like to sing in some of the greatest acoustics the world has to offer is a virtually impossible task.  To try and confine these overwhelming feelings to simple words or phrases simply can’t be done, but I’ll try and recap today as best I can.
We woke up again in Salisbury after a great dinner the night before and had breakfast and then loaded the coach for a trip to Stonehenge.  We stopped in what seemed like the middle of nowhere only to find that due to the “horrid” conditions and the “blizzard” from the previous days Stonehenge was closed.

It’s at this point I feel it necessary to give you a little bit of insight into British culture and how it differs from a Midwestern American’s paradigm. Like our systems of weights and measures, the perceptions of “horrid” and “blizzard” differ greatly.  The British definition of “blizzard” is about eight inches of snow, a mere dusting by Iowa standards, especially after getting slammed with roughly 17 inches of snow right before finals week this past semester.  It seemed like while we were practically going out in shorts and flip-flops everyone else was scurrying to the local supermarkets to snap up all the remaining bread and milk for the inevitable doomsday that was looming (even though everyone knows that the world is ending in 2012.)

But I digress.

You would think that the closing of Stonehenge was a devastating blow to the morale of a young American choir.  But, in a moment of great truth, our tour manager, Tom Doyle, told us that we weren’t really missing much because the tour itself wouldn’t have allowed us to get very close to the structure itself anyway.  Our morale boosted, we scrambled off of the bus and across the road to see the ancient monument that to this day has an unknown origin and purpose. Theories about its construction range from nomadic tribes to aliens. Who knows? Maybe they’re both right.

After taking some great pictures and throwing a few snowballs we boarded the coach and began our drive to London itself, the capstone city of our tour. I think the drive was about three hours long, but we’ve done so much traveling via coach that I’ve actually lost all sense of time and space.  Our doubly first named coach driver, John Bruce, had this amazing ability to make 98 percent of the group fall asleep whenever we rode in the coach for more than 20 minutes. This was great down time and it gave everyone a chance to recover from all the overstimulation that I think lots of people have been experiencing from day one. Little did we know that the overstimulation is never really over in a place like England.

We stopped at a gas station to refuel and stretch our legs and then began a driving tour of a bit of London. We got out and saw Prince Albert’s monument and then had our picture taken outside the Royal College of Music. After seeing some more of London by coach, it was time for a speedy lunch and then a tour of Westminster Abbey.

Westminster Abbey frustrated me. Not because it wasn’t beautiful or incredibly important historically or even that it was so crowded. The fact that I couldn’t take pictures inside was quite aggravating because everything in the place was, here I go again…amazing.  It was filled with so much beauty and history and tradition and overall coolness that I felt like the Abbey was taunting me, saying, “Look how gorgeous I am and how much rich history I have. I house the tombs of some of the greatest minds of our times in every major field and some of the most important events in England occur here, but you have to rely on your feeble memory to remember all of this. I hope you took your multivitamin this morning.”

In all honesty the Abbey was spectacular. To see the tombs of people like Isaac Newton, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and countless other great thinkers of all time was an experience I’ll remember forever.  To be close enough to touch the coronation chair that dates back to the 14th century but is still used today was mind-boggling. That kind of tradition is unheard of in the United States, where it seems like our oldest building is still one thousand years younger than any of England’s most modern buildings.

After a very thorough tour of the Abbey, we checked in to the Holiday Inn Bloomsbury and prepared to go see Les Miserables in the West End, the English equivalent to Broadway. We had absolutely fantastic seats (I was in the second row, the closest I’ve ever sat for anything in my life.) The show didn’t disappoint. We all left the theater gushing about our favorite characters and generally babbling incoherently about how great it was. It was an incredible way to finish off a fabulous first day in London.

You’ll notice that nowhere in my seemingly endless rant about the day’s doings did I once mention us singing. We didn’t sing today at all. In fact, today was the only day of the tour where we didn’t have any sort of performance or informal sing planned. Not only was it a much needed break for our voices, but it was an opportunity to forget about performing and gave us an opportunity to just take in everything London had to offer - and believe me, London has plenty to offer.