Saturday was our day to walk around Glastonbury. After arriving last night from Bath, we woke up to a postcard view of central Glasto thru the window of our room.

Glastonbury is like a hippie pilgrimage site. There are lots of other people with long hair and brightly colored clothing, and most of them are locals.

The ruins of the abbey (destroyed by Henry VIII in the 16th century) are said to hold the remains of King Arthur and his wife Guinevere.

Many attribute healing powers to the water from the Chalice Well. According to legend, Joseph of Arimathea hid the holy grail (containing the blood and sweat of Jesus) deep beneath this well, which explains the red tint to the water.

Others say there’s a lot of iron in the water.

Next to the well is the Tor, a 525-foot hill with the tower of a 14th century church at its summit. The wind was fierce at the summit, as there is nothing to stop the wind for hundreds of miles.

In Glastonbury itself are endless numbers of shops devoted to various forms of ancient and new-age mysticism. You can buy everything from bumper stickers to books to artwork to crystals of every shape, size, and color.

There’s a bookstore just off the main plaza, where we peeked into guidebooks to research places to stay at upcoming destinations. Our next stop is Chester, so we took note of a couple of places to stay near the train station there.

We found a curious phrase book in the language section: “USA English”. We Americans have enough unorthodox contributions to our “common language” to merit our own phrase book. A random peek landed on two pages of colloquialisms unique to surfer culture.

But since we carry everything on our backs, we could only window shop. All-in-all, Glastonbury was a town in which we felt very much at home.

Our room at Backpacker’s had previously been reserved for tonight, but the good folks at the front desk found us a room above a bar just down the street. So we got settled in there to prepare for our travel day on Sunday.