The Dreaded Day Trip

Here in London we've gotten on a pretty regular schedule. Every Wednesday we have a day trip where we get on a coach early in the morning and do not return until late that evening. These trips are usually neat; we've gone places like Oxford, and Cambridge, and Brighton. All have been really cool, but they always take all day to travel and see these things.
So yesterday we knew we were going to Wales. Everyone was excited for this trip, it is it's own "country" after all. The excitement lingered until Dr. Jacoby (he pretty much is the boss, our dad, the head honcho, you get the idea...) told us we were leaving by 7 AM. So that is really early but whatever, we were still ready to go.
We get onto the Coach and the first downer of the day was finding that Brian our regular driver was on skii holiday in Austria. Well that news was terribly upsetting because Brian rocks the world and always seems to find ways to wedge our ginormous bus into tiny alley ways. So our initial distress passed until we discovered that our second favorite driver Roger was not there either! This news was just as upsetting; and we just couldn't get into the regular swing of things with the ronchy two old men that were our drivers for the day. In fact they were so mute that they didn't even tell us their names. So driver one and driver two is what I'll be referring to them as our story progresses.
We knew that Wales was a little over 3 hours away so we saddled up and basically the bus went straight to sleep. Our first stop of the day was the famous Tintern Abbey. Which actually was quite beautiful to see. Although at the end of the day it is still a ruin and hard to grasp the full picture of the Abbey. But we did get some sweet pictures on some pillars (actually they are quite ugly which is why I will not be posting them.... but it kept us entertained~) So after the Abbey we get back onto the bus to go to see a coal mine! Well, that sounds swell doesn't it, driving 4 hours to see a stupid mine. But we as student have no say in the matter so we just go along with this idea. Well driver one and driver two decide to take an alternate route, that halfway through we came to a 11 foot bridge when we were a 12 foot 5 inch bus! So they were ridiculously embarassed and in the end our 30 minute ride to the mine had taken another 2 hours.
We got to the mine and did the whole "tour" thing underground. Totally creepy by the way! Although lets be honest I could totally pull of the hard hat/ flashlight/ batterypack/ dirty look. So yeah, the mine was scary and took like 2 hours of waiting in line. By the time we were back on the bus we still had one more stop by our gracious Dr. J decides to go to a closer village and let us get out and grab some food then we'll head back home. -As a side note we usually pack lunches on these days, but when we ate breakfast at 6 AM we ate our lunches at like 11 and it was now like 6 so we were starved!- We get to this tiny crappy town and everyone is laughing at how pathetic it is, so they let us off to find food and literally there isn't even one grocery store in the square. So we found some digestives (kinda like biscuit cookies... sick name though huh!) and some diet coke and we got back on the bus for our 4 hour long journey home.
Yeah yesterday sucked, but I suppose you just gotta put it in perspective. I still got to come home to our flat in Notting Hill!