Richard Lyons wrote:
On Tuesday 13 January 2004 16:29, Jim Higson wrote:On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 22:54:13 -0800, Nano Nano <40101.nospam@comcast.net> wrote: Stonehenge sucks! Seriously, don't visit it. You get to walk around a rope 10 meters or so from the stones, which have mostly fallen doen anyway. I spent most of my visit playing Sonic2 on a RedHat laptop. And then there's the people (mostly American) standing around filming the stones with their camcorder - huh?Really, the main problem is that it is far too distant from London,
That's true to a point ...
where most of the target audience (American or other) is visiting. Far better would be a good replica close to London, complete with underground cinema/planetarium and all the gimmicks to explain the theories about what people might have done there. Then 95% of visitors would use the replica for their filming and visiting. They would not want to touch the stones because of the feeling of awe (however misplaced). Many more visitors could be accommodated, and they would pay for the convenience and ancilliary facilities.
But surely it would be far better to build the replica in America and save them all the hassle of a long plane flight! The food would be familiar. There could even be stonehenge-east in say Atlantic City and stonehenge-west at Disneyland.
BTW, the general approach is pretty much what's been done in the Lake District. There's one road that's been improved and leads to the place that tourists are supposed to go (the average distance a tourist moves from their car is 300 yds or some such number). Then there are lots of lanes and paths where nobody but locals and oddball tourists go :)
Cheers, Dave