I can't help feeling this day could have started better. To be fair, I got up on time, and I was sceptical about being about to get to Lansdowne Roundabout in two minutes. Better give it five. I reached the roundabout at the same time as the bus. Even if I ran screaming after the bus, there'd be no chance of getting to the stop on Christchurch Road before the bus.

I watched in annoyance as the bus spun round onto the main road leading to Boscombe. Rather than wait the hour for the next bus on the street, I decided to return home. And it was now that, for the first time in three months, the heavens opened.

It was still raining when I left my flat again, this time certain I would reach the stop on time. I was already soaked by the time I boarded the bus.

This is one of the major problems of holidaying in England - when you book your hotels and transport tickets, you just can't predict what the weather will be like on your actual holiday. The tourists who have decided to take a beach holiday in Bournemouth this summer have largely had good luck. Unless they chose to arrive in the town today! But you have no way of knowing which week is best to do your trip.

OK, so here's my deal. I was originally hoping to get to Manchester using only local buses. It looked not only possible, but in fact quite easy.

Problem is, I didn't look carefully enough at the information. After booking my hotels, I checked the routes again and discovered that some of the routes I'd found were trains or coaches.

Well, I can get to Coventry by local bus. After this, AI assures me that a service operated by National Express is a local bus, not a coach (I'll believe it when I'm on the bus).

However, from Birmingham to Manchester, local buses take around 9 hours and involve about seven changes in places I've never heard of. On another occasion, I might take this journey, but certainly not in one day, and certainly not this week.

Instead, I will cheat, and take the coach for the last leg of my journey. I don't mind admitting this - after all, I'm only cheating myself!

Unfortunately, I wasn't stopping here. It's probably my favourite city in the UK. The beautiful Medieval city centre, and market square greet you as you get off the bus. A hundred metres or so from here is the cathedral, which boasts the highest spire in the UK, the world's oldest working mechanical clock, and the only surviving copy of the Magna Carta.

Walking along the lovely waterside, you get to Old Sarum, the site of the original cathedral. You can walk along the ruins, and learn more about the history of the city.

You can also visit several independent art studios, and talk to the local artists about their work.

On my last visit, a barista asked me why I loved Salisbury so much. I come from a bigger, more exciting place. "You know, we call this city Smallsbury!" he joked.

Salisbury is much smaller than Bournemouth, and if you didn't know which of the two had city status, you'd be unlikely to get the answer right. But that doesn't stop it being a lovely city with a lot to see and do.

Like in Bournemouth, there's no real bus station. Instead, the central square acts as a confusion of bus stops which sprawl through several streets. I made my convoluted way to the wrong bus stop, and got caught in another outburst of heavy rain. My trousers, which had only just dried by the time I'd got off the bus on Catherine Street, were soaked yet again.

I checked the information again and realised that I'd only had to walk two stops down from where I'd got off the Bournemouth bus. I walked back the way I'd come.

The rain stopped almost as soon as I got on the bus. The windows were still covered in raindrops, and it was still difficult to see what was outside.

My impression of Wiltshire is that it's very, very agricultural. Almost everything you can see from the twisting lanes that the bus trundles down are yellow and brown fields. Bizarrely, it's the villages and small town which add some greenery to the route.

In one such village, the lane was too narrow to allow two buses to pass. Our driver began to reverse back to the only slightly wider highway. At the junction, she stopped, and yelled, "If you can't get past that, you ought to give up driving."

Several passengers started laughing.

"Wait. Did I just say that out loud?"

Towards Devizes, the bus goes through some more wooded area, but only for a few minutes. Suddenly, you're at your destination

Overshadowed by the more famous stone circle at Amesbury, Avebury Henge goes under the radar. Indeed, I'd only heard of this circle two years earlier.

In this village, you can walk right up to the stones, and you can even touch them. Apparently, you sometimes even see sheep grazing on the grounds. Consisting of more than 170 rocks, this is the biggest stone circle in the world, but despite being free to enter, there are nowhere near the hordes of people who pay a small fortune to get no closer than five metres from Stonehenge.

The first barrows were built around 6000 years ago, and the inner stone circle was constructed about 600 years later. Later, a second, larger, circle was built, and then a third. Within these circles are other small stone circles - really, whoever built this henge had a very different sense of aesthetics as we have today.

Two 'avenues' were also built, although archaeologists cannot be sure if they were intended as roads for the living, roads for the dead, or they served another purpose altogether. If you're willing to walk a few kilometres, there are more sites of archaeological interest just outside the village.

I'd noticed that there were at least three chalk horses, all of them about four kilometres from the village. I wanted to investigate, and would probably have had time.

If I'd taken my holiday a week earlier, I'd have been greeted with blue skies and temperatures which were warm, but not oppressive. Instead, although it had stopped raining, the sky was misty, and the atmosphere bleak.

Maybe I'll leave the chalk horses for another time.

Besides, just as I reached the bus stop to continue my journey, the clouds decided to flush the toilet on me once more.

It rained all the way from Avebury to Swindon, and I saw little out of the window. More yellow and brown fields, more quaint villages.

But I can't be so sure. I probably fell asleep for a few minutes, and besides, whatever was on the other side of glass was so distorted from the raindrops on the window.

On reaching Swindon, I could honestly say that I had enjoyed the journey. Yes, the train would have been easier. Even a coach via London would have been quicker.

But I was worried that this could be too much at my age. It turns out that the six hours it took from Bournemouth to Swindon (including the two I spent in Avebury) were not so bad.