I launched Rudder Financial a few months back with the intention of offering financial planning and wealth management to people well beyond the traditional nine-to-fivers looking to grind away to 67 before sailing off into the sunset. There are plenty of financial planners out there who can help anyone do that. Instead, the niche I’m looking to fill focuses solely on my strengths: trading/investing, sailing, RVing, and just generally living a more unconventional life. Unconventional is not a word most planners like to hear. So, if you think you could use some help getting your financial house in order, setting a plan to get you out living your adventurous dream, and maximizing what you already have, check out Rudder and set up a call.

And now, back to England.

You might think it’s just a pile of rocks. And… you’d be right. But, as with just about everything in England, the point is more about just how old that pile of rocks is. Things first started being constructed around this site 5,000 years ago, and the big rocks were piled up just a few years before the Pyramids of Giza. It really is something to see this place firsthand and look around the area, where it’s not only the rocks, but the hundreds of burial mounds (barrows) lining the hills surrounding the site.

From Stonehenge we drove up to Burford, in the Cotswolds region, to spend a couple of days amongst the small villages scattered around the area.

If you’ve seen Jeremy Clarkson’s The Farm then you know what this place is. We showed up and the line to go inside this tiny farm shop snaked around the parking lot for about a two hour wait. We did not need to do that, so we took in the scene and headed out again.

All over the Cotswolds are huge fields of purple flowers which we at first mistook for lavender. It’s actually phacelia, which is a fast growing pollinator the farmers grow for soil health in between regular crops. Sure does look and smell nice as you drive through the countryside.

Dinner at the end of a long day. They say the number of traditional English pubs like this one have plummeted in the past decade or so, but as a visitor you’d never know it. There seems to be a perfectly nice pub every mile or so out here.