Day Thirteen (Sweating through Bath, Stonehenge and London)

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Despite the lack of air conditioning I got a good night's sleep in my rather modern looking hotel room. Breakfast was unexceptional again. I guess the breakfasts I find unappetizing are the continental ones. This morning's was primarily cereal products and toast. Give me bacon, eggs and baked beans every time.

The morning was already stinking hot as we tried to repack the every expanding pile of bags in the boot. By the time we left the hotel property, drove through Swindon and finally reached a major roadway, we were stuck in rush hour traffic. Things weren't quite as bad as New York City or Washington DC traffic jams but progress was rather slow as we headed Southwest toward Bath. We must've gone through twenty traffic circles on the way. We got to Bath so much later than our expected arrival time that James opted to skip giving us a bus tour through the town. Instead we went directly to the city's main touristic attraction: The Roman Baths.

After driving on to Stonehenge we continued on to London where we checked into the Days Hotel London. I was expecting this American chain hotel to offer us frigid air-conditioned rooms for the 3 nights we'd be staying there. Boy was I wrong!

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Photos

Historic snooty Bath
Bath was the spa town that the English royalty and nobles escaped to to relax. The soothing mineral waters were a cure-all for rheumatism, dropsy, gout, pleurisy and all kinds of other illnesses only the wealthy are entitled to get. The town grew up around the mineral springs and many of the Georgian and Victorian abodes of the pecunious denizens still stand today.

Must be the maid
It took Mark a lot of maneuvering through one way streets and alleys to get us to the Roman Baths. Along the way we saw row and rows of these beautiful old homes once occupied the super rich.

Rowhouses of Bath
We knew we weren't going to get much time to explore the streets of Bath so Gail and I snapped away from inside the confines of our bus.

Hello?
Mark was having a heckuva time getting us into the center of town. We seemed to be going around in circles. He really needed some help with directions. If only we could find a phone.

One of the many Crescents of Bath
We didn't have time to step or even to slow down much as we passed though Bath. At this point we kept passing through curved residential streets housing beautiful old homes of the 18th and 19th Century rich. I always thought that the mass-produced residential developments we see today are something new but in the late 18th Century urban development featured planned blocks of housing like these.

We're getting there...
Finally Mark extricated us from the blocks upon blocks of sandstone colored rowhomes and got us to within a block of the Roman Baths. The minute we got off our air conditioned bus I thought I was in a blast furnace. It was disgustingly sticky and hot. The first order of business was to get a drink somewhere.

The Roman Baths
We got to the Roman Baths just as the site was opening. Our EF Tour included admission and the audio guide. The latter is a phone-like device on which you type in the posted number of the particular area where you are standing and a narrator then explains exactly what you are seeing. If you want to skip an uninteresting looking area you just pass by without typing in the number.

That's some nasty looking bath water
We are looking down from curtrent street level to where street level existed during the Roman conquest of England. This area is the "Great Bath".

Bath Abbey
Walking around the parapet overlooking the Great Bath, I soon had Bath Abbey in front of me. It was built adjacent to the thermal baths. In pre-Roman times a pagan religious site was erected next to the sacred waters of the thermal spring. Over time the baths were enlarged and various structures were built on them and next door the religious ground hosted a number of different churches, a cathedral and now an abbey.

Roman Emperor
I don't recall who this guy was but statues of various Roman emperoros adorned the terrace just above the Great Bath. The view from up here is deceiving. At first one would think that the whole site lies in this small area, but the Roman ruins and excavations extend deep below the modern buildings and streets.

Original temple entrance decoration
Down on the lower level Gail, her mother and I walked into the museum with our audio guide phones in one hand and cameras in the other. We learned that a temple to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, once stood next to the baths. The carved head of a Gorgon guarded the entrance.

Mosaic floor
Excavation has gone on for years at this site and is continuing. Thousands upon thousands of items have been found. Roman bath visitors often threw valuable jewelry into the waters in the belief that they were appeasing the gods in some way. All around the bubbling waters buildings were erected then built over time and time again. This nearly perfectly intact floor was found beneath nearly 30 feet of construction rubble.

East Bath
We spent almost 2 hours going through the museum with periodic walks through some of the other rooms in the baths. Besides the Great Bath we also saw the deeper and more private East Bath. In this section we saw what the various bath rooms looked like drained of water. The Romans employed a very sophisticated and intricate way of using the hot spring water to keep certain rooms very warm, while other rooms were purposely filled with cold water. The crazy Romans loved to run around naked alternating between dips in hot and freezing cold water.

Back in the museum
Passing back through the museum we saw just a small portion of the myriad artifacts found at the site. We eventually got bored stopping to listen to the commentaries for so many statues, figurines and display cases. Because so many different periods of Roman construction were covered it was a bit difficult to understand just when certain structures and decorations existed and what replaced them.

Now back in the Great Bath
We could actually see bubbles rising to the surface as we got closer to the big pool. During the height of Roman civilization this area was covered by a huge vaulted ceiling. This bath was the largest constructed north of the Alps. Hot water at a temperature of 115 degrees Fahrenheit rises here at the rate of 240,000 gallons every day and has been doing this for thousands of years. No wonder ancient people saw this as something mysterious.

More baths
Despite the fact that the baths were generating hot water and we were in the middle of a record-setting heat wave, it was very comfortable down below street level. We decided to cut our tour short and explore downtown Bath since we only had another hour and a half before having to reboard the bus.

Disgusting pigeons
We only paused for a minute in the gift shop as we exited the Roman Baths. By now I was extremely thirsty and ready for some lunch. Not wanting to waste too much time or spend too much money we found another pasty shoppe where we each got our own warm doughy turnover. We walked to the center of the shopping district where we found a couple benches where we enjoyed a little picnic. Before long these feathered friends began to show up to clean up any crumbs we might have dropped. This guy looked to be in pretty bad shape with some sort of wing injury. I saved a nice chunk of sausage for him.

There really is such thing as "too much shopping"
Even though we were in the middle of the shopping district in chic Bath we simply couldn't get too worked-up about buying more junk. Gail did waste about a half hour of our lives looking at purses for Cassie, but none of the other jewelry, shoe or women's clothing stores sucked her in. We headed back toward our meeting spot much earlier than we needed to. On the way back we headed toward the Abbey again.

Now THAT'S the way to get around Bath!
Of course Bath is now added to my huge list of places I want to come back to. Next time we bring the kids.

Back on our Magic Bus
Now it was getting really hot again. The sight of our air-conditioned bus was like an oasis in the distance.