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Published: October 7th 2008
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Stonehenge
One of the hundreds of angles of Stonehenge. Prepare yourself for a potentially long entry and sorry for any grammatical mistakes - I will be typing a lot!
Brian, Anthony, Stephanie and I left London early Friday morning. We were going from Stonehenge, to Bath and then on to Wales but there aren't any buses/trains on that direct path so we rented a car. BEFORE ANYONE GASPS, everything went fine! Anthony was our driver and he was very confident. There were no accidents and not even a close call. However, we did get a written warning from our hostel and two parking tickets that we now have to pay off.
It was a 2 hour drive to Stonehenge. We were concerned that we had missed it when all of a sudden, we drove over a hill and there it was! It's just randomly off the highway (kind of like a McDonalds) but pretty hard to miss. Stonehenge was actually more than what I was expecting. The $20 ticket you have to buy just to walk along the sidewalk includes a "free" audio guide. It was sort of interesting to listen to but it was so windy that you could hardly hear and so cold that you didn't
My Visit to Stonehenge
This photo A) proves that I was at Stonehenge and B) shows you how unbearably cold it really was. want to keep your hands out of your pockets. It was a quick walk around the site - it all kind of looks the same and it's not like it ever changes. But it is weird to have seen it so many times in photographs and then see it for yourself. I'm happy I was there.
After Stonehenge, we headed towards Bath. We had to pull over to ask directions from a hotel receptionist and then decided that we were hungry enough to eat lunch. The nearest place was Kentucky Fried Chicken. So we had overpriced KFC for lunch. We arrived in Bath and had some idea where our hostel was and headed in the general direction. We knew that it was about 1/4 of a mile up a hill, but didn't know which street. We drove up and down this hill for at least 30 minutes, pulling over 3 times for directions and were still unable to find it. After some bickering (we had been in the car way too long), Brian spotted the hostel's 12x12 inch sign hidden behind some trees. Finally! When we checked in, I was a bit tired and cranky and told the receptionist
View of Bath Abbey
This is a view of Bath Abbey from the upper deck of the Roman Bath. that the hostel was too hard to find. She apologized and said that city law allows signs to only be of a certain size to avoid ruining the character of the city. I felt pretty rude after that.
After settling in, we headed into the city. Bath is absolutely beautiful. The Roman Baths is at the top of my list of the most exciting things I have seen. The baths were built about 2,000 years ago and the architecture and engineering is mind-blowing. The fact that the Romans channeled springs through the city into this luxurious bathing complex is incredible. To this day, the water still flows into the bath at 116°F and the drainage system that the Romans design still drains about 240,000 gallons of water a day to allow fresh water to enter the bath at a continuous rate. The remains of changing rooms, saunas and steaming pools have been recovered and the "free" audio tour guide described every bit of the baths plus more. The bath itself was obviously amazing but I think my favorite room was actually the sauna. A guide took us through it and described how it worked. There are stacks and stacks
The Bath
Here's the actual pool. It's crazy that I was close enough to touch the water myself. I asked a tour guide when was the last time anyone had been in the pool - I was thinking about archaeologists and researchers - but he said that someone fell in two weeks ago while trying to take a picture. EW! of bricks that once held up slabs of stone. A fire was built around the bricks that heated up the stone floor to such a degree that the Romans usually had to wear sandals to walk on it. I find it so amazing that someone designed this system 2,000 years ago. Some of the remains are still uncovered because they are underneath Bath Abbey, the church that was built over part the bath. Couldn't the English have thought of a better place to build a massive church?
After touring the baths we went to a pub that someone recommended called Pig & Fiddle. I don’t know what kind of pub stops serving food at 5:30 but this one did. We walked around the city and ended up at a place called Belushi’s where I had breakfast for dinner. Oh Mom, they served Harvey Wallbangers so I got to try my first one in Bath, England. It was good, but kind of a weird combination with breakfast.
The boys called it a night after dinner (boring!) but Stephanie and I stayed out. I finally met my first group of English local boys. Yay! They took Stephanie and I to
The Bath from Above
Here's a larger view of the bath from the upper floor of the complex. As you can tell, it's obviously a large pool. a club (also my first in England) but we were still in our “tourist clothes” and felt too underdressed to stay there long. The bouncer even gave us a dirty look when we walked in. So we called it a night after that and are now “facebook friends” with the Brits we met.
Saturday morning we went into Bath Abbey which was disappointing. The only exciting thing about it, is that it was the site of the coronation of the first English king, Edgar. Other than that, it looked like an average church with a lot of stained-glass.
After Bath Abbey we tried to see the Royal Crescent, which my book about London day trips describes as “one of the most distinctive examples of Georgian architecture in the world.” We kind of missed it. We drove there, planning to leave directly to Wales. Bath, and England in general, are not very keen on street signs so we had a hard time finding it. And when we finally did, we were already halfway past it that we barely got a glance before calling it quits and getting out of town. Oh, I case you didn’t know, the Royal Crescent
The Sauna
This is the sauna I was describing. You can see the bricks holding up the stone floor. Multiply that by 200 and that's about the size of the sauna. is an exclusive residential semicircle of townhouses. I am a little disappointed that I didn’t get a good look at it, especially because Nicholas Cage and Johnny Depp are rumored to own property there.
From Bath, we headed to Cardiff, Wales. The next 24 hours aren’t even worth blogging about. We couldn’t wait to get back out of town. It looked and felt like a boring, ugly American city. Take the worst, ugliest parts of Kansas City and Milwaukee and put them together and that’s Cardiff. Apparently there is a beautiful bay in Cardiff but it rained the entire time we were there. We had plans to go to Cardiff Castle, which we later learned was bombed during the war and was under construction until 1947. There was still a bobcat bulldozer behind the castle and there was no way we would waste our money on that. So we ate Burger King for lunch and spent Saturday night eating at Subway and seeing a movie. We saw “The Duchess” which is an amazing movie (bring the Kleenex) and the best thing about it all, is that the duchess lived in the Royal Crescent so even though we missed it
ME!
I realized that I need to get pictures of myself at the sites I visit or people may not believe me that I've been there. in Bath, we got to see it on the big screen!
When we got out of the movie, downtown was absolutely out of control. We soon learned that the city actually closes some streets off at night because there are masses of people running to and from bars, girls in ridiculous and semi-scandalous outfits and as one person in our group said, “parades of douche bags.” Sorry that was probably inappropriate to say. But I think you get my point. It was almost unbelievable and just confirmed our bad impression of Cardiff. To add to the night, we got our first parking ticket.
We got out of Cardiff asap the next morning and drove to Oxford, England. If we had had the time, I would have liked to take a tour of the university but we only had a couple hours to spare. Oxford is actually made up of 38 different colleges, at separate locations, but everyone graduates with a degree from Oxford. I bought a rugby-style polo with the Oxford University crest on it so I’m feeling very preppy. Oxford is the place where we got our second parking ticket.
So even though we had KFC,
Royal Crescent
Here's a downloaded picture of the Royal Crescent. I didn't want you to take the time to read my novel of a blog entry and not know what it looks like. Burger King and Subway as three of our seven meals on the trip, the weekend was still close to perfect.
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Christina Gault
non-member comment
Weekend
Hi Abby, Keep up the blogs and pics! I love hearing about your experiences. Take care, Christina