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Published: March 12th 2012
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We started off our France trip with a day trip to Bath. Yes, it seems a bit out of the way to go to Bath first, but we like to be complicated and pack everything in. The reason for Bath is that we were planning to take the overnight ferry from Portsmouth, England to St. Malo, France, and we didn't want to waste a day of our vacation, so we stopped in at Bath for a few hours by bus, and then we took the train from Bath to Portsmouth to catch the ferry.
Bath was a beautiful town. Unfortunately we had less time than we thought we had to explore, especially since we had to drop our heavy backpacks off at a hostel to store for the day so we didn't have to lug them around.
We started exploring the town a bit by foot and then we hit the highlight: the Roman baths. It took us a few hours to get through the whole thing, but it was definitely worth the visit. It was so fascinating that these baths were built almost 2,000 years ago, and that we were walking around a piece of very old history.
This hot water spring attracted people from all over the roman empire. When the Romans left England, the baths were no longer kept up, so the drainage system backed up causing flooding in the area, which caused the buildings to collapse and the mud that settled on this spot hid the site for a very long time. It's hard to imagine a roof over the top of the pools, or even how the area looked in it's glory days.
After we finished seeing the baths, unfortunately we had run out of time. We had to head back and pick up our bags and board the train to Portsmouth.
The train would take 2.5 hours to get to our final destination, and when we got on, it was packed! People we standing everywhere! Luckily for us, we had prebooked our seats. Unluckily for us, there were people already sitting in our seats, which would not normally be a problem except one of them was an 85 year old woman. Reserved seats or not - we were not about to make an 85 year old woman stand up on the train! We just stood by hoping that we wouldn't be
standing for 2.5 hours. I think we eventually were both sitting down 1.5 hours into the journey.
When we got to Portsmouth, we didn't know exactly where the ferry terminal was, so we started walking and ended up going the wrong way. Eventually we were pointed in the right direction and told it would be a 2 km walk, which we had to do with our heavy backpacks. Later we realized if we had gotten off the train a stop earlier, we would have been pretty close by the ferry - oh well! We like doing things complicated.
When we checked into the ferry, Elysia persuaded Mike to pony up the 29 pounds to get a sleeping berth, so we didn't have to sleep chairs (the ferry was 11 hours, overnight). We're glad we did because we got to have a nice hot shower!
The ferry was amazing! Since Mike has made a (short) career out of working with boats and ferries, he wasn't surprised at how amazing it was. Elysia, on the other hand, hadn't expected all the facilities and grandeur on the ferry. It was like a floating hotel, and definitely a lot nicer than
the places we've stayed in the last little while. There was a pool, bar, cozy restaurants, two cinemas and lounging areas. It was beautiful. The (inside) cabin was nice too, having our own washroom. We got on the boat at 7pm and spent the evening exploring the boat, eating a decent dinner, standing on the deck looking out into the darkness and sitting in the bar watching some bad magic and singing performance. Then we fell asleep to the rocking of the boat.
Overall it was a great day - and in the morning, we would be in France!
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DAVID BURGESS
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Standing
Well I'm certainly proud of you for not kicking the old lady out of your chair, but then I think that is what anyyone who knows you would expect! Geart pictures Mike. I very much enjoyed reading about your journey. It was almost as if I was there myself. Dad.