Bath

Our plan for today is to visit Bath. This is one of the most touristy places in the UK, so we had booked a private tour guide and the tickets to the Roman Baths a few weeks ago. The Baths really do get very busy, booking is done in time slots and in this season they run at maximum capacity. The only thing we have to keep an eye on today is the deadlines: 11 am for the start of the tour and 3 pm for the entrance to the baths.

We leave at nine exactly, having decided during breakfast – skyr, fruit and nuts for me – which P+R to use and having calculated additional bus and walking time. We follow the A303 towards Stonehenge and endure the weird traffic jam at the point where you can see the henge from the highway. The road does go from two to one lanes, but even then the jam only resolves once the monument is out of sight. We’ll visit next Tuesday, tickets are already booked.

The route continues past Warminster, mostly single lane with a double white line, going around the towns and villages. Maximum speed varies between 30 and 60 mph, with roundabouts and crossroads that seem very dangerous to us. It’s strange, coming from Belgium with its dense network of roads, that we drive the 90 min to Bath without seeing one highway. The last bit to the park and ride is on roads barely wide enough for two cars, with high hedges which don’t allow you to see if anybody is coming the other way.

The country side is very green here: fields with great stacks of hay bales, steep hillsides crowned with deciduous forest, green pastures dotted with cows. The road is often lined with trees growing so close that they shear them into a vertical wall a few meters high which, combined with the crown reaching over the road, creates the illusion of a tunnel in the greenery. Beautiful views, but not very relaxing for the mainland EU driver.

Arriving near Bath, we leave the car in a Park + Ride outside of the city and take the shuttle bus to town. We meet our guide Maisy near the abbey and set off to discover the town center. Maisy studied in Bath a few years ago, is well trained and enthusiastic, but not very knowledgeable about the finer points of history. Doesn’t matter, the tour is a great intro and an efficient way to discover the town center if you don’t have oodles of time. Did you know that though Jane Austen wrote two books that are set in Bath, her diaries show that she didn’t like the town when she lived there? I have read those books and really enjoyed them, I might pick them again now that I’ve gotten to know the town. Arne and I had visited before (see my journal entry from that day here), but it’s definitely a place that bears visiting again.

Funny detail, in the recent series Bridgerton there are quite a few scenes filmed in Bath and here too this is a big thing, the guide mentions it at a few locations and there are dozes of websites detailing the different locations. Some or group are really into the series so it’s a lot of fun for them to match the street views with the scenes from a specific episode.

We finish our tour around one pm and have a quick lunch in a café recommended by Maisy. I have Eggs Benedict and share a pint of the local cider with Arne. The café seems to be popular with students, there are about 20.000 of them in this town (of the 90.000 inhabitants), so the crowd in town is a nice mix of tourists, students and ‘normal’ people going about their lives.

Next up is a visit to the Roman Baths. Again, I visited before, but the site has such a long and varied history that I enjoy the second visit equally much. The eighteenth century buildings are most recognisable, but for me the most interesting bits are the roman ones: the beautiful pieces in the museum and the subterranean remains of the temple courtyard. I decline the audio tour but do some research on Wikipedia. A chat with one of the supervisors while I’m waiting for the others reveals a few more fun facts: they fish out persons from the big basin monthly, items from the excavations in the eighteenth century were sold to raise funds, people continue to throw coins in the spring, but they don’t fish them out because bacteria in the water make it unsafe (somebody actually died after swimming in it in the seventies) and one of the many curse tablets is out of office for further research.

We finish our city visit with afternoon tea. I have the house afternoon tea and scones with jam and clotted cream, delicious, you cannot find this stuff in Belgium anywhere. The drive back is a bit smoother than this morning, because we use Google maps – instead of the 8 year old built in system of the car – to find the best route home. The traffic jam near Stonehenge is still/again there, but at least we’re not in it!

Home around seven, we have aperitive while watching the Olympics and cheer on Nafi Thiam and Noor Vits as they get gold/bronze medals in the heptathlon competition. We heat up the pizza’s for dinner and then play board games until it’s past time to go to sleep.