Bath

A row of houses. The whole town is this same stone and it gives it a very cohesive look. I have no idea where those doorways to the right lead as there is a huge round about to the right.

This past weekend, we took an overnight trip to Bath. It's only about 2 hours by train so we were able to leave at a reasonable time (after Anna's morning nap) and get there a little after noon. We stayed in a nice B&B (we need more of these in the US). The room was large and they had a crib and a high chair. The owner is Italian and breakfast was lovely.

The Roman bath from above.

The things we wanted to see closed early so we only had time to do one thing on our list when we arrived on Friday night. We chose to see the Roman Baths. Bath has a natural hot spring and the Romans used that to build a temple complex and a bath house. After they left, the ceiling fell down and got covered with mud and people built over it until the Victorian era. A woman complained to the city about hot water in her basement. After making sure it wasn't the pipes that were leaking, they sent the city architect to excavate her basement and he found the lead floor of the bath house. So on his recommendation, the city bought the entire city block and dug it all up and found the Roman ruins. Then they decided to build a complex on top of it, turn it into an attraction and build the pump room.

A cool mosaic, they think it was in the bath house.

The ticket into the place included a free audio tour (a lot of places did, I was getting kind of tired of them before the end) so we learned all about the place and the excavation and stuff. They have parts of the temple complex opened up under ground that you can see, parts of the building and artifacts that people had thrown into the spring to give to the goddess.

Jason with the drain out of the spring. The orange was really bright.

You could even see the Roman drain that still worked along with the various rooms of the bath house. It was really cool and was nice to visit it leisurely and to have enough time.

Our room.

That night, we just hung out in our room while putting Anna to bed at her regular time. We watched an interesting show on what it takes to become a barrister. It's a crazy process. The next morning after Anna slept through the night and we had a lovely breakfast cooked by a cute Italian woman, we were busier.

We started out at the Bath Abbey. It's a huge church that is really cool. To add to the coolness of it, after we had been there for only a short time, someone started playing the big pipe organ that took up a goodly amount of one wall. Talk about adding to the ambiance.

I loved the ceiling.

Me in front of the altar at the front.

From there, it was time to move on to the Jane Austen Center after a little snack to keep us going (side note, we saw a teddy bear dressed up in leiderhosen, it was SO cute). They started out with an explanatory lecture type thing to tell us about Jane's life. While we were waiting for that to start, we watched part of a documentary about the Jane Austen Festival that they have in Bath every year. Naturally I thought of my sister-in-law Marrisse and decided that she needs to go to that some day. Maybe even dress up. She would love it. So the talk mostly just talked about Jane's life and where she lived when she was in Bath and where she went from there. Anna started having a hard time at that point so Jason had to step out with her. After that, we went downstairs to the center. It wasn't what I was expecting. Mostly it had dresses from a movie called Jane Austen Regrets and talked about life in her day. At that point I had gotten Anna to sleep and was a bit tired carrying her heavy sleeping self (we didn't bring the stroller) so I didn't really read the informative signs and just kind of zoomed through.

A great quote in the room we waited in for the lecture. As you can tell, Jason had the camera and wasn't as interested in taking pictures of non-architectural things (we have tons of detail pictures) and was tired. A killer combination.

Then it was on to the Fashion Museum. It was in the Assembly Rooms where a lot of the balls were held in Jane Austen's time. This audio tour also talked about the various rooms in the building. Unfortunately, by this time I was getting nervous about the time. We had an afternoon bus tour scheduled and I wanted to make sure we got finished with this and got lunch in time to meet the bus at 1 pm. I didn't really know how big the museum was and kind of zoomed through this until then end when I realized there was plenty of time. I would often start the different numbers on the audio tour and then stop them before they were done. My patience was waning. In spite of that, it was an interesting museum. It was set up by type of clothing and had things from different eras in each case. There was day wear, evening wear, undergarments, bathing suits, menswear, dresses, shoes, hats, bags, shirts and ties, and a whole big case by one designer's collection in the 70's.

After that, it was time for our bus tour which I will talk about tomorrow. All in all, I liked Bath. the buildings all had a cohesion because they were all designed and built by the same architect (John Wood), at the same time-ish and out of the same stone which was a pretty creamy yellow color. Bath is known for it's shopping and there were a lot of stores. Apparently a lot of people go there from London to do Christmas shopping and I can see it. I feel like I would have liked it better in different circumstances (less rush) but I feel like I saw it. Next time we're in England, I will have to go back and take a bit more time to enjoy it better.