Time for Bath

I finally went on a proper adventure last weekend, I drove to Bath, Stonehendge, Leatherhead and Oxford.  Since that’s lots of places for one blog, I decided to split it up into two parts.  Plus I don’t want to write about everything tonight! Haha

Friday afternoon, my coworker David, his GF Diana and I all went to the rental car place to pick up the rental car.  Since work is paying for the rental car as part of me working over here, I rented the car in my name, which meant I had to drive on the wrong side of the road.  To say I was a little nervous was an understatement.  The roads here are so much narrower than in the States and they are FILLED with roundabouts.  The first 30 minutes of our trip out of the city was filled with at least 15 roundabouts, they never end!!  After the first few, I got the hang of it but they are still a little nerve wracking. 

The trip down to Bath took about 3 hours and we made it there just as the sun was going down.  Similar to Chester, Bath is an old roman city so its got a lot of history to it and looked very pretty at sunset (wish I had pictures but I was the driver).  It took us a while to find the parking lot and a few just misses on hitting someone or getting into a wreck.  City driving is much more difficult than driving on the motorways.  We checked into our hotel and then went about touring around the city.  The one thing that is so strange to me about small English towns is that shops close at 5 or 6pm!! And then the town looks deserted, not a fan.  I did manage to get some good pictures of the cathedral with no one around so that was a plus.  

We grabbed a pint of Guinness at a local pub than headed to dinner at a south American restaurant.  It was Davids birthday on Friday so we let him choose.  The food was pretty good for Spanish food in England.  We got an appetizer of Mexican popadoms which I was hoping to be like chips and salsa, not even close.  It came with salsa and guacamole but it was a giant chip the size of my head and covered in parika or some seasoning.  We elected not to celebrate Davids birthday too much because we had to be to up early the next day to get in all of the sight seeing before heading out of town. 

Saturday morning we were out the door by 9 and touring the town.  We first went down to a pretty garden and then headed to the Roman Bath tour.  The city got its name because it has hot springs located in the city so the romans called it “Aquae Sulis” which translates to bath in English.  The tour was pretty neat but I really wanted to jump in the hot pool.  Its had the same water for the past 1000 years so I elected to be smart and forgo the dirty water.  The tour took us around what used to be a Roman spa.  It had 2 hot springs, saunas, massage rooms and a temple to worship the gods.  It is amazing to see what people back then could carve out of stone with the tools they had.  If I remember correctly, the baths were only discovered in the last 100 years.  Apparently they had been built on top of and so no one knew it was there. 

Old Sauna room minus the floor which the tiles held up.
It was just a giant room that you would splash
 water on the floor to heat the room.

One of the baths -
check out the lady dressed in Roman garb! 

For the rest of the day we just walked around the city, went into a few shops and had an amazing pastry from this cute little bakery.  If there is one thing Brits can always get right, its pastry shops.  Oh my they are delicious and you can find one on every corner.  Thank goodness we walk everywhere or I’d have a problem. 

Well that’s it for now, im going to hold off on the last 3 stops until tomorrow.