Bath and Stonehenge

...so I am a little behind on blogging, but tonight I will do this past Saturday and we'll take it from there. Weeks aren't as eventful as weekends anyway.

So this past Saturday John and I went early to King's Cross bus station to catch our tour coach for Stonehenge and Bath. It picked us up at 8am but we didn't actually leave the city until around 9am because we had to pick up at a few other stops first. Our tour guide was an elderly British man who was born in Wales and did not speak English at all (only Welsh) until he was 12. He was very funny as well as informational, giving us facts not only about our two main destinations but about London and the countryside as well.

We arrived at Stonehenge probably between 11 and 12...honestly it is difficult to remember exact times because John and I were both so sleepy from getting up early that we drifted in and out of napping most of the way there. We had about an hour at Stonehenge and really you don't need too much more than that, although John would disagree since he did not get enough time to sketch it. You can't walk too close to the ruins, or in among them at all because they are apparently quite wobbly from surrounding traffic, and of course there are always concerns about people wanting to take souveniers from the stones themselves. We were told before we got there that they would be smaller than we imagined because of the way they are photographed, but I thought they looked exactly as I had imagined them. They are absolutely incredible, and of course still very mysterious because no one knows, or probably will ever know, why they were put there in that manner.

We left then for another hour or so in the coach on the way to Bath, and I was much more alert for this ride and able to really take in the beautiful countryside. It is absolutely picture perfect, with hedgerows and sheep and everything. We even passed through a few tiny towns, one of which still had a tiny dungeon from when they used to hold town drunks until they were sober enough not to be a nuisance to society.

Unfortunately, we only got about 2.5 hours in Bath, since it is almost a 3 hour ride back to London. This was a little disappointing, but the tour was less expensive than doing both things on our own so it still ended up being worth it. Bath is a town built entirely out of the same, yellowish stone that is taken from the hillside it sits on, or somewhere very nearby. To this day, everything built in the town must use this stone. It was first occupied in Roman times because of the natural hot springs, and is the location of some of the best preserved Roman ruins in the UK, the Roman baths. We went into the baths, of course, which are now a museum but you can go right down to the original Roman steps and blocks that the pillars would have stood on. There is also a wealth of Roman artifacts in the museum. The rest of the baths were built over the Roman ruins when they were rediscovered in the 1800s, I believe. Bath's springs were rediscovered in Elizabethan times, and became very fashionable during the reigns of the four Georges in that century, hence all of the beautiful Georgian architecture that Bath is known for. I thoroughly enjoyed the museum and was even brave enough to try some of the healing waters from the springs, which mainly tasted like hot sulfur water, and quite salty. So far they have not done too much to clear up my sore throat.

After the Roman baths, we wandered around the city in the direction of the Jane Austen centre, which I went into briefly to see the gift shop and take a picture with Jane Austen herself. I didn't drag John into the museum itself because I thought I'd rather see the rest of the city where so many of her novels took place than read about it inside. It was a very beautiful day, and the decision was well worth it. We walked around some more, I got an ice cream cone, and we went into Bath Abbey, a beautiful church from the late 1400s that looks much like a smaller version of Westminster Abbey. Then, unbelievably, it was time to get back on the bus and head for home. However, our tour guide did take us around the city by bus one more time to show us some more famous architecture, such as the Royal Crescent, which were houses designed to look like a palace (today they are divided up into a hotel, a museum, and flats, each of which costs around $1,000,000 US). That evening John went grocery shopping and made dinner again, so kindly, while I worked on my literature paper.

Pictures tomorrow maybe...I have a presentation for lit tomorrow that I should finish now.