Bed, Bath and beyond

Tuesday



Sylvia and I arrived at our hotel in Bradford on Avon, near bath, last night after the golf dinner. We have a very large twin room with period furniture. The hotel itself is quaintly old fashioned with lots of similar furniture, reading areas and so forth, set on large grounds with lawns and gardens.

Breakfast was the traditional Full English with sausages, eggs, baked beans and hash browns.

We liked it enough to want to stay an extra night and eventually we were told they could accommodate us (literally) after initially saying there were no free rooms.

Freed from the necessity to pack, we headed into Bath which was
15 or so minutes away. We opted for a 4 hour parking ticket and headed to the city centre. There are a number of pedestrian malls there and the roads where traffic is allowed are often one way.

Our first port of call was the Roman Baths.These are located near the abbey.

 I had been here some 30 years ago but don't really remember it. I suspect that they have improved things since then.

For a start there are now audio sets where you type the number on the display to hear a presentation on it.

You enter at the top level where you walk around the main bath. This several statues of Roman figures looking down on the baths.
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 After that you go inside which is more like a museum. There are displays of life of the Romans as well as pices from the original buildings on the site.

There are lif- size movies of scenes from the times.

Also in several places ,they have TV screens which repeatedly play short clips. Many of these show the current scene as you see it, ie the remnants and ruins, and then they overlay this with a 3D rendering of the original buildings.

We spent a good 90 minutes there.

After that we wandered to various places. Sylvia was keen to have a bath bun from Sally Lunn's but the prices were somewhat on the high side. I found a bank and got some more cash and we eventually found a fish and chip shop for lunch.

After lunch, we walked up the hill to the circus, a round park with curved Regency buildings surrounding it. It seems that each of the houses there can be subdivided into up to 5 dwellings.




From there is was a short walk to Royal Crescent, another curved regency building with a multitude of houses perched at the top of the hill with a park opposite - Very Posh and no doubt very expensive.

The circus

Royal Crescent

We headed down hill through the park and eventually back to the car and returned to the hotel via a more scenic route than we used to get there.
After a nap, some reading and computer time, we decide to head out for dinner. We were heading for the city centre but saw a sign to Trowbridge. After heading down that road for some time we realised it was quite an long way off and turned back to the city centre. After much driving around without being able to find a park, we headed out on the road to Bath where we'd seen a pub in the morning. We had a light dinner there.

We have decided to go to Oxford tomorrow and found a guest house near the centre with parking and wi fi.