Bath

Our last trip to a destination in the UK was to Bath. This city is famous for its Roman Baths, hence the name Bath, lol. It's about a 4 hour train ride so we left Friday when Daniel got home from work so we would have the whole day Saturday to look around. We actually had to stay in Bristol, which is about a 10 min train ride from Bath, because there were no affordable hotels available last weekend.

The train station in Bristol was pretty.

The city of Bath (originally named Aquae Sulis) was founded in AD 43 by the Romans who built a city to take advantage of the natural hot springs. They built wash houses and a temple to fully utilize the hot springs. During the Georgian times (early 1700s to early 1800s) it became a popular spa town because the waters of the hot springs were said to have healing powers.

Our first item on the agenda on Saturday was a free city walk. In the 1930s, the mayor of Bath took a group of people on a guided tour of the city and now The Mayor's Corps of Honorary Guides offer free tours daily. They're volunteers who have a passion for Bath. Our guide was pretty good. The tour didn't start until 10:30 so we actually got to sleep in a little bit, which was good because Daniel's sinuses/cold were still bothering him a little bit.

The tour started off in front of the Pump Room, which is part of the Roman Baths and a restaurant. These are both located right next to the Abbey so that was one of the first things he told us about.

Bath Abbey, or The Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, is 500 years old. There has been a church at this site since very early on and King Edgar was crowned there in 973.

You can see the two statutes of Peter and Paul on the sides of the door. It's believed that the head of the statue on the left was shot off during one of the wars by soldiers having target practice. They created a new head from his giant beard. Some say it was just his hat that was shot off but I think it was probably his head because the head of that statue is much smaller than the head of the other one (I can't remember who's Peter and who's Paul).

Beau Nash was the much liked Master of Ceremonies in Bath in the mid 1700s. He ran the social events and made sure that Bath was the most fashionable city to visit.

You can just barely see the only intact remaining portion of the old city walls.

This used to be the front of the Theatre Royal. It's now the back.

This is the Royal Crescent. It dates back to the Georgian time period. These house (all connected) were designed to look perfectly symmetrical on the front but the architect left it up to the builder on what the back could look like. Earlier in the tour we saw the back of a separate set of connected houses and they all looked different and not in the best shape. this is where all the rich people would live.

Another set of houses like the Royal Crescent. There are 3 buildings like this in a circle called the Circus. Both the Circus and the Royal Crescent were designed by John Wood Sr. and Jr. Both rich and poor live here now as the government has set up subsidized housing in some areas.

There are 3 sets of columns going up the building and each one is in a different architectural style.

These ones are more scrolled at the top.

These are really fancy. I don't know the architectural terms for each style of column.

There are hundreds of these panels representing the arts, sciences, and crafts. They're all different.

This is one of the famous houses in the Circus. A famous political figure used to live here. Also, Nicolas Cage used to own this house but he had to sell it because of his tax problems.

The Assembly Rooms. This is where they used to gamble and dance in the 1700s. Beau Nash was the Master of Ceremonies. On nights when they had dancing he always had it end precisely at 11.

The person who had this house built had a major obsession with King Alfred. He had the house and the street named after him.

The people who were sick but couldn't afford to come to the Roman Baths would send letters to this hospital in the hopes of getting their treatment paid for.

This is the only remaining original city gate. This was what the ground level of the city used to be. I guess it was raised to help prevent floods.

The free walking tour took about 2 hours. It was really cold and overcast outside and all the walking around was making Daniel feel worse and worse. We decided to just get lunch and head to back to the hotel for rest and relaxation. We watched movies and napped all day and ended up ordering room service for dinner. The walking tour covered a lot of the city and we decided we could see the Roman Baths and the Abbey on Sunday.

We slept in again on Sunday and actually decided to watch another movie before we left. We watched Horrible Bosses. I thought it was pretty good. There were definitely a lot of funny parts but seeing Jennifer Aniston play a character like that was really weird lol.

We took a train to Bath at about noon so we would have time to eat lunch and then get to the Abbey when it opened for tourists at 1. Before we went to the Abbey we took some pictures of Pulteney Bridge and the park that is next to it.

Parade Gardens. I think its closed during the winter but it looks really nice still.

Bath considers itself the Rome of England. This bridge, Pulteney Bridge, is supposed to be like Ponte Vecchio in Italy. It was made with built in shops.

As I mentioned earlier, there has been a church at this site for at least two centuries. However, the Abbey that's present today was built in the 16th century. It was different inside from any of the other churches we've been in so far. I could definitely tell that this church was still in use. Notre Dame is still in use as well but it definitely felt more like a tourist attraction while we were walking through it than this church did.

The ceilings were really high and had a fluted pattern at the top of the arches.

Like many other places in Europe there were gravestone used as floor tiles. I'm not sure if anyone was actually buried here or if these were removed from the burial site and just used as floor tiles.

All around the walls were these plaques to different people.

There was a small chapel off the side of the high altar. It's hard to tell from this picture but the scene in the stained glass window shows Edgar being crowned King of England.

The organ. Someone was playing it intermittently while we were walking around inside. This was actually put in in the mid 90s.

This giant stained glass window above the altar shows 56 scenes of the life of Jesus.

Unfortunately we couldn't do a tower tour of the abbey because they don't offer them on Sundays. I thought they did when the Christmas Market was there because they offer them more frequently but I guess it's still only Mon - Sat. Another way all my planning didn't really work out, lol. Oh well. We headed to the Roman Baths next. I wasn't expecting to see near as much as we did. I thought maybe only the baths themselves were preserved but they had a lot of the original rooms and areas underground that had been excavated.

After going through the lobby to buy tickets, we stepped out onto this balcony/overlook, that went around three sides of the main pool called the Great Bath.

This is part of the facade of the temple entrance.

This was part of the Temple Courtyard. The door you can see here led to the Sacred Spring, where people would throw prayers and curses into the water to the gods.

Some of the Temple Steps are still there.

This is part of the drain and Spring overflow. They used gravity to get the water to flow into the nearby river.

Since it was so cold outside we could see the steam rising off the baths. This is the Great Bath.

This is part of a suite of Roman Baths. There were several rooms here for treatment. They would sit in this pool with the water up to their necks. There was also a large swimming pool, a hot room, and more private baths.

One of the private baths in the suites.

This is a cold bath. The warm water opened up all the pores and helped get all the toxins out of their skin so they would get into the cold bath before they left to close their pores again.

This is the Sacred Spring. People didn't bathe in here because it was for the gods. Sulis Minerva was the name of the god they worshiped here. People would write curses and prayers (but curses mostly for their stolen clothes) and throw them in the water hoping she would help them out.

This is the floor of a hot room. There would have been another floor on top of these stacks of tiles. They would pipe hot air through here which would warm up the floor and make the room above even warmer. Sometimes the floor would get so hot they would even have to wear shoes.

This is another large bath near the end of the tour. It had 3 of these columns to help support the road above.

After visiting the Roman Baths we stopped at little chocolate shop for some truffles (and macaroons for Daniel since he can't have chocolate) then headed back to Bristol to get our bag and head home.

After this trip it's starting to show more how exhausted we're becoming. We're also both getting really homesick. Unfortunately, we're not really looking forward to going to Germany. We've heard the place we'll be staying isn't that nice (we have to pay 10 euros a night for me!) and doesn't have the same amenities as we have here. It looks like we will be able to spend the holidays with some family friends of Daniel's which will be really nice. Hopefully that will be just what we need to make it until the end of January when we get to go back to the states. I'm hoping to be able to substitute while we're in Louisiana which will help fill up my days and earn us some extra money before we head back to Houston.

I hope everyone is having fun getting ready for Christmas! Hopefully we'll be able to get a small tree, real or fake, doesn't matter, while we're in Germany. I love love love getting Christmas trees and decorating them. It's probably my favorite thing to do at Christmas time. Or baking and decorating Christmas cookies, can't decide hehe. What's you're favorite thing to do during the Christmas holiday?

Can't wait to hear some of your responses!

Janelle