Foot Bath

Oh god I'm so tired. Quite a long day today, all walking around the town. Yesterday evening, we saw a sign for a free walking tour starting point, so we planned to join that at 10.30. Knowing it would be 2 hours of walking, we caught the bus into town, to save our legs from that kilometre. It was still a few hundred metres from the bus station to the starting point, and then we stood and waited for 10 minutes for it to start. And then we walked around the city. The guide was an older lady, knowledgeable and enthusiastic, but not really a good speaker. She had quite a thin voice with no lung input to speak of, and she often turned to face the building she was talking about, and she sometimes lowered her voice even further for dramatic effect. With my blocked ears, this wasn't great, but still, we got good value for money. We learnt a lot of stuff that we wouldn't have picked up from brochures, and we became a lot more familiar with the streets.

The tour ran almost half an hour over time, but we had a sandwich for lunch and started retracing our steps to see inside the places we'd just been standing outside. We started at the Abbey, which was shorter in length than the abbeys and cathedrals we've been visiting so far, but is pretty much as tall and with as impressive stonework. But the similarity meant we could go in and out in a few minutes, and we could move on to the Fashion Museum. This was good: lots of genuine 18th and 19th (and 20th) century items, well displayed and explained. This is in contrast to the Design Museum we saw in London, which was confusing and frustrating to try to make sense of.

We continued further back to No 1 Royal Crescent, the first house on that famous Bath street that everyone knows. It's been restored to the state it was between 1776 and 1796, which was beautiful, as well as architecturally interesting.

After this we went back into the middle of the city to see the Baths themselves. Again, fascinating stuff, as the building has parts that are Victorian, Georgian and Roman. It's still (or again) possible to see some of the Roman plumbing and drains, and to go down and walk on the original Roman level stones, and see the Georgian water level, and realise that the current ground level is 5 metres above what it was. And you can still see the hot water bubbling up from its original spring.

We found ourselves near the station and were footsore and weary, so we went into a nearby pub. There were still a couple of places I wanted to see, and we also wanted to wait a bit before dinner - it was still too embarrassingly early to eat - so we recovered ourselves with a quick half. From there we walked towards and then along the river (the Avon). It's such a picturesque scene: imagine, if you will, a sunset, Georgian residences, church spires, tree-covered hills and a clear shallow river. I should be able to get one of the many photos I took on to this page. I think some turned out well.

And then, let's see... more walking to find somewhere for dinner, backwards and

forwards and finally right back to the Abbey, we settled for pizza (it was good), and a taxi home. Sitting down, and shoes off! Yay! A bit of telly. And now we're up to date. See you tomorrow :)