BATH 5th – 8th DECEMBER

Bath is beautiful! My only regret is that we had not booked a longer stay here. I surprised myself to realise that I had never visited this place, despite having lived in UK for 42 years.

Our hotel room is great, very large and well equipped. The hotel is set in 20 or so acres of parkland and all around there is work going on to various buildings. The whole complex is undergoing a massive renovation. This work in no way affected us during our stay except maybe was the reason we got such good rates.

On our first day we took a walk into town along the canal.

The weather was cold and frosty, a new experience for Julie. The canal was frozen over; not thick enough to walk on but frozen never-the-less.

During this walk we called into a local church and, much to our surprise found it to be the final resting place of Arthur Phillip, the founder of Australia! 

You learn something every day!

The streets of Bath are gorgeous and just full of charm. I could have stayed here for a month given the time and money! Everywhere is so near and easy to reach.

Unfortunately we were not able to get any really good vantage points to take photos but we got a few anyway.

Day 2 we took a side trip to Cardiff for a few hours. This was partly to get a look at the Severn Bridge. As most of you are aware we both love bridges so took this opportunity whilst in the area.

Cardiff City is pleasant enough with a massive shopping center. Not really worth a visit in my mind but probably would have been more interesting had we had more time. We could then have visited the castle and seen more of the outskirts. However, our time was brief as we wanted to go back to Bath to visit the Roman Baths and have a swim in the Thermapool complex.

We greatly miss-judged the value of visiting these places. The preserved and restored complex is awesome and we didn’t give ourselves enough time.

The session we had in the Thermapool was an experience not to be missed. The feeling of swimming is a naturally heated outdoor roof-top pool is weird to say the least. To do so when the temperature is at 0-1 degree centigrade is a real mind bender! We were not allowed to take a camera into the complex so the only photos are from the web. Besides which, our battery was flat and we had left the spare at the hotel. DORK!

The good thing for us is that when we are in Southampton in a couple of weeks we will be paying another visit. After all, we will only be an hour or so drive away.

Tomorrow its’ off to Looe in Cornwall for a week, then onto Southampton.