Bath: The Roman Baths and the rest of our weekend

Don’t forget to read up on the first parts of our weekend, Salisbury Cathedral and Stonehenge.

We woke ourselves up early on Sunday morning (June 20^th) so that we could see more of Bath and visit the Roman Baths. Both of us were still suffering from pretty severe jet lag, though we’re still not sure if it was actually jet lag or just lingering exhaustion from the years long haul of graduate school culminating in a Tasmanian Devil style weekend of commencement and defense.

The city of Bath served its purpose as an “entry level” sight seeing city very well. We followed Rick Steves’ advice to spend our first weekend there in order to shake off the jet lag and also to let the whole “ZOMG WE’RE IN EUROPE” thing sink in. And although we scoffed at the notion, in retrospect we needed such a weekend on both accounts.

We found that Bath reminded us a little bit of Las Vegas. Everything was overpriced, had an aura of attempting to be extremely clean despite hooligans constantly messing it up, and there were people dressed up in crazy costumes having stag and hen parties all over the place. (Stag=bachelor and Hen=bachelorette, and I promise the parties are even more raucous than in the states!)

Since we left much of our Bath touring to Sunday, the Bath Abbey was closed to tourists but the Roman Baths gladly took our money. An interesting note of history is that the Bath Abbey is right next door to the Roman Baths. At some point in history the same people responsible for building the Abbey were responsible for destroying much of the Roman Baths, as the Baths were religious grounds for the Romans.

The Bath tour was not cheap, but it did include a fantastic audio guide. These audio guides are very cool as you just dial in what exhibit you’re standing by and it will give you a little speech about it. I was particularly excited by the children’s tour as it had fun characters and more succinct information. They have audio guides at all the major sites we’ve been to, though many cost extra and none of the others have had a children’s tour.

Much of the Roman Baths have been restored to their original state, or at least as close as historians and archeologists can guess. They have excavated and found original paths and floors and pipes and evidence of superb engineering. We found the underground heating system remarkable and imagined what it must have been like to visit in the freezing winter and walk around barefoot on a warmed stone floor. Mark and I were both pleasantly surprised to find that we found the Roman Baths fascinating and remarkable. It is one thing to read about history, hear about it from someone, to watch a movie about it, or even have a lively debate about it. It’s another to put your hands on a lead pipe that once transferred water to a bath full of Romans two millennia ago or walk down a path made of stone bricks formed by a mason in the first century.

After leaving the Roman Baths, we stopped at the Royal Crescent which are some amazing old flats for the very rich. Even the rich live compactly in Europe! Finally it was time for us to wave goodbye to Bath and drive through the country to Windsor. The country drive was beautiful and much of it reminded us of San Luis Obispo county.