Bath

The next day, we drove down to Bath. This was something that I was really looking forward to because of Jane Austen. In a lot of her novels, she mentions Bath in them and two of them were actually set in Bath--Persuasion and Northanger Abbey--which I have never read. Jane Austen actually lived in Bath for five years--although it wasn't a very happy time for her then. So, there's actually a Jane Austen centre there that we went to go see first--Garrett was thrilled about it! :) But, he went with me like the good husband that he is.


It was neat to see, but it mostly focused on her unhappy life there and I wished they would have talked more about her other novels and such. They did talk about a few places in Bath that were mentioned in Persuasion and Northanger Abbey. We didn't get to see those places, though. We never have enough time. They had the costumes set up from the new BBC movie, Miss Austen Regrets. Those were neat costumes.

If I didn't have my kids with me I would've gone upstairs and had tea in their tea rooms. The room was pretty small though and taking all of my kids in would've been a nightmare. It would've been so fun though. All of the menu items were named after characters or places in her novels. Such as: 'Tea with Mr. Darcy', 'Mrs. Bennet's lemon drizzle cake' or 'cousin Collin's crumpets'.

After that, we grabbed some lunch @ Subway and found a bench outside to eat on. They really don't have places to sit and eat here or else it's just a tiny little area--a place where we don't fit. Here's us eating on the busy high street.

As we were eating, there was a young guy set up on the street and he was drawing cariactures. After we ate, I went over to watch him and saw that he was really good. So, we had him draw the girls. Unfortuneately, Bella was sleeping so he couldn't draw her. But, it turned out really cute. Maggie doesn't look exactly like her, but he did a good job for the most part.

We then went to the Roman Baths which is what Bath is really known for. The city used to be called Aquae Sulis. Romans traveled so often there to "take a bath" that finally it became known simply as Bath. It was an interesting place that was really big. I just thought we'd walk in, see that bath and be done, but it was a huge museum with an audioguide tour. Some of it was interesting but the audioguide things were a bit long and boring. We overheard one of the "live" tour guides telling her group that sometime in the late 1600's, a woman discovered water leaking in her house, and when they dug around to find the source of the water, they discovered the Roman ruins of the bath and began excavating. They found this "bath" 18 feet below the dirt floors. Crazy. Today they have a nice spa there that's really expensive and a restaurant/cafe called "the Pump Room" where you can actually taste the water that flows from the spring. I've heard it doesn't taste very well.

There was this abbey right next to where the baths were found. (Behind Garrett)