Layla decided to take her sweet time falling asleep last night. She makes more noise, grunting and such, while falling asleep than a pack of wild dogs. By the time we had finished our episode of Game of Thrones it was past midnight again. As such, we awoke a bit past 9am this morning. Breakfast at the Hampton Inn was a bit less fancy than the Hilton’s had been, as we suspected. Everything was nice, the mussleix, ham, toast, except the coffee. So far the coffee here has been good or great, but this was brown water. I’ll find something to complain about most places, but this was truly bad.
Back the room to get ready and then out to the car, where we found it was storming quite badly. Excellent weather for a drive in a foriegn country – at least I was getting the hang of it by now.
RIck Steve’s guides have been quite helpful when figuring out where the “best” of something is in a given city. His advice for parking in Bath was spot on and gave us a nice all day car park within convenient walking distance of the Roman Baths and the central district. We would never have found it otherwise as many areas in British towns are hidden from the roadway. A quick walk put us in the central district near what I’m coming to find is the typical main street outdoor shopping mall. We grabbed coffee and proceeded to the roman baths.
The natural hot spring that feeds the baths is the only one of its kind in Great Britain. It is fabled to have healing or restorative powers, but when Layla went to put her hand in the water she was told not to touch the water as it is “very dirty.” I guess all the healing powers have been replaced with germs. All-in-all the museum and uncovered portions of the bath were quite interesting to look at.
Our ticket also included entrance to the Fashion Museum just a short walk away. Billed as the 10th largest museum of fashion in the world, the Bath Fashion Museum was probably just larger than a school multi-purpose room and very dark and dingy. While it was interesting to see some of the fashions over the years, if you’re tight on time I’d skip it.
We grabbed another pub dinner in Bath. I didn’t catch the name of the place, “West” something. There was a Sunday roast special that sounded great. Everything but the meat was quite good, but the roast beef was a bit dry. I suppose when you catch the end of service that is to be expected. Puddings were great as usual. The Brits do seem to have dessert down.
We drove back to Newport, in Wales a bit earlier with the intention of an early bed and early rise.
