Where: Bath, England
When: February 18-19, 2012
With who: Dave, Tim and Kelly
After a full day of Stonehenging and Salisburying, we landed in our final destination for the weekend - Bath. After getting off the train from Salisbury, we had a nice little walk through the town at dusk, following along the river running through the city.
Bath is such a lovely little city. It's been a tourist spot since the Roman baths became the hot thing to do for Victorian Englanders on holiday. It's filled with novelty shops, fudge sellers, and hot cross buns.
We stayed at little place called the Duke's Hotel. After our walk to the hotel, we had a bit of a lie in before heading out to dinner. We had a bit of a tapas/wine crawl, snacking and drinking at few locations into the wee hours of the morning. Who knew so many tapas bar could be in one small English town.
The next morning we got up for a good English breakfast and the Roman baths. The Romans arrived in this spot while they were busy conquering the world and set up camp here after they discovered the natural hot springs bubbling up from the earth. They thought the springs were like portals to the gods, so they built the baths to harness the natural hot water and temples to worship the deities who put it there.
This was The Great Bath. When you enter the site, you're on the second floor promenade overlooking it. While this promenade came much later in time, the bath itself and the pillar bases around it are all from 60-70AD. The statues surrounding the bath on this second level were meant to pay homage to the Roman greats.
Attached to the side of the baths is a fantastic museum. It's built on top of the foundations of the original bath houses to protect them and provide a place to store artifacts from the site, like the pieces of the old temple, shown on the left. As you walk through the ruins, they have these big television monitors all over that show you what the area you are standing in would have looked like 2,000 years ago. So for example, they'd show you the image of the steps shown on the right, and then superimpose a temple behind them so you could actually envision what they used to lead to.
This room was like an ancient sauna. The piles of bricks used to hold up a floor. Then a fire was lit underneath, so the flooring would heat the room. Voila, sauna. The floor got so hot, you needed wooden flip flops to walk around and avoid blistering the soles of your feet.
When: February 18-19, 2012
With who: Dave, Tim and Kelly
After a full day of Stonehenging and Salisburying, we landed in our final destination for the weekend - Bath. After getting off the train from Salisbury, we had a nice little walk through the town at dusk, following along the river running through the city.
Bath is such a lovely little city. It's been a tourist spot since the Roman baths became the hot thing to do for Victorian Englanders on holiday. It's filled with novelty shops, fudge sellers, and hot cross buns.
We stayed at little place called the Duke's Hotel. After our walk to the hotel, we had a bit of a lie in before heading out to dinner. We had a bit of a tapas/wine crawl, snacking and drinking at few locations into the wee hours of the morning. Who knew so many tapas bar could be in one small English town.
The next morning we got up for a good English breakfast and the Roman baths. The Romans arrived in this spot while they were busy conquering the world and set up camp here after they discovered the natural hot springs bubbling up from the earth. They thought the springs were like portals to the gods, so they built the baths to harness the natural hot water and temples to worship the deities who put it there.
This was The Great Bath. When you enter the site, you're on the second floor promenade overlooking it. While this promenade came much later in time, the bath itself and the pillar bases around it are all from 60-70AD. The statues surrounding the bath on this second level were meant to pay homage to the Roman greats.
Attached to the side of the baths is a fantastic museum. It's built on top of the foundations of the original bath houses to protect them and provide a place to store artifacts from the site, like the pieces of the old temple, shown on the left. As you walk through the ruins, they have these big television monitors all over that show you what the area you are standing in would have looked like 2,000 years ago. So for example, they'd show you the image of the steps shown on the right, and then superimpose a temple behind them so you could actually envision what they used to lead to.
2,000 year old aqueducts. You can practically smell the sulfur...
The bath is still piping hot. If you don't trust the steam, trust me. I probably now have meningitis from touching this water.
This room was like an ancient sauna. The piles of bricks used to hold up a floor. Then a fire was lit underneath, so the flooring would heat the room. Voila, sauna. The floor got so hot, you needed wooden flip flops to walk around and avoid blistering the soles of your feet.
The best I've got for a panoramic shot of the lower level.
Some bathing beauties.
Back in the day, Romans believed that if you wrote a curse on a small tablet and threw it into the baths, the gods would find your curse and make it come true. Nowadays, they just encourage you to throw a coin into the fridgadarium (the cold bath) and make a wish. This is Tim and Kelly's toss.
After leaving the baths, we headed over to Bath Abbey, right across the courtyard.
I love the ceiling in this place. It's so incredibly intricate and beautiful, yet the abbey itself has such a small and quaint feeling - or maybe I've been spending to much time in gigantic cathedrals.
Lots of flags in here.
More stained glass
And one ginormous organ
After that, we had to head back into London, but very much did not want to. We will definitely try to make another day trip out this way before leaving.
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