Europe - Trip 2

Day 1 - January 23, 2002

Todd is very excited to be both a driver and a safe one...

After a hectic breakfast and farewell the day started reasonably early with a drive start of 9AM. We drove down the M to Bath to see the baths and the rest of this English resort town. The M’s being really boring if not slightly harrowing at 80 MPH we don’t have much to say for the morning. Listened to BBC 4 all the way but didn’t learn anything of interest.

The King' bath in Bath used for bathing the King

We exited off the road towards Bath and saw a sign for Hinton. Since Todd was born in Hinton it was worth a stop to see where it all started. This little hamlet was nothing like the coal-mining mountain town that is Hinton, AB, but had a fabulous pub where Sue and Todd had a great 90 minutes writing post cards and hassling the locals. They also had some excellent Celtic up on the beams; one of the sayings was, “ing odwe trus teve ryon eels epay sinc ash.” Once we had it translated it definitely gave us a chuckle.

We would’ve stayed the rest of the day and night there but felt oddly compelled to actually get to the city we drove 3 hours to see.

The main bath in the old Roman baths

A quick nip into town, getting lost only 3 times (better than ususal), we parked and ran down to the baths and paid the £8 each to get in. We then proceeded to spend the next 2.5 hours in the place snooping, reading and taking pictures. They also had those new-fangled portable digital personal tour guides where you key in the number corresponding to the number at the section you’re at and you get an informative but slightly cheesy audio description of what you’re looking at. Both Sue and Todd thought the guides were slightly superfluous and abandoned them except in moments of complete despair of the displays.

The streets of Bath...

Discovered a bit more about the digital camera today and got some excellent shots in and around the baths. The mineral, light and stone colours made for some stunning shots.

We debated staying the night in Bath but the B&B’s were a touch too expensive for our liking so we headed east towards Henley-on-Thames. Ate a decent dinner at a Brakspear’s pub in town, chatted with the locals and a long-term tourer from Western Australia. Headed back to Tom’s place, stopped in at the Frog in Skirmett for some pints of the Brakspear Special and headed off to bed.

The name seemed to make some sort of sense...