Bath Abbey
Yesterday three of us gathered at the Stanhope Arms Pub at 7:00 a.m. and stood about in the London rain with our coffees, waiting for a tour bus to come.
Touring tourist attractions in a bus can be risky, because you don't know any of the people involved. You can find yourself seated next to someone who talks incessantly about themselves, when all you really want is to sleep or listen to the tour guide. Or you can get a tour guide who knows less than you do about the attraction. And worst of all, you can get a scary driver who sways round the corners of the English countryside, making everybody sick.
But none of these dreadful things happened. We sat next to each other in the VERY FRONT of the bus (with Hudson not far behind). We had boarded a little later than the others, and figured our goose was well and truly cooked. But then I noticed that the front seats were empty. I thought it must mean that someone Very Important was to sit there. But when asked about Very Important persons in those seats, the tour guide said they must be for us! This started everyone off in a happy mood because becoming bus sick isn't fun for anybody.
And we had a superb tour guide! She (her name was Lucy) was young and (we think) British with a very unique accent we could never figure out. From the start she was funny, knowledgeable, interesting, and extremely likable. Spending 11 hours with a busload of strangers and keeping them happy is a true gift. We all instantly knew that we were in good hands.
Oh - and we had a very capable bus driver! None of this slap-dash taking of corners or looking over at the cute tour guide when he should be watching the road, Once again, we were clearly in good hands.
But first, do you know about Bath? About THE baths? The baths we saw today in Bath were what the Romans built when they took over Britain and wanted their baths in England to be just the way baths were in Rome. Apparently they had not needed bathing costumes back in Rome, and saw no reason to need them now. There were hot baths, cooling baths, baths with massages, baths without massages, some rooms with just women, some with just men, and then (here is where I part company with the Romans) some with them all mixed up. At this point in the tour, I ducked out and went to the Bath Abbey. Much nicer all around.
The strange bridge you see here is in Bath, and it is called Pulteney Bridge. I always go to see it when in Bath. Perhaps you remember it from the film Les Miserables, when Inspector Javert was so deeply saddened by Jean val Jean's kindness that he wound up jumping off of it while singing the song, "Stars". There is quite a lot to love about that song, and it is just too bad it had to have such a tragic ending. The Rather Stunning Son said, and I agreed with him, that there was no reason Javert should have to die right then. In the film starring Russell Crowe, he very dramatically leapt from the Pulteney Bridge, which would actually be impossible in real life because they did something to make the bridge a shorter distance than he could have leapt. But let's forget about that right now because I can't see the words on this page anymore, and am having difficulty making sense of it.
See you along the way!
the SconeLady
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