Rub a Dub Dub...

Today is the pictorial tour of Bath!!! Yay!!! I'm sure you are super excited, or if you are like I was before we went there, you have no idea where Bath is or why it is noteworthy. Never fear. I will pass along the fun facts and education that I received on Saturday.

First off, a little background information. <Please excuse me if you do further research and find that any of my points are inaccurate. I'm just going off what I heard on our tour. Blame it on Matt (tour guide Matt, that is) if I get something wrong.>

Tour guide Matt

Anyway, Bath is the location of the one and only hot springs in all of Great Britain. Edinburgh was built on an extinct volcano (Sir Arthur's Seat), but even it does not have these warm mineral waters bubbling up from the ground. Way back in the day, the Romans made a temple to the goddess Minerva at the springs and claimed that the water had healing powers. From that time until the mid-late 1800's, Bath was the premier destination for Britain's rich and famous. Some people came for the medicinal effects of the baths, and some came just to see and be seen shopping and gallivanting around town. Later on, the city's popularity waned once sea bathing and sun bathing became popular, and suddenly the rich thing to do was to take a coastal vacation. Today, you can go inside and visit the baths (although you can't swim in them) and you can even pay to drink a glass of the nasty hot mineral water at The Pump Room restaurant on site. If you want a spa treatment involving the springs, you can walk down the street to the modern day spa and pay oodles of money to get various treatments. They pipe the water from the baths to the spa, so you can soak up the minerals for a couple hours or have someone rub mud on your face. To tell you the truth, I was contemplating how good a hot tub would feel at that point in our tour because it had started to rain, and it was a very cold and gloomy rain.

The Kings' and Queens' Bath House

So there's a very brief intro. The rest I will try to sum up in the captions of my pictures.

Here's a visual to show where our tour went. We started in Cambridge, which is slightly northeast of London. It's probably about as far north as Stratford upon-Avon. We went south around London and west to Stonehenge. From there it was only about 50 minutes on the bus to Bath. On the way home, we left Bath around 6:30pm, swung back around London and then up to Cambridge. We got back to Cambridge around 9:30pm.

The bus dropped us off right in front of Bath Abbey, so that's where Matt and I decided to go first. Later in the afternoon we met up with the group for the guided tour, but we had a couple hours of free time for independent roaming. The Abbey was the location of the first coronation of the very first King of England back in 973AD. The current Queen (Elizabeth II) visited the Abbey in 1973 to mark the 1,000 year anniversary of the coronation.

The church is very light and open and welcoming, not as dark as the Ely Cathedral. Because of its fan-vaulted ceilings, the supporting pillars did not have to be as large, thus there was more room for huge stained glass windows. (Side note: Perhaps the best example of fan-vaulted ceilings is located in Cambridge's own King's College Chapel. If we ever make it inside, I'll be sure to take pictures.)

After lunch, which was a much larger chore than it should have been thanks to the weekend lunch crowds, we met up with our group near Pulteney Bridge. This is one of England's most iconic bridges and is often compared to Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy. Ponte Vecchio, Ponte Rialto in Venice, and Pulteney Bridge all have shops lining both the right and left sides. You wouldn't even know Pulteney was a bridge at all when you walk over it. It just seems like a regular street.

Pulteney Bridge in Bath

Ponte Vecchio in Florence (taken during our 2009 trip)

Ponte Rialto in Venice (also taken during our 2009 trip)

Looking down the street from Pulteney Bridge you can see a hotel at the end past the fountain. This was the go-to place to stay because it was the most expensive hotel outside of London for many years.

This is looking back down Pulteney Bridge. See how it doesn't look like a bridge at all? The shop closest to the camera on the left had some enviable antique maps. I chuckled when I saw one in the window that was of Texas and Oklahoma! How coincidental.

You would assume by the uniform architecture in Bath that the entire city was designed by a single architect and built all at the same time. That would be an incorrect assumption. Apparently, the city has a very strict building code, and although much of it was built rather quickly in the Georgian Era, there is no single designer. The law states that you must build your building's facade to match those on either side of it. Thus, you get very symmetrical and cohesive architecture in the front, but the backs of the buildings show that each is different on the inside. It's practically impossible to tell which buildings are the oldest and which are the newest. They all look alike after a couple years of exposure to a maritime climate.

Next, we went down some stairs to be level with the River Avon. I've noticed a lot of things, especially cities, with the word "Avon" in their names. By the way, it is pronounced like the latter parts of the words "haven" and "raven." Don't say "A-vaughn" like the cosmetic company or you just gave yourself away as an outsider. Avon apparently was the Celtic word for "river." So, this river is literally the "River River." Creative.

A nice riverboat wedding! What a pretty setting.

A better view of the bridge. If for some reason you wanted to traverse the UK via its rivers, you can rent a boat and drive it wherever your heart desires. No license required. That seems safe. Because Bristol and Liverpool were major slave-trading ports, they have an extensive system of locks. At one point, a boat can climb over 70 meters vertically in a stair step fashion thanks to the locks. It takes 3 hours to get from top to bottom, but it gets the job done.

Here is the Bath Rugby Stadium. It seats around 10,000 people. I don't know if this was purely myth or not, but tour guide Matt told us that Cambridge was the place that rugby and soccer split into two different sports. Supposedly in 1863 on Parker's Pieces (a green in Cambridge) some rugby players from the town of Rugby met up with some other athletes. They haggled over the rules of sports - you can use you hands, no you can't, etc. Eventually, two separate sports were birthed - Rugby Football and Association Football. We Americans took the "soc" out of Association to rename it soccer. How 'bout that? Tour guide Matt was not fond of rugby. He said it is a stupid sport that hurts really bad. That reminded me of my dad and how he hates American football due to his childhood experience playing the sport. The one season he played, his helmet was too tight, and he was small, so everything about it just plain hurt. (PLEASE CONTINUE TO THE NEXT POST FOR THE REST OF THE PICTURES OF BATH. FOR SOME REASON BLOGSPOT WILL NOT LET ME INSERT MORE ON THIS ONE. THANKS!!!)