Touristy Trip 2: Bath

Despite knowing in advance that it would be a crap weekend (another May day with temperatures barely breaking double-digits) we decided to go on one of the recommended day trips from London, this time to Bath. I'd been there once before, on my only school trip of secondary school, where we went to visit the birthplace of Shakespeare and stopped in Bath overnight on the way back. Even then I remember it having been a nice place, but I was also more interested in playing the Smash TV arcade game on the ferry over and back. This time we were up early to get a train to the Waterloo, to get the tube to Paddington, to get the train to Bath. As early as it was, nowhere was empty, especially Paddington station which serves as the train connection to Heathrow. And apart from everyone with their luggage going to the airport there were plenty of people with the same idea as us; the train was jammers. After an hour and a half we got off in what looked like a really nice town, full of tourists and for that afternoon, sunshine. We did the tour of the old Roman ruins complete with Audio guide by Bill Bryson who seemed just a little too bowled over with the place to be believable. It's apparently the only hot spring in the UK - not exactly the land of onsens. Spent the afternoon walking around all the very fancy victorian streets and crescents and Jane Austen period townhouses, and was kind of surprised and disappointed that this place had more cafes and restaurants (not of the franchise variety) than most of the places we'd seen in London. Anyway it's not like we could afford to live in what often looked like an open-air museum.