Epic Grad Trip: Bath

Thursday morning we said good-bye to London and caught a morning train down to Bath. We got into town around noon, checked in, got settled a little and then headed out to the Roman Baths, which were cooler than I expected really. Bath screams Jane Austen to me, and it was fun seeing the 18th centuries upper parts of the bath house that was in use during her time, but what I found even cooler were the actual ruins of the actual Roman bath house.

The whole ingenious set up that they had for heating the bath rooms, the tiny etched gems, the alters, the pools -- it was all really fascinating. Which explains the paucity of pictures that I have from this tour. :-) But, here are some of the remains of the old Roman structure that was on the site.

After the tour we headed over to the famous Sally Lunn restaurant for a High (herbal) Tea. Sally Lunn's is famous for their brioche buns and deservedly so. We had a sweet bun with jam and clotted cream and a savory bun with smoked salmon. The buns were so big and light and just melt in yur mouth delicious that I could eat one every single day. Sally Lunn is also famous for having been in business since the 1600s, and you can pop down into their little kitchen museum and see was cooking was like in the olden days. This was also where Lori started her British jam collection -- she'd loved the strawberry so much that she bought herself a jar, and then we had to go back and get another one later. I think by the end of the trip Loo's collected half a dozen jars of jelly. Silly girl.

It was at this point, though, that I diagnosed Lori with travel exhaustion and homesickness, for which I prescribed a nap and an Internet connection. We got back to the hotel, and I made a quick trip to the loo and came out to find this

I was restless, though so I changed into work out clothes and headed out on a run. Note to self: totally worth finding time to go on a run when traveling. It was really fun discovering cute little side streets and well-tended parks and I somehow ended up running near the Royal Crescent, and I enjoyed it very much. By the time I got back, Lori was feeling much better and I took her out to this way spangled out Thai restaurant that was quite good, but didn't turn her into a Thai aficionado the way our first Indian restaurant changed her life forever. And then it was time for the Bizarre Bath tour.

After four days of filling my head with historical information, Bizzare Bath was a nice reprieve. The tour promises absolutely no history and was absolutely hysterical. Magic tricks, hilarious commentary, a stuffed bunny -- um, yeah, it's super British, but Lori and I laughed until our stomachs hurt. The most hilarious bits were the things the guide would mutter as we were moving from one spot to the next, but you had to be standing close to catch it. Lori and I really wanted some ice cream or cookies after the tour, but everything closes at like 5pm in Bath, so we settled for some French desserts at one of the only restaurants still open before heading home and to bed.

The next day we headed out of bath on  small bus tour. First stop: Stonehenge

I'm glad we'd decided to go with the tour out of Bath, because while Stonehenge was really cool and impressive, and surprisingly beautiful, I don't know if it would have been worth the half day to do it on its own. Much more followed. But before we go on, let's talk and stop a minute about Lori's attire. First, please not that while I'm in a sweatshirt -- because, you know, it was chilly -- Lori is walking around in a short-sleeved t-shirt. In fact, Lori didn't even have a sweatshirt with her that day. I almost never took my sweatshirt off while we were in the UK, Lori almost never wore one. But, to be fair, she also almost never complained about being cold, so I have to give her credit for that.

Second thing about Lori's attire is that she's wearing a BYU Idaho shirt (I'm also sporting BYU blue, but that's irrelevant to the story.) As we were walking out of Stonehenge, there was a family of people on the other side of the chain link fence who spotted Lori's shirt. The following, shouted conversation ensued:

Random Lady: BYU Idaho! Do you go there?
Lori: I'm going there in the Fall
Random Lady: We know someone who's going there is the fall, too!
Lori: Cool!
Random Lady: His name is Sam Pulsipher (spelling?)
Lori: Okay.

Next up was Avebury -- a henge much like the famous one, but much, much bigger and unfortunately, not as well preserved. The ditch is still pretty impressive, though.

This rock was called the Devil's Seat or something like that and I'm pretty sure there was a reason for that, but I don't remember. Mostly what you need to know is that this is Lori's "devil" face.

After Avebury we stopped for lunch in a town called Laycock. This was one of only a few pubs that Lori allowed us to eat in, and of course the bus driver got us properly prepared for it by telling a ghost story about the men's bathroom.

What you really need to know about this village, though, is that it was used in a lot of movies and most famously in several of the Harry Potter movies. For example, if memory serves this was Harry Potter's parents' house (I've only seen each of the movies once, so I don't really know).

After Laycock we headed to Castle Combe in the Cotswolds. This teeny village is also famous for being in movies, including the old Dr. Doolittle with Rex Harrison which I love.

And then we headed back into Bath. We'd built a good rapport with the tour guide during the day, so he took us on a little side trip up to his favorite viewing spot of Bath -- breathtakingly gorgeous.

 

We still couldn't find any ice cream that night, but we did find Jamie Oliver's Italian diner. It was good. Not spectacular, but no way I could note that Jaime Oliver had a restaurant and not go to it.

We only spent two nights in Bath, but took an afternoon train out of town on Saturday. Unfortunately we spent *most* of the morning trying to located the Bath at Work museum that we wanted to go to. It was not, say, the Winston Churchill museum, but I liked the small-town curated feel of it and it had some fun working machinery and a decent audio guide. Plus: pretty baubles.

And that was it for us in Bath. I'll leave you with a parting shot of the Royal Crescent.

Epic Grad Trip: London, Days 3 & 4

By the third morning in London, Lori and I were getting really sick of the muesli and greek yogurt that was the free breakfast offered by the hotel. Every. Single. Day. There were options for other kinds of breakfasts, but they were money and neither Lori nor I wanted to spend money if we didn't have to. So after forcing it down, we headed over to the Churchill War Rooms. Somehow I don't have any pictures of this; I'm not sure if it was because photos weren't allowed or if I was just really into the museum. I periodically would play the "What was your favorite ____________?" game with Lori (and I guess, to be honest, by periodically I mean daily) And the War Rooms consistently came up as a favorite museum or favorite activity in London. We loved it. It was hands down the best audio tour that we had the entire time in the United Kingdom (and there were LOTS of opportunities for audio tours) and it was just an extremely well curated museum -- a really good use of interactive and non-interactive exhibits, there was a good flow so I never felt crowded, and the museum, particularly the map room, retained such a sense of time and place. It was amazing. I will confess that there was one point at which I actually got teary-eyed because of how immediate they made the whole feeling of directing the war effort from this bunker. Amazingly well done.

We spent probably two and half hours there, which as I mentioned in my last post is the point at which my brain starts to get too overwhelmed with information. It worked out, though, because it gave us time to get some lunch and then go to a lunch time concert at St. Martin-in-the-Fields. There was a winds quintet playing and they were quite remarkable, but for some reason day three was when the jet lag decided to up and smack us in the face and so at different points in the concert we both struggled with staying awake. But, for the parts that we could pay attention too, really amazing quintet.

After that we had about a hour to almost literally run through the National Gallery before heading home to get ready for the ballet that night.

Except for the teeny weeny detail that our ballet tickets were for Wednesday. Oops! I'm not entirely sure how I got it in my head that our ballet tickets were for Tuesday, but I was pretty convinced of that, so imagine my dismay when we went to collect the tickets and the guy was like "The ballet isn't on tonight..." Um... but I bought tickets! Anyway, luckily the tickets were for the next night and not for the previous night. This did leave us with some time on our hands. We decided that we would start by having a leisurely dinner. This is the night that I introduced Lori to Indian food, and girl couldn't get enough of it after that. She loved the naan and the rice and the curries and the tandooris. I created a monster! After dinner we went to check out Covent Garden, but there was nothing really going on there (we were too late for the good stuff). So we decided that we'd make a trip out to Kensington Palace.

The grounds looked like they were lovely, and Hyde Park was also nice. The Kensington part of London was SO different from the other parts of the city that we had been in -- more modern feeling, I guess would be the best way to describe it. It was nice to see that and really recognize that for the most part, we were only seeing the tiny tourist part of London and that beyond that it was this busy, bustley city with all kind of different neighborhoods and personalities. We also took advantage of the unstructured time to take the obligatory red phone booth photo (thank you, kind strangers for offering to take this one of both of us!).

Wednesday was our last full day in London. After a comment from our walking tour guide on Monday that Westminster Abbey and the Tower of London covered the whole of London's history, we decided to skip the Tate which was originally in the plan and do Tower of London instead.

It was nice -- we got there first thing to try and beat the crowds, which seemed to work. My favorite thing was the engravings in the prison tower walls. Lori's favorite part was the crown jewels (she likes sparkly things.) We wandered around for a while learning about William the Conqueror and being like "This is a CASTLE! Like, a for real castle!" until we hit the "saturated with information" point, and caught the bus to St. Paul's Cathedral (we were a teeny bit sad to have just missed the old fashioned double decker bus that runs the route between the Tower and St. Paul's, but c'est la vie).

We oohed and ahhed about how beautiful it was for a while, sat for a while in the whispering gallery, although we couldn't get it to work, and then climbed the 3,476 steps up to the dome. (Obviously, that's an exaggeration, but it was a lot of steps. One of Lori's "favorite things" that day was "having made it to the top of St. Paul's" hehehe.) The view was TOTALLY worth it, though. Stunning.

Of course, I spent the rest of the day singing "Feed the Birds" from Mary Poppins, particularly the line "Early each day to the steps of Saint Paul's/The little old bird woman comes."
Our afternoon was filled by a performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" performed at the reconstructed Globe Theater. It was awesome. We bought the £5 peasant standing in the yard tickets, which was fun, and not as straining as expected.

The performance was excellent, if occasionally bit bawdy for my tastes (there were a few times I was like "I hope Lori either didn't see that and/or didn't understand what was going on"). And there were also a few strange chant/dance/Enya parts added in that were... weird. But we liked it. However, we were cutting it really close getting from the Globe to the Opera House for our dinner reservations that evening. The play went a little longer than expected and then we got a little lost trying to find the Tube station and there came a point where I realized that our best bet of arriving on time would be to hoof it. And we BOOKED it. Technically, I think you have to describe what we were doing as walking, but it was no leisurely stroll. I think Lori's feelings toward me during this part of this day could best be described as "deep and utter loathing" as she occasionally had to bust out a bit of a jog to keep up with my enormously long strides.

But, we made it to dinner on time. And we changed into our fancy outfits. And we had a fancy meal. And we saw the London Royal Ballet perform Mayerling at the Royal Opera House.

As with pretty much all ballets, this story line for Mayerling is pretty messed up. But luckily, it's ballet, so mostly you just care about the dancing and the dancing was absolutely breath-taking. There were these incredibly intense pas de deux performances, and some truly amazing male solos. But I think my favorite parts were the scenes in which this group of rebels tries to bend the prince's ear because it involved these really cool echoed dance moves; hard to describe but I loved it. Also really awesome was that our fancy dinner reservations at the Opera House's restaurant meant that we were able to go back to our table during the two intermissions and have dessert, and then hot chocolate. Very fancy. It was a great way to end our London adventures.

Epic Grad Trip: London, Days 1 & 2

We landed in London around 2pm Sunday afternoon. Our flight was uneventful and we were lucky enough to get emergency exit seats with tons of leg room (perfect for trying to sleep). One thing I should mention though is that we discovered in the airport that Lori's suitcase was missing a wheel which made getting around places annoying for the rest of the trip. I guess we could have tried to get her a new one, but I didn't have that kind of money to spend.

Anyway, for me, one of the best things about traveling is that "just arrived in a new city" feeling: a combination of excitement about everything that's going to be cool, the whole of your adventures in that city lying ahead of you and that huge not-knowing feeling as you have to learn to navigate new territory. It's both a promise and a challenge, and I love it. Lori didn't love the "not-knowing" part so much. But we made it to our hotel without incident, checked-in, freshened up, grabbed a bite to eat (chicken schwarma wrap and a falafel wrap; Lori's introduction to south/southeast Asian food and she was pretty impressed) and headed out into the city.

I think it was this point on our outings tonight that the reality of "you're in London" hit:

Our first activity of the trip was attending a worship service at Westminster Abbey. We had decided to do that to get into Westminster for free and because it sounded like a good Sunday evening activity, but I have to say that I now wish that we had paid the £15 to go in as tourists. It was breathtakingly stunning inside, but I would have liked the chance to walk around and see the markers for all the people who are buried/commemorated in the abbey.

It's also always interesting attending worship services of faiths that are not your own. Lori's comment afterward was that "I felt the spirit while I was there, but something was also missing." It was a beautiful service, and there was one hymn in particular that I loved, but it's not yours, you know? And especially, for me, there's a huge difference between a lay-clergy and a professional clergy. After the worship service we tried to follow the Westminster walking tour in Rick Steve's Great Britain travel guide, but there were a few places where we weren't sure which building he was talking about. Mostly we walked around telling each other "Dude, we're in London!"

At one point during our stroll, Lori got accosted by an apparently Latin American man dressed as a cowboy, but with his face painted white, which was a fun adventure. He wanted her to take her picture with him, but I didn't think he was cool enough to spend a pound on, so we moved on and had a good laugh. We were exhausted by our long flight and limited sleep the night before, though, so we headed back to the hotel a little early and get some sleep.

The next morning we were up and at it, though. I have a tendency to way over estimate travel times, especially while traveling, so we had about an hour of early morning time to kill before we needed to start staking out space at Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard, so we took a leisurely stroll through St. James Park

Then we staked out a spot in front of the palace.

It was crazy how many people ended up showing up for the Changing of the Guard -- by the time the show started there were tons and tons of people.

My favorite part was the military music; I do love me a marching band. And I'm glad to have watched the spectacle, but if I'm going to be honest (and I usually am) Lori and I both agreed that it wasn't quite as cool as we expected it to be. Like I said, we loved the music part, but the rest of it: lots of marching and standing.

Once that was finished, we headed to the British Museum. Which was crazy amazing. The museum has stuff from pretty much all time periods and from everywhere all over the world. There's no way to see it all, and while I wish that I could say that I could have spent hours in there, the real truth is that after a couple of hours in any museum my brain starts to get saturated and words and objects start to become meaningless.

So, after a couple of hours exploring the Museum, Lori and I headed to Piccadilly Circus where we watched street performers for a bit, and then had a delicious Italian dinner.

The final event of our long day of sight-seeing was an evening walking tour around Westminster and watching the debates in the House of Commons. Probably the most touching thing about the walking tour was seeing a few of these signs still hanging around on the buildings:

The tour was our favorite part of the day. Our guide was delightful and we loved hearing a little more about the history of the area, even though, of course, I don't remember any of it now. I do remember feeling this huge sense of the vast history of the city though, and an awe for how much fear and triumph the people of that city had experienced. It was pretty cool.

We capped off our evening with some hot chocolate and tiramisu at an Italian place near our hotel. And I think I will cap off this blog post with what is probably my favorite photo of the day.