Photo recap: Bath.

I've already written about this, but I'll do it again with the photos. On Sunday we went to church in Bath, Widcombe Baptist. On the bottom right corner of this useless map, which was all we had on my ipad. This was the worst driving experience we had. Even when we were in the vague area of the route we needed, the map was useless. And it took 15 minutes to get from driving past the church to getting INTO the school carpark. Bath is not car friendly at all. It is, however, another lovely place to walk around.

Church was good, very familiar in style, and we were invite back for the evening service as well, which I was not super keen on because of predicted tiredness, but the promise of all day parking in the school clinched it. Didn't have to drive to a tourist carpark!!! In the end, evening church was really good, 2 uni students were baptised and gave their testimonies, it was incredibly encouraging.  And a young man chatted to Matt afterwards so we got welcomed.

In the afternoon, between church, Matt and I walked into town and arranged to split up and meet back for dinner. We both met up again immediately in the Roman baths. I thought the baths were just the one green steamy swimming pool with columns around it, but there is a whole lot of stuff still underground and it's very educational and takes a long time to go to. I drank the water, it was warm and eggy. I drank 2 cups anyway because it was free.

When I emerged onto the street again, it was raining. The street was busy and there were lots of places to buy cheap pastry-food. I had a sausage roll for I think 85p, and it was cut in half lengthways with tomato sauce in the middle! This is brilliant, I can't believe I never thought of doing that myself, because you get to eat all the sauce and don't waste any on the paper bag.

I took this photo because I remember this exact street from the movie of Persuasion, the old one. Looking at the photo later I wish I had factored in the people a little better, because people with umbrellas are a little like red buses. They don't get in the way in a photo, they add something. This photo could have been very special.

I like this one too. Red umbrella. I really enjoyed exploring the lanes in the rain. Isn't it nice how plain the city is! No advertising, no ugly shop signs. It was very restrained and unobtrusive.

I wanted to go to the Jane Austen centre. It was a letdown. The shop is very good, but the rest of the house is not worth the visit. If you pay to go in to the house part, you do get a helpful short lecture about Jane Austen and her family which is quite good.

Then I wanted to see the round terraces. Remember how much I like terraces built on curves? Bath is famous for them. The Royal Crescent, and the Circus. These are very famous and feature in both versions of Persuasion.

Now this is lovely, on the park in front of the crescent was a Roman reenactment thing. They had trebuchets but I missed out on seeing them fling the watermelons. I did, however, find out how the Romans did brain surgery. But not how they kept warm. They looked really under-dressed for the weather.

I went then to the Assembly Rooms, which were empty and beautiful. This is where Austen and society went to mingle and dance and so on.

Underneath is a costume museum, which was quite good but I only went because it was included in the ticket to the Roman Baths.

Then I mosied around the streets for a little while, and went along the river. Even the non-circular-terrace parts of Bath are lovely.

Then Matt and I scored end-of-the-day 1 pound pasties for dinner. But I ended up with sparkling water, yuck. It is a hazard of bottled water in England that it's not all just water.

I liked Bath a lot.