Stonehenge & Bath

Some time I'll come up with a creative title for a post instead of just listing the location's name, but for now I'll stick with it. Another weekend, another day trip...

This one started off really early. We had to be on the bus at 7:30 AM so it was a nice 6:30 wake up call. Ick. So we get on the coach and for 2.5 hours, nothing interesting happens. We drive. People sleep. I am not one of them. Suddenly, as we're driving, off in the distance, we can see...STONEHENGE!

We get to the giant pile of rocks at about 10 and are let into the site, given audio guides and are told to be back on the coach at 11 and we begin our tour. I've been told by a number of different people that Stonehenge is kind of dissapointing, especially because you can no longer walk through it, but I liked it. The rocks are really rather impressive to look at (they are HUGE) and the audio guide really helped. I think if the audio guide were not a part of the tour, it would have been much more anticlimactic. But it was full of useful information and various stories, myths and mysteries surrounding the circle. An hour was the perfect amount of time...it probably took us 45 minutes to walk around the whole site. And then once you got out of the site and were walking back to the parking lot, you could touch two of the types of stones used in Stonehenge. One was a "blue" stone (it wasn't actually blue, but that's what they called it) and the other was a different kind. The audio guide had told us that the blue stone was noticeably warmer than the other stones regardless of the weather, which I thought was a little bit of a ridiculous statement. How can stones be wamer? But seriously, when I put one hand on each stone, the "blue" one was definitely warmer. Weird.

At 11 the coaches once again depart and about an hour later we make it to Bath!

First of all...Bath is a beautiful city. There is all this Roman archtecture and most of the buildings are made out of the same creamy stones, and on a beautiful day with clear blue skies, it's just gorgeous. I think Bath would probably be a great place to have like a romantic weekend or something, plenty of things to do but also great for just wandering around. So after we get off the bus, we, as a group, enter the Roman Baths. There isn't a real, live, tour guide but we get the audio tour again (love it) and are free to wander around the ruins for as long as we want. The Baths are really cool (or dare I say, warm?). There are all these different rooms and ruins to explore...there is a whole area dedicated to different parts of Minvera's temple, the Great Bath, the Sacred Springs, and all the hot/tepid/cold rooms that the Romans would sauna in. It seemed like a pretty delightful life; I would have liked to be a Roman and use those facilities. There were also a lot of exhibits on the lives of the Romans, which was also pretty interesting. Haha, the Romans would etch curses on pieces of lead and then throw the lead into the Sacred Spring, hoping that Minerva would enact it. They've recovered a bunch of these curses and it's funny because they are ridiculously petty. One was basically "someone took my hooded cloak. I hope they suffer horribly". Really, Romans, you think that a goddess is super concerned with your missing cloak? Silly. Anyway, we wandered through the exhibits for about 2 hours and then headed out, looking for lunch. We wandered down some random alley and found a little cafe that was delicious and cheap. I had a lamb and mint cornish pasty and it was amazing. I had heard good things about cornish pasties and now I am converted. We sat around the cafe for a while, enjoying the Bath atmostphere and decided to wander around some more. I had remembered hearing about this place called the Royal Crescent from my favorite tour guide, Rick Steves, so we took out our map and hunted it down. It's not anything super exciting but I still enjoyed it- basically just a wide crescent of beautiful houses done in the traditional Bath architecture style. We continued on past the crescent down into the Royal Victoria Park and at the end of our wandering we found this crazy cool playground. Mature students that we are, we decided to play on the playground for a little while. It was a much better playground than anything I remember from my childhood. These Bath-ian children have it good. After doing that for just a little while, we make it back to the coach, depart Bath at 5 and arrive back at uni at 8. Long bus ride, but I did manage to sleep for some of it, which made it more bearable.

Other exciting things: all accommadation is booked for my Easter vacation! We booked the place in Venice last night. Everything in Venice is expensive so instead of paying like $30 a night for a super crappy hostel off of the actual island of Venice, we got a three bed hotel room in this B&B south of the Grand Canal for $36 a night, which I'm excited about. Yay for non-crappy hostel room! Now I'll just need to book some train tickets and then we're golden! I'm definitely going to book the night train from Venice to Nice ahead of time and probably some of the others. But trains seem so frequent and reliable I don't know how far in advance they really need to be purchased.

Day trip to Oxford and Blenheim Place next Saturday! The only problem with these day trips on Saturdays is that I miss the free bus to ASDA and therefore I have no food to eat. I guess I'll have to go into town to Sainsbury's sometime soon. Lame.

Toodles for now!