The City of Bath

  Bath was our last stop on the road before we headed to London.  We were looking for something interesting in the south west, not too far away from London, not too far away from Broadway (our previous stop) and within striking distance of Stonehenge on the way to London.  So, we settled on Bath.  It is routinely referred to as a very beautiful city, and the Roman baths there are the major tourist draw.  Mark, being a fan of things Roman, and seeing the positive remarks about the place, we decided to spend one night there.

We're not sure it was the best choice!  First of all, traffic in Bath is horrendous.  We were stuck in traffic for about an hour just trying to get into the city off the motorway.  We also made the mistake of not having a good map of the city itself, and while we had a fairly decent map showing directions on getting to the B&B we had a hard time finding labelled roads.

With our one day, we walked around the city a little bit but we spent most of the time at the Roman Baths themselves.  You could easily spend a full day there depending on how much you want to read and/or listen to.  Mark found it fascinating, not sure about Melissa, although she seemed to enjoy it.

We also had our one McDonalds meal of the trip in Bath.  We'd been walking around all day, Mark was still getting over his cold, and we both had a bit of a craving for french fries.  Somehow we always regret eating there after the fact, but we still go back for some reason.

Our B&B in Bath was probably at the bottom of the list of all the ones we stayed at.  It wasn't bad exactly, but one major drawback was that it was the only one where we did not have a private bathroom in the room.  The building itself was a row house and was fairly cramped inside - although our room was pretty big.  Furnished and decorated in the 70s but fairly big.  We had a really hard time finding a B&B for one weekend night; most required two nights and so regardless, we were happy to have a place to stay.

  All in all, I'm not sure we would recommend staying in Bath.  I think we would recommend spending the day there to visit the baths themselves if you were within striking distance from somewhere else.