3 June - The Roman baths and John Cleese

I'd read that reservations needed to be booked in advance for a tour of the Roman Baths, so I made sure to do so. We arrived at the baths at 10:15 and were given the official welcome & audio guide to the museum and told where to meet for the guided tour at 11:00. The museum is really interesting with lots of displays and videos which acquaint one with the history of the spa. (Top photo from the Roman Baths site)

The Roman spa complex was quite large and included a temple to Minerva on the grounds. Parts of the temple entrance have been recovered and are displayed on a wall. There's a clever projection that fills in the missing bits so that you can see what the wall would have looked like, then adds color as it would have been painted in Roman times.

I find it amazing that there's still so much detail in the carving after all this time.

This head probably decorated the tomb of a wealthy woman. The hairstyle was popular in Rome during the 1st century.

This man lived in Aqua Sulis, the Roman name for the city now known as Bath, nearly 2,000 years ago. This tombstone shows him as he wished to be remembered, holding a scroll, which symbolized his learning and status in life.

These are the remaining bits of the temple on display. The modern door represents where the original door to the temple would have been.

There were videos throughout the museum like this one showing what life at the temple would have been like.

Incredibly, this head of Sulis Minerva was found intact at the site. It's made of bronze and has layers and layers of gold baked onto it.

One of my favorite sets of items at the Roman baths was the collection of curse tablets. These are small sheets of lead or pewter with prayers for Minerva to curse someone for some wrongdoing.

"I give to your divinity and majesty my bathing tunic and cloak. Do not allow sleep or health to him who has done me wrong, whether man or woman or whether slave or free unless he reveals himself and brings those goods to your temple."

A brooch found in the baths, thought to be from Ireland:

We made our way outside to find that the baths were being cleaned this week. I feared it would be another case of "sorry, you can't see this part," but it actually turned out to be pretty cool, because you can see the drains which are usually submerged and watch the workers cleaning out the lead-lined pool.

At last it was time to join our guide for our tour. I've been trying to find a way to describe our tour guide and not be mean. Have you ever watched John Cleese's classic British sitcom "Fawlty Towers"? Do you remember Manuel? "Que?" He was a lovely man from Spain with a tentative grasp on the English language who tried very hard but didn't always succeed in accomplishing what Basil Fawlty wanted. Well, our tour guide was the Bath version and his name was actually Emanuel. He was often left struggling for the right word and what came out was unintentionally funny. "The Romans would-a go to-a de baths to get umm tidy and do-a de beauty routine-a." "'ere is-a de sauna. It would smell-a very bad because of all-a de sweets." (I'm pretty sure that was sweat.) I'm sure he knew a great deal, but his inability to express himself ended up being pretty frustrating, if hilarious. When his tour was over, we took our audio guides back to the places he showed us, so we got the gist of things.

In a number of the rooms, they've tried to show what would be happening in them by the use of projections.

The gym:

There were two actors on site greeting people and showing how the Romans would have dressed while coming to the spa.

At the end of the tour there's a water tap where you can "take the waters". Emanuel told us it tasted horrible, and those who went before us concurred. I tasted it and didn't think it was bad at all.

When I was here 30+ years ago, I remembered the city tour bus being great, so we decided to do today's version, the "Toot Hop-on hop-off bust". These buses can be great because they give you a nice overview of the town and then you can decide where to visit. This one was not so great. We sat at a parking spot for about 20 minutes while the prerecorded audio told us about all the things we were passing (or not). We saw a couple of new sites, but it was a bit of a waste of time. When it was done, Bruce went pub crawling, I decided to go on the other loop of the Hop-On, Hop-Off tour, called the Skyline Tour. (Hope springs eternal.) This toured the outskirts of Bath and supposedly gave a view over the city, but which was unfortunately blocked by the large, lovely trees. It turned out to be a nice ride around Bath and amusing because, being an open top bus, the left side of the bus was constantly assaulted by those lovely trees. (I was sitting on the right side of the bus so, yes, that's a bit mean spirited. Sorry.)

The tour ended and it was still early afternoon, so I walked to the Bath Guild Hall because on the Hop-On tour we heard that there was a room in the Guildhall that was a perfect Georgian style room open to the public. A security guard stopped me as I walked in . I told him I was looking for the Georgian room and he told me that it was closed for a event. (Ah, the closed venue curse strikes again.) Right next door, however, is the Guildhall Market. It's an old circular building chockablock full of anything you can think of: hardware, sewing supplies, greeting cards, candy. It's all inside a circular building and really quite charming.

I had thought about visiting the Bath Fashion Museum but - wait for it - it was closed! It's moving to a new location and will reopen in a couple of years.

I then walked down to the river Avon, which can't close. There's a company called the Pulteney Cruiser which offers cruises up the river, with commentary so I hopped onboard. It's a nice enough river, though the view is mostly of lovely trees and riverside homes.

The only commentary on the trip upriver was from the two girls behind me, which was banal and nonstop. We got to a weir upstream and the "guide" pointed out that the mill by the river was never actually a mill, but a pub and event center.

That was pretty much the entire commentary (except for the girls behind me.) It was a nice way to spend an hour, though, with lovely scenery passing by.

I walked back to the flat but Bruce had gotten there first so the key was not in the lockbox. Unfortunately he had fallen asleep, so didn't see my messages or hear my phone call to him. I killed a bit of time then went to the restaurant where we ate the night before and which we had decided to return to. The meal was not nearly as good as the night before. I put it down, in part, to the fact that our waiter, Tom, was so great and the sun was shining. Sometimes it's best to be happy with a good memory and move on to a different place.