Our last city visited on our adventure honeymoon vacation was Bath, England. We left for one night in Bath on Sunday Sept 14th.. travelling from Cardiff!
On Sunday morning, we left for the Cardiff train station for a quick train ride (I think 1-2 hours) to Bath. Before catching out train, we stopped at the grocery store across from the train station in Cardiff for the usual pre-made grab & go sandwiches: they have these everywhere in he UK! I also found my honeymoon diet coke.
When we got to Bath, we set out from the train station to locate our hotel so we could ditch the luggage and explore. And Bath is small enough that along the way, we passed so many beautiful buildings including Bath Abbey: the central cathedral and parks too.
This was our hotel for the night: the Redcar hotel, which we found on booking.com (as we found all our hotels). Then we read the ratings of the hotel (3 out of 5 stars) are we were very worried! But when we got there, we felt much better because although the decor was outdated, the room was big and the bed was big (which we discovered a lot of beds an rooms are small in the UK!). It was good for us! So we dropped our stuff and headed into Bath!
This is a walking route along the water that we took a few times. Everything in Bath is picturesque and this was the beginning of our discoveries.
There were a few places in Bath that were "cannot miss spots", which we thought we could get everything in with 2 days, one night because of the size of Bath.
One of these spots to check out was this: The Royal Crescent, which is a continuous row of joint buildings, Roman inspired with a big park in front. The architecture in Bath was phenomenal.
On the first day we also saw the Circus (which is similar to the Royal Crescent but is a full circle, and smaller and walked a bit around central Bath.
Walking around, admiring the Roman inspired city, we noticed that Aleksy is too tall for Bath...
To add to the cool places we ate and drank on vacation, we stopped on our first day in Bath to have a drink at a cafe that was right in the court yard of Bath Abbey (left) and the Roman Baths (right). I was sitting facing the Bath Abbey, and I could find so many intrinsic details on the church. We tried to go tour the Roman Baths on the first day, but it closed an hour later so we decided we would do that the next day.
Aleksy chose a local beer, and I had a cider!
This was Aleksys favourite restaurant experience of all time. Because of this here big red leather chair... Aleksys "King chair" if you will. We walked around the streets of Bath reading all the menus on the outside of the pubs/restaurants and found because it as Sunday night, there was a lot of Roast Beef dinners as the specials! Aleksy wanted some roast beef, and we knew that supper was at very specific times (between 5 and 8 usually), so we set and and found this awesome place.
We sat in this little nook that was under the staircase, and the bookshelf that you can see on the right had Jenga and other games to play while you enjoyed your brews! My dinner was ok: some ham, eggs, peas, and fries but Aleksy had roast beef, mashed, and yorkshire pudding and made a better dinner decision than me (I hate when I'm the one who chooses the less delicious meal...).
We strolled the streets of Bath for an evening walk around the 8 O'Clock in the evening hour after supper. And it was ghost town... this is one of the busiest places in Bath and there isn't one person visible in this picture. This is the outside of the Roman Baths (the church is just behind us).
To save us some money, we went back to our hotel room to have some drinks before calling it a night after our ghost town stroll.
Monday morning, September 15th, we woke up early to get an early start on touring the Baths since it was our last day in Bath and we had about a 5 hour bus ride to London that day. We started off with some coffee and pasties (with a full egg breakfast with sausage inside of a pastry) then headed in for our Roman Baths tour: where the Romans would gather socially 2000 years ago. This was the main bath, which was heated naturally like a hot Spring, and through the tour we also were able see some of the other baths: cold baths, hot baths, and lots of ruins to demonstrate how things once were. So historically amazing!
At the very end of the tour of the Baths, they had cups and this water fountain, so you could drink the bath water! And it tasted like... sulphur! I couldn't drink more than a tiny sip... yuk (and warm!).
Just another picture showing how architecturally beautiful Bath is! This is one of my favourites: a timed shot from a garbage can. Sometimes to get a picture of the two of us together, we had to improvise. Plus, when we asked the man on the water taxi to take the picture, he didn't get a good shot.
After this, we gathered our luggage from our hotel and headed to the bus station to head to London for one last night before catching our flight home.
<--- Our last night of vacation.
We booked our hotel in London for the last night from booking.com (our favourite site of honeymoon time!) and it was about a 45 min walk from the bus station. So out of cheapness and feeling that 45 minutes of walking is nothing compared to how much we had walked throughout the past 2 weeks, we walked to out hotel. We also got to use one of the red London phone booths to call the manager of the guest House that we were staying to tell him we had arrived! Then we checked into the Riz Guest House, where the management was the nicest and carried our luggage up some steep stairs, and were so kind to make sure we were pleased! And the location was sweet, here I am having a beer about 5 oors down from the Guest House, right in front of the Underground Station where we were catching the tube to the airport the next morning!
On our last night in London, we had some brews, our last fish & chip dinner of vacation and returned our "Oyster Cards" for 5 pounds! On Tuesday morning, we conveniently headed out of our hotel to the Greggs right next door for a coffee then across the street to the tube!
The weirdest thing about flying back: we left around 12pm from London on the Tuesday, and got into Toronto around 3pm! The 5 hour time change had out flight change to a 3 hour flight! Alesky was right back to work the next morning, but I took an extra day and went back Thursday to make sure there wasn't too much jet lag happening!
