Day 155 - Bath time

Radstock to Backwell - A&L's House

We were a bit surprised this morning when we saw a sign saying 13 miles to Bristol, we didn't realise we were quite that close to "home"! However we found that we had made the right decision  in visiting first thing in the morning as the beautiful town was quite quiet as we headed into the Roman Baths, there were a few people in there but it wasn't too busy.

The Roman Baths were quite interesting, and the way projections and video had been included in the exhibits helped to provide an idea of what it could have been like back when they were in use. When we emerged about a hour later the town was totally different - it was swarming with tourists, the difference was amazing. Our guess is that the day trippers from London had arrived and fortunately we had arrived early enough to miss them. After the Baths we briefly visited Bath Abbey, and saw the memorial to Arthur Phillip, with a small Australian flag above it. 

Bath is a really beautiful town, the river and gardens are splendid (a good British adjective), it also helped that it was such a beautiful day. We found Bath too busy to attempt lunch so picked a place on the coast near Bristol pretty much at random, and found ourselves in Portishead for lunch (nowhere near as splendid as Bath though).

We drove back to our little cottage in the back garden at A&L's house, having decided that our time in the UK is up and it's time to move on. Our original idea was to head to Paris next, but the English summer school holidays have started and there are reports of large crowds heading into France, so after consulting the atlas and the list of destinations directly accessible from Bristol, we chose Amsterdam instead. We booked our flight and some accommodation before finishing the evening with a family game of 6 of us playing canasta (K for the first time, so we did well to come second!).