Bath and the Roman Baths

Greetings Mate,

Saturday we took a tour bus (only us and 17 others thankfully) to Stonehenge, Bath, and Salisbury (Magna Carta)

www.romanbaths.co.uk (open daily)

This post will only be about Bath and the others to soon follow...

Bath is about 2-2.5 hours drive from London and in the rain it seems like 12...nonetheless, it was glorious, rain and all...we were dressed for it, so all was just fine...

In the picture above you can see the Roman Bath where nearly 2000 years ago people bathed. At one point it was only men and then women were allowed but they each had to bath on opposite ends. Then there was the bath in the nude or not bath in the nude controversy...

Story has it a man name Bladdered (spelling?) was disinherited when he got leprosy, so he then became a pig farmer. One day he noticed his pigs wallering in this muddy warm water (the hot springs) and their skin became smooth and a vibrant pink, all the warts and dry skin were gone. So he then tried it for himself and bye bye leprosy. He then built a temple and surprise "The Roman Baths and the Temple of Minerva" now exist.

Hot water at a temperature of 46 °C (114.8 °F) rises here at the rate of 1,170,000 litres (257,364 imp gal) every day,from a geological fault (see the hot springs picture above, its the one with the steam).

The water in the bath is pretty dirty, a girl allegedly died while swimming in the bath after accidentally swallowing some of the water in 1979, 5 days later she died of meningitis and after some tests were ran the bath closed and still remains closed today. (the tour guide left this part out)

The last picture you will see is one of the Georgian streets of the city of Bath, it is a beautiful and charming city even in all this rain. In one of the sections of the city there is a "Circus" basically a circle of gorgeous mansions (maybe 20/30ish of them in the circle) and #7 is owed by Nicholas Cage and #9 is owned by Johnny Depp. Our tour guide made a point to tell us this.

On the way home there was a span of about 18 seconds worth of road where we were in Pennsylvania, population something like 30 people and then not too far from there we could look across the hills and valleys and see Wales all lit up (it was night by this time) it was really pretty to see.

Stonehenge coming up next....

Cheers,
WMMc