England #4 -second half of the first day in Bath in The England Chronicles - September 2024

(Monday September 9, 2024, Part 2)

Which of course is not confusing at all! I’m trying to force my entries to make sense time-wise but I’m sure they won’t, as has been the case with all my previous England travelogues. I’m also trying to not make them insanely long, so clearly that means cutting days in half since I have never learned the art of being concise. And I am trying to do them a lot faster than usual. I have many many goals!

When I ended the last entry all we’d managed to do was find parking and track down coffee and scones, which we enjoyed while people-watching on a handy bench. Then we went to the Jane Austen Center. In our three previous trips to Bath we’d never gotten further than the gift shop, so we’d decided to make this a priority. And it was well worth it! It was very interesting, with lots of information about her family and their time in Bath especially. I was surprised to find she really enjoyed living there, since I’d always thought she disliked Bath, and I was baffled as to how anyone could ever not loooove Bath! She did enjoy satirizing Bath society, though, luckily for us all. 

An interesting timeline of her Bath years. 

A list of her novels in her own hand:

A tableau of oddly faceless/headless people:

A reconstruction of what Jane Austen may have looked like - there’s only one verified portrait of her, which was drawn by her sister, but with the magic of forensic techniques and eyewitness accounts, the museum procured a possibly accurate wax figure about ten years ago:

And we got to dress up, which was just ridiculously fun! You could put on entire outfits over your street clothes, but we stuck to the wide assortment of hats and scarves. 

I find that selecting dress up accessories is serious business:

Mr. Darcy joined in although he looks a lot more interested in himself than in either of us 🤣

SO definitely check out the Jane Austen Center if you’re ever in Bath! And the gift shop is great too. 

After that we visited my beloved Bath Aqua Glass, which is an independent local shop that specializes in glass creations. They also have a glassblowing studio although we just went to the shop. Their jewellery is gorgeous and shockingly reasonably priced, and every time we are there I get something - this time a necklace since I always get earrings. 

AND a tiny little suncatcher that I decided to turn into a necklace. I did a very poor job on the bit you put the cord through - I was trying to just bend the suncatcher wire enough to make a loop but that did not work at all. One day I’m going to get back to jewelry making - retirement!!! - and I will put a proper bail on it. 

Then it was onwards to Sally Lunns,  which is yet another famous Bath destination we’d managed to miss previously. Sally Lunn’s started in 1680 and is in the oldest house in Bath, which is saying quite a lot, and specializes in enormous buns. Enormous and delicious buns. We both ordered tea and a gargantuan bun. I had the Queen Victoria Tea, which was a bun with lemon curd and a pot of tea. I generally don’t put sugar in my tea (I generally don’t drink hot tea because… it’s not coffee) but I put a lump of brown sugar in it (they had sugar in lumps!!) and it was absolutely delicious. AND very restorative!

Somehow we managed to miss the museum, despite intending to go and it being right there. We were waiting to be seated so meant to go afterwards… and totally forgot. 

Fun wallpaper in the hallway:

The dining areas are in a number of small rooms, and are very pretty. And very old!

The Enormous Famous Buns. Kim’s was cinnamon, and tasted much like cinnamon bread. Mine was the basic bun with clotted cream and lemon curd. OMG it was delicious and insanely filling. I took at least half back with me and ate it for breakfast the next two days! You can see from Kim’s how thick they are. Oh and there are the lumps of sugar, which is a rare sight here. 

They also have the prettiest to-go boxes ever, and the waitress even brought us a couple of unused ones for souvenirs, which was awfully nice:

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After that we walked around some more to work off the massive amount of sugar and bread we’d ingested. We went along the river area to Pultney Bridge, and down to the shore on the far side. 

It was about then that I got a notice from the parking app saying our time was up in half an hour. “How convenient is this!” I said. “We can just add time on the app and not have to go all the way back to the car!” There was a seafood place Kim had spotted that sounded great for dinner, so we wanted to stay in town for quite awhile longer. 

I tried to add time. It wanted my phone number. It wouldn’t take my phone number, which of course was a US phone number. It wanted me to create an account, which I’d actually tried to do when we first parked and couldn’t because it wouldn’t take my number to make an account, but it DID take my number for the initial payment!! Now it did not work. I tried and tried and tried and tried, with all the variations I could think of for the extra numbers you have to use with US numbers, grew increasingly frustrated, swore like a sailor, and grew a tad annoyed at Kim who did not seem to be taking this catastrophe seriously, as she continued to text friends and chat about unrelated things as I fought with the parking app.

Finally I said I was just going to have to run back to the car and pay there!! By then we were down to maybe 15 minutes and it was at least a mile to the car, so although I didn’t technically run, I did walk really really really fast. Kim is a very slow walker, largely due to her knee problems, so I flew off alone. Which was kind of fun since I am a ridiculously fast walker in ordinary circumstances and all the slow walking was wearing on me. But it was still a LONG way and then when I finally got to the car… I still couldn’t get anything to work. Now it’s all a blur, but I also couldn’t find any way to pay WITHOUT the app. Although maybe there was a card option??? That still wanted my phone number so wouldn’t work either?!?! Honestly I think I missed something somewhere - there were several payment places in this lot - none manned - and surely there was one that took cards, because we DID use them later on. By then I was completely frazzled and panicky because I didn’t want to get a ticket and didn’t know if they ticket you for leaving later than the time you’ve paid for, which by then it was. I ended up calling Kim and saying I’d just drive back and pick her up because I could not figure out how to pay. 

Naturally, because we are us, it took me forever to find Kim! She’d wandered away from the spot we’d been at, and thought she could just meet me on the street nearby, but she was describing one place that I thought was another place, (involving a sports complex that apparently stretched over a couple of streets) and although we weren’t far apart it was more unnerving frazzlement! Finally I was able to track her down with Find My Friend and we were reunited at last. At that point we just drove to a pub we’d been to on our last trip, The Wagon & Horses, which was in Peasedown St. John- a few miles from our Airbnb. Naturally when we got to the pub they weren’t serving dinner, and we couldn’t find anything else close by, so we had crisps with our beers and then went to the Tesco Metro on the same street, stocked up on supplies, went back to the Airbnb and ate our leftover Thai from Uber Eats the previous night. Which was even better than it had been first time around. 

I still don’t understand what was going on with the parking app, but I will note that the next morning Kim googled parking, found another app, then when it still wouldn’t work with either of our phone numbers she called the help line and found you could just do it with an email address. I am still marveling at her calm problem solving skills that just appeared out of the blue, lol, since that’s not like either one of us. Although her job DOES involve problem solving so apparently her Work Persona appeared at last and took over, which was quite a relief. This app was called JustPark, and it rents parking spaces from ordinary people, oddly enough, but it was really convenient and cheaper than lot parking. We used it for the rest of our Bath Week although we didn’t need it in the Cotswolds.  

Next stop: Glastonbury!