England #9: Last Bath Day Part 2 in The England Chronicles - September 2024

(Thursday September 12, 2024)

I see by my travel journal that the first thing we did after touring the Bath Abbey was…get more coffee! Hahahhahhaha!!! YES we had THREE coffee stops that day. It definitely sounds as if we are crazed addicts and I’m afraid that might be the case. In our very slight defense, and this doesn’t make it sound any better since it just illustrates how HUGE EVERYTHING HAS TO BE FOR AMERICANS, coffee in the UK comes in very small portions compared to coffee in the US. The flat whites and cappuccinos seemed tiny as did the coffee from Colonna & Smalls. So I generally felt I still needed more coffee, no matter how delicious what I had was, and Kim definitely needed more that day since she didn’t like the black coffee she ended up with initially. I applaud everything else in the UK for being a reasonable size — you don’t routinely get served a plate with enough food for three people in restaurants, and I never saw anyone wandering around with supersized soft drinks as is the norm here - but…but….cups of coffee should be gigantic because I need gallons!!! 🤣 

Clearly I should have named this book The Coffee Chronicles. 

Anyhow, we were also a bit hungry by then so stopped by Cafe Nero. There’s one conveniently located just up the street from the Abbey. There was a Starbucks in this location on all our previous trips, and I didn’t see nearly as many Starbucks as I have in the past, so I’m wondering if Cafe Nero has defeated Starbucks in the Coffee Shop Wars. I was fine with that - there’s a Starbucks on every corner here, but we don’t have Cafe Nero or Costa so they were both exciting treats. We split a delicious toasty cheese and mushroom sandwich at Cafe Nero and I had a latte, so at last felt fully caffeinated. This does not in any way make me wonder if I need to rethink how much coffee I routinely consume. 

After fortification we walked up to the Circus, which is a really impressive ring of townhouses built in the mid 1700s. It’s hard to get a good picture of them - they make a big circle, but it’s impossible to see that here. 

But it’s not impossible from above! I was going to steal an aerial picture from Wikipedia but it won’t let me - it’s in the link though.

They all have these really neat little symbols across the fronts - 525 emblems of nautical things, arts and sciences stuff, and serpents.  

Why yes, I DO find creepy dolls no matter where I go!

After that we walked over to the Royal Crescent, which is very close by. It’s a row of terraced houses built between 1767 and 1774 in a long astonishing crescent shape. It’s really hard to get a good picture of too, and on previous trips we’d thought you couldn’t go down onto the lawn and see it from the front. 

 But the Royal Victoria Park  is right below the Crescent, and from there you DO get a great view. There is a ha-ha keeping people from going up too close, though.

The Royal Victoria Garden was very pretty, and we walked around awhile.

This is a garden shop on the grounds and I was surprised at the reasonable plant prices. Too bad I couldn’t stock up!

I would love to have seen more of the park, but I think at this point we were both getting pretty tired. It was chilly and off-and-on rainy, and Kim was having issues with her shoes. She’d brought some New Balance walking shoes with her but felt like they made her feet look huge so was wearing a pair of more attractive yet less comfortable shoes. I can sympathize since I also have ginormous feet and had on my beetle-green Asics that may as well have flashing lights screaming !!!look at these giant clown feet!!!! but they are SO comfortable and I can walk all day in them so I really do not care if everyone is staring at them in astonishment. But my point is that we didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the park, and ended up walking back over to Pulteney Bridge. 

We wandered around there a bit, then Kim had the great idea of taking a ride on the canal tour boat. That hadn’t even occurred to me, but it was the perfect thing to do.   

The boat went a couple of miles up the River Avon and back. It was so pretty,  a mix of the city and people’s backyards, along with countryside once we were just a little bit out of town. Very peaceful and enjoyable! And cold, but I was bundled up and they served wine. 

After that we had dinner at the  Saracens Head, possibly the oldest pub in Bath. We’d been there before and really liked it - great food and beer, not fancy. I had fish and chips - yes, again - and a Fosters. 

  https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/54050422933_60097f0dba_h.jpg 

Then it was a little bit of strolling through Bath At Night, and onwards to the Airbnb. Which we were at last able to find thanks to the Hub reference point.  

Next stop, one more Glastonbury day, featuring the Glastonbury Abbey ruins, the Tor, and Kim’s past life regression session, before we move onwards to the second week in the Cotswolds!