For our last adventure in Europe we spent two weeks in the UK: a long weekend in Bath and then an extended stay in London. For this final hoorah, we were joined by our dad for some father-daughter bonding time!
When arriving in Bath, we were welcomed not only by our dad, who had flown into London the day before, but also by this adorable city known for its Roman Baths, beautiful Abbey, and Georgian architecture. Our first day was spent visiting the ancient thermal baths (and missing Rome while doing so) and meandering through the cute city streets on a near perfect day.
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| Bath Abbey |
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| Roman Baths! |
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| SPQR! |
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| Beautiful Gardens in Bath |
On Friday, the well-known English rain returned for our day-tour of Stonehenge and a couple small towns in the English countryside. We took a tour with a small company (our tour consisted of 13 people total) called Mad Max Tours, and our driver, Tim, acted as our guide through the hills and valleys of England and provided us with some useful knowledge in a fun and interesting way. Our first stop was the mysterious Stonehenge, the rock formation that has been present for thousands of years and is even more ancient than the Egyptian pyramids. Little is known about them and little will probably ever be known about their purpose. What we do know is that the formation has to do with the cycles of the sun and at one point people were buried on that site. The cool, foggy, rainy, and windy morning added to the mystical atmosphere of one of the wonders of the world.
After Stonehenge, we travelled to another remarkable stone formation called Avebury, which is so large that a little town runs right through it! In some ways, Avebury is even cooler than Stonehenge because it hasn't been overrun by tourism, and you can still walk directly up to the rocks, touch them, and even hug them if you want (which Megan took the opportunity to do so). This stone formation is about a mile in circumference, so we enjoyed walking around the various rocks in the field that was also full of grazing sheep and lambs.
We had our lunch break in the small town of Lacock, which appeared to be trapped in time. Tim told us that all of the buildings in this town are owned by the National Trust, and in order to live there, you have to either have had ancestors who once lived there or have ancestors who had done business with Lacock. We ate lunch at a tasty little pub before walking down one of Lacock's two main streets. We also discovered that several scenes in the Harry Potter movies were filmed here, such as those including Professor Slughorn's house, Harry's parents house (in the flashbacks in the first movie), Hogsmeade, and several classroom scenes in its Abbey, which unfortunately we didn't have time to visit.
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| A street of Lacock. |
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| The Red Lion, where we had lunch. |
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| The Potter's house from the first movie. |
For our final stop of the day, we were again transported back in time to Castle Combe, which Tim liked to describe as the "Hobbit Village" because the doorways were so short. Remarkably, if you just put some dirt or gravel on the streets, it could look like the 19th or early 20th century. For this reason, Castle Combe was used to film town scenes in Steven Spielberg's "War Horse." It was a lovely town to finish the day with, and it was so small you could walk up and down the Main Street in five minutes! Overall it was a pleasant day despite the dreary weather, and we especially enjoyed driving through the wonderful English countryside.
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| The main street of Castle Combe. |
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| The market square |
On Saturday we decided to travel to one last new country, Wales. We first went to the town of Caerphilly. Here we spent some time exploring Caerphilly Castle, one of the coolest castles we have ever seen. Only with a few information boards and a couple of "exhibits," Caerphilly Castle is not at all touristy and you are pretty much free to roam the grounds. This castle has a double-moat system, with the moats still full of water. It was a large and impressive fortress, and is the biggest castle in Wales.
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| Another leaning tower! |
In the afternoon we spent a couple of hours in Cardiff, the capital of Wales. It was a nice city, which also had a castle (not nearly as cool as Caerphilly's) as well as beautiful civic buildings. One of the most interesting parts of Wales was seeing Welsh written on signs and posters, as well as hearing a few people speak it. It looks and sounds nothing like English or any other language we've seen or heard over the past seven months, which is pretty cool. We loved our day in Wales!
We spent a relaxing Sunday and Monday morning in Bath, visiting the boutique shops, the Abbey, some pleasant walks and gardens, as well as The Circus and The Royal Crescent: two areas which are know for their Georgian Architecture. We also walked along Pulteney Bridge, a small-scale version of Florence's Ponte Vecchio, with shops and cafés lining either side.
Bath was a beautiful and relaxing place to spend a long weekend and to recuperate after all of our non-stop traveling. It was also definitely a weekend for Spring weddings, for we saw at least a dozen wedding parties and bachelor/bachelorette groups throughout the weekend. Time for our last stop: London!
