Canterbury to Bath

Sunday July 18, 2009

Yesterday in the Canterbury Tales Experience we heard and meet the Wife of Bath. We are on our way to Bath Spa and I certainly hope that she‘s not there since she was a rough looking character.
It gets light early and with the change of time we are still waking up early. Marci seems to have slept like a rock and is getting a second wind. Granny and I (Amos) were up at the crack of dawn and after a bath we went off for a walk in the gardens around the town. There are some beautiful gardens and green places and people seemed to give old moldering buildings away because you can’t fix them up too much, if they get put on the historic registry. Not even new double paned sash windows, so they can be uncomfortable and expensive to live in and you can hardly sell one. In P.G. Woodhouse books, selling such buildings to American’s is a running gag.
After walking we went back for the breakfast and meet up with Lydia and Marci. We ate and were well. The lady I had referred to as the proprietress earlier turn out to, as she said, “only work here”. When I was arranging to leave the bags while we went to church and I gave her the key I said her assistant had given me. She said he was Mr. Chapman and owned the place. He looked like a teenager to us and while we were there he never changed his clothes. Well she did give us a good price of 85 lb /day which was 20lbs off what the quote was for summer season. I hope she doesn’t get into trouble and left her a tip.
All four of us went off to look at the gardens and river and a truly amazing tree. It was like a baobab tree, but a mulberry. (See the pictures) It had been very sunny earlier and when we started to walk over to Canterbury Cathedral to go to church it began to rain hard. We got all of our rain gear out and went on into the church. I had thought we would go to an Evensong to hear the choristers (boys choir on scholarship for school) but the time had not worked out so we went to the main service of the day. It was nice although I don’t think I would like such a choir all the time. Sometimes the accent seems a little like the priest in Princess Bride saying “mawridge” or some word that doesn’t exist but looks like that one.
We left a little early to make the train to Bath Spa. Well we got there early and got and earlier express train to London which was helpful. Some people got a nap and the country side is nice to look at. We had to change to the Tube to go from one station to another and did have an hour at Paddington Station to freshen up and eat some lunch. There are no trash cans in the station and no trash either. Apparently after the IRA bombings in the 80’s they took all the cans out for safety and they just have people scooping up rubbish so that it was really very clean.
We are now on the train to Bath Spa. We talked with an American living here about our multi-pass (which is supposed to get us four days of travel on any sort of public transportation) and that no one seemed to pay any attention to it. She said this had been her experience as well but then the young man to let us through scolded us for not filling our pass in properly. Not a single one of the other multiple workers we showed it to said a thing.
We will check into the Brock House and visit Bath tomorrow. I haven’t made a reservation for a tour of Stonehenge which I plan for us to do on Tuesday so I may work on that tonight. We get three nights here so we can settle in.


Lydia here, to sum up our evening in bath. Our bed and breakfast is lovely, with windows and a more reasonable bathtub/shower configuration. Too bad its up four flights of stairs. Ahh well, Granny stayed up in the room while we went to get ourselves dinner, planning on getting her some take away on the way back. The city is as lovely as our room, though expensive. Apparently, its something like the British version of the Hamptons. We walked around, looking for a place that was a) open on Sundays b) not a smoke filled bar and c) reasonably priced. I spotted a sign in the window of a bar/restaurant that advertised food for less than five pounds. It was delicious, to say the least, and authentic too. Me and Papa had Fish and Chips and mum had roast. Hers came with Yorkshire pudding and papa had mashed peas. We went to order Granny some take out, when they said they didn’t do Take Away. So we wandered down the street, and no one did Take Away. So we wandered further around, up down and across and still no Take Away. Finally Papa went in to an Italian restaurant and begged the man inside to give him some soup in a take away container, because his poor old tired mother couldn’t walk down the four flights of stairs to go out to eat, and so he gave in and grudgingly gave us a container of soup and some garlic bread. So, there we are. Dinner accomplished.