Last day at Bath

Last Day in Bath. A little less hectic today as we had prearranged and planned our dinner restaurant instead of wandering around the concrete wilderness like last night.
We started out with a tour bus ride on Mad Max tours to Stonehenge and a little village where parts of a Harry Potter movie were filmed. The tour guide/bus driver Gary was quite a character. He could have his own HBO special I think (less censors than network tv). In attempting to talk through his headset and make the tour memorable, he managed to insult the French, Older/women drivers, the Druids (smelly) and others. This was after he had interviewed various parties on the bus to find out where we were from. When he mentioned there was a beautiful Art Museum but he had never bothered to go and then later mentioned during an R rated commentary about pubs and tourism, that he hadn’t been able to find a good Lap Dancing venue since he had moved to Bath 3 years ago, I impulsively yelled out that that the Art Museum had a lovely Lap Dancing area, and why Didn’t he give it a go? (go see it). Well the bus ride had been rather dull up to then, because the people from Taiwan, Canary Islands , Israel and the back of the bus weren’t participating in the group dynamics, but from then on Gary mentioned Lap Dancing that Marcia (he thought Marci too American sounding) had recommended, every chance he got. At this point the people in the back perked up and paid attention to the rest of his tour guide patter, because there might be more info on how to get into the lap dancing exhibition. And I was Gary’s new best friend and he gave me a free bottle of water. However, at the quaint Harry Potter village, he cornered me and asked how I had found out about the Lap Dancing at the Art Museum, and I had to tell him I was just kidding. Well, then, on the bus ride back to Bath, he broke the bad news to the bus, and commented that he was looking for an ejector seat for Marci and her American ideas. It was all in good fun, but (I thought) but the lady from Israel asked me what Lap Dancing was and if she should go also. So we may have very well confused the tourists from Hungary and Australia as well.
After the tour bus, Amos’s radar kicked in and he directed us straight away to a great restaurant with reasonable food, where Lydia had Bangers and Mash (pork sausages and mashed potatoes) and Amos had a Shepherd’s Pie. Afterwards, we had an invigorating city hike uphill to see the Bath Museum of Works. Apparently, The Bowler Family had run a general fixit/make/it invent it shop for 3 generations and kept every invention, machinery , tool and spare part for all those years. They even bottled mineral water with carbonation from mixing the local lime stone (white cliffs of Dover chalk/lime) with an acid. The abruptly, the business was shuttered in 1969 and the family walked away from it all. When years later the city wanted to refurbish or knock down the building (I couldn’t figure out which) they unlocked the doors and discovered a treasure trove of museum quality artifacts. So they documented and took pictures and moved much of the stock, machines and work areas, lock stock and barrel (literally) (in fact maybe that is where that phrase comes from) up the hill to a different building where it has been preserved as a museum. It was Fabulous, although I think they could have splurged on new electric lights, instead of the dim period lighting they kept. If I lived in Bath, I would happily take visitors to the museum of Bath Works as often as I could and still not tire of looking at the contraptions and shelves of spare parts and tools.
After lunch Amos, Lydia and Granny went off to be pampered (their thoughts) by taking a Hot Springs Roman Bath Spa treatment and Granny got a simply lovely massage from a young chap named Adam. He really worked out her luggage carrying kinks and was rewarded for his efforts by plying her for information on all the Large American Cars she had owned/driven. Discovering she had owned “ two toned white aqua Plymouth with a soft top and Fins” was like us oohing and aweing over the 5,000 year old bronze ring dug out of the drain of the Roman Bath house.
While the trio turned into aromatic prunes in the in succession of “Lavender Steam Room, “Herbal Steam room’, warm spring bath, Foot bath and finally in the Roof-top glass walled hot thermal open air bath in a light chilly drizzle (Sound delightful?) Marci enjoyed the British version of Marie Clair magazine cover to cover and subjected our dirty clothes to their own hot bath and sauna in the local laundry mat. We all then met up at the famously accommodating Martini’s Italian Restaurant mentioned in a previous post, where the owner was delighted to meet Amos’s old and feeble mother who was previously too tired to come down 4 flights of stairs for dinner. After a sauna and massage, she was a bit of a limp noodle, but we didn’t mention that she had just hiked up and down the hills of Bath 3 times a day since the first evening. Granny treated us to a delicious dinner, including tiramisu, of course and then we all turned in early, happy, full and tired from our last night in Bath.
Tomorrow, it is a taxi, train, train, train, rental car journey to the north, to the Lake Country(District) where we will be staying (we think) at a farmhouse on the Youth Hostel route – with the penny pinching youth bunking in a barn loft, and we in an awesome English Cottage Home.