Stonehenge, Bath, Cheddar Gorge
Stonehenge, Bath
We woke up (considerably) early at 9am and caught the bus to Euston station to pick up our rental car. We then had an easy drive out of London, towards Stonehenge. Luckily the instructions I'd printed out from Googlemaps told us which exits to take as our map of Britain was not detailed enough ...
About 1.5 hours later, we were in Stonehenge ...
It was cold and windy (and smelled of sheep) so we had to buy cups of hot tea to warm us up ... Entrance fee for Stonehenge was £13 altogether, which was pretty expensive ... so there were a lot of tourists looking from the outside of the fence.
We continued on, and drove past some Tank Crossing signs ... an hour later, we checked into our B&B in Bath ( Aquae Sulis).
We were hungry, so left our car parked at the hotel and caught the bus down to town (bad move, because car park cost were cheaper than the bus fares!). We picked a really crappy cafe to dine in (Adventure Cafe) -- the tables were sticky, and I had a fly sandwich!
We went into the Roman Baths (costs £21 altogether) ...
The Gorgon's head
Stone head of a 1st century AD lady
Roman theatrical mask carving
The Spring overflow
The Great Bath
We headed to the Thermae Bath Spa (and forked over £62!!) for the use of the Steam Room, Minerva Bath, and their open-air rooftop pool and their (crappy) robes, slippers and towels. The baths are ok, but it was very crowded as it was the weekend. Its probably a good idea to bring your own towels and slippers and forgo the robes and save yourselves £9 each. The bath was supposedly mineral-rich ... but then again, chlorine is a mineral ...??
We were STARVING after 2 hours of soaking, and Muffin had a hankering for Indian (again!).
The first Indian restaurant we walked into was PACKED and looked like a wedding banquet (except full of tourists) so we were glad they couldn't fit us in ... which means we wouldn't have found Bengal Brasserie, which is probably one of the best Indian places we've been to.
Even though they were busy, we were given private booths so that we could enjoy our meals. The entire meal plus drinks cost us £38.
Fried onion balls (Muffin couldn't resist)
4 curries: ladies fingers, chick peas, fish, dhal
We were so buggerred we fell straight asleep that night ...
Bath, Cheddar Gorge
We headed back to Bath town to check out the rest of town (and parked in a car park for £4).
It's occurred to us that Bath was a cleaner, Roman version of Brugge ...
The Royal Circle
Gay Street
Pulteney Bridge
Sally Lunn's Buns (we didn't eat any)
Bath Abbey
After grabbing a coupla coffees from Nero, we drove on to Cheddar Gorge.
For £33 we got to see ...
Cheddar Man (which looks fake!)
Some formation in Gough's Cave
Empty cheese shelves
For some reason there was a theme on cannibalism in this Museum ...
Cox's cave was pretty lame (locals dressed up, and some mechanical dragons, and recorded story about elves??)
We went up Jacob's ladder, and Muffin went up some tower (I couldn't follow coz my fear of heights kicked in about 2 floors up). Bored and ripped off, we decided to head back home.
We stopped by in a KFC along the motorway ... (I think the two piece feed gave me a stomach bug for two days afterwards!)