Day: October 14, 2019

Our hotel included breakfast so we ate there before heading out. Sharon wanted to visit the Jane Austin centre, this held little interest to me, so Emma and I walked down to the Herschel Astronomy museum. Fantastic little museum, Herschel discovered many interesting things about the solar system, however he is best known for discovering the planet Uranus, from which has generated endless jokes for generations. We owe him a great gratitude.

Whilst waiting for Sharon to finish in the Jane Austin house, I found a great coffee place only metres from the museum so Emma and I had a coffee and hot chocolate. Happy to have found a great coffee place so close.

We walked up to No.1 The Royal Crescent, which is now a museum run by the Bath Preservation Trust to showcase what wealthy life was like in an 18th century house. Learnt a few things I’d never heard off, like the “Turnspit” dog which was put in a wheel to Walk and turn roasting meats.

The “To Do” thing in Bath is a high tea at the Pump Room, which we had booked in for 3pm. After handing over a princely sum, something like the annual GDP of a post colonial third world country we were presented with a massive amount of delicious food (probably enough to feed a village of starvin’ Marvin’s).

We went for a wander after the Pump House to try and walk off some of that food. The Sydney gardens and area around the river are beautiful. Thankfully the rain had disappeared in the afternoon.

Was an early start today, got picked up by a taxi from our AirBnB apartment at 7.30, we got the 8am train from Bruges to Brussels South station, then the Eurostar at 11am to St Pancras in London, then a taxi to Paddington station and finally a Great Western train to Bath Spa station. Remarkably all these connections ran on time, even with the rain in Belgium and the UK.

I had a half decent coffee at Brussels station, found a place just doing coffee that wasn’t machine made. Finding something like that in a French speaking railway station isn’t an easy find!

We checked in for the Eurostar and found out our seats had been reallocated, not a big deal. Brussels is really a horrible station to get the Eurostar from, it’s crowded with hardly any waiting space. Luckily most people were EU citizens travelling to the UK, not UK citizens returning home so we got to use the UK / Commonwealth citizens lane which had no queues and were able to breeze through past everyone else.

I was wondering why we were reallocated seats and found out when boarding the train. It was an old clunker of of a Eurostar. No wifi, screens etc. Even the guard mentioned over the loudspeaker that it was a “Vintage” train, to howls of laughter from the other passengers. It was first announced in German, I picked up enough of the words to know what he had said. Seats were comfortable and importantly it ran on time which is a huge improvement over the Eurostar trains I took last year.

We grabbed a taxi between Kings Cross and Paddington, didn’t quite feel like moving the ton of luggage we have through the tube in the wet and a few lines were closed this weekend anyway.

Train to Bath was nice and smooth. The Hotel is the old Grand Hotel just across the road from from the station. Walked into one of the corridors backwards to hold the door open for Sharon and Emma and didn’t notice the step to the right of the door, tripped and fell over completely on my arse. This of course was hilarious for the others….

After checking in I went straight over to look at the old Roman Baths again and Sharon and Emma looked around the shops. I’m still amazed at how good a condition the Roman Baths are.

At a great dinner was had at “The Huntsman” pub a few doors up from the hotel.