Bath, UK

Most of the posts from our UK + Ireland trip so far have been about specific attractions or sites encountered during our trip and haven’t included everything we saw in one city or town. The reason for this is twofold. The first reason is because we take a lot of photos. Between the two of us, we took 7,478 photos, and we didn’t have both cameras running each and every day. So if I included all the site from one city, the posts would be even longer than they already are (they would be enormously long if I included all the photos from one entire day of our trip). The second reason is because we didn’t spend too much time in actual cities or towns. Most of our stops were at attractions located in the countryside. So with all of that said, I believe this is the first post about an actual city – the city of Bath, UK.

Bath is a beautiful city, and it was recommended to be included in our trip by many people. We, however, were not really big fans of it. This was mostly due to the driving there. The roads are ridiculously small and not only are they two-way roads, but there is ‘parking’ alongside them. For a part of the driving through Bath we had to pull in our mirrors to be able to squeeze through the roads! It was stressful to say the least. Once we had parked, it was really nice. The weather was gorgeous (if anything it was actually a little on the hot side) and the sky was a beautiful blue.

We walked around the Royal Crescent and got our first taste of the constant construction and restoration works in the UK. They were in the process of removing the grime that had built up on the exterior of the building so there was scaffolding over a portion of the houses.

We then moved the car to the lower part of the city and walked through some really nice parks and the historic downtown area. We walked around the Abbey and Cathedral and along the area of the Roman Baths.

But what we were really searching for was the Pulteney Bridge. I was really just moving towards the sound of water and eventually we found our way there.  The bridge was just as nice as pictured online and it was really relaxing to watch the boaters, pedestrians and kayakers enjoy the water. We even got to see some swans.

We stayed until the sun went down and got to take out my new Three Legged Thing (3LT) tripod to do some long exposure night shots. It was the first time using the tripod (outside of our short test runs in the house) and it worked beautifully.

As I mentioned, Bath was definitely not one of our favourite stops on our trip. BUT I feel like it is still a beautiful city, it is just best taken in by public transportation so you don’t have to deal with the driving conditions. It also may have hit higher on the list if we had time to take in the roman baths themselves as I feel like that would have really relaxed us.