From London to Bath

June 4/10
Another beautiful day! High of 30 Celsius in Bath today, where we are spending the afternoon and night. More crowds but apparently it is a special music weekend. We were lucky to get the last room in the Abbey Hotel in the centre of the town.
It did take us an hour and a half to get out of the London area, and we only went 12 miles!! So much traffic, but we did see a lot of the suburbs with mostly row housing and some lovely gardens and of course lots of little pubs. Then we were on Motorway 4 and it was smooth sailing from there. One reason it was easy driving was that we got Emily fixed up with a new connector. She is working so good we may change her name to Bonnie. So far we have both side mirrors still on the car so I guess we are doing OK on the roads. However these damn drivers keep expecting us to drive on the left side of the road.
We took the Hop On Hop Off city tour on a double decker bus. Bath is quite an interesting place. When Queen Victoria came here, someone said she had fat ankles, so she never came back and would make everyone pull their curtains to block out Bath when travelling past it on the train. There are Roman baths here that are mineral baths and are said to be very healing. The story goes that a young man got a terrible rash with scabs etc and was diagnosed with leprosy. He had to leave his town and went out in the fields to herd pigs and realized that they had the same skin ailment. One day there was an area of wet mud that the pigs rolled in and it got rid of the rash. He thought, well, it if it is good enough for them, it’s good enough for me and went into the mud bath until his skin cleared up. Hence the healing baths started. We quickly headed for these wonderful baths and were all set to dive in and heal all our ailments. The guy at the door said “Where the hell are your bathing trunks?” Oops, we nipped out of there in a hurry as there apparently is no nude bathing.
Off to Cornwall tomorrow.