BATH/OXFORD: Bathing in Bath, car challenges, Allison!

This photo of Thermae's rooftop pool is from their website.
Phones/cameras were not allowed during bathing, understandably.
In the back, on the right, you can see Bath Abbey.

Thermae Bath Spa

We wanted to emulate the ancient Romans by immersing ourselves in Bath's steamy mineral waters, too. You can no longer do that at the original Roman Bath site—it is run as a museum now, not a bathhouse—but you *can* soak in Bath's same mineral waters at Thermae Bath Spa, located near the original Roman Baths, and sourced from the same spring.

This photo I took on Sunday, during a free
city walk. We were gazing up at the spa participants
in their white robes, looking like gods on high...

Yesterday we tried to go around 4pm; we'd been assured earlier in the day that we could get in as a walk-in up to 5pm, but it turned out an issue had come up with one of their two main pools, reducing their capacity. They were only accepting pre-bookings. We decided to try again today and happily, both pools were working and there was no problem getting in. 

What was it like? When you sign in, you receive a nice long white robe, a towel, flip-flops in your size,, and a special stretchy wristband. You change into the swimsuit you brought, and pack all your gear into a locker, the "key" to which gets electronically transmitted to your wristband. Then you are free to wander the five floors of the building. The main floors of interest were a lower level pool, a rooftop pool, and a second floor "wellness suite". Other floors include the changing area, and rooms for additional spa treatments, like massages, which we did not get.

Photo of inside pool, again from their website

We spent time in the lower, inside pool, then in the rooftop pool, then in the wellness rooms. You get about two hours to roam about, which was enough. The water was very comfortably warm, but it wasn't as hot as we expected, nor did it seem all that "minerally" (despite having *42* minerals according to their promotional materials). Still, it was nice to have a good soak, and both pools also had some jacuzzi-like jets in some areas, and a small water spray. My favorite wellness room was the Georgian steam room. It was very densely steamy in there; you could barely make out that there were any other people in the room.

I wouldn't say Thermae is a can't-miss experience, but it was pleasant and certainly thematic with being in Bath.

Car challenges and Doug in a fancy waistcoat

We originally planned to pick up Doug's booked rental car right after the Thermae visit. However it turned out the car they were intending to give us had a problem—the tire had gotten blown out or something. The only other possible cars were stick shifts and not back yet! We ended up having to kill about 3.5 hours until one was ready. We spent the extra time checking out the Georgian "Assembly Rooms" plus a very nice Fashion Museum. 

One section of the Fashion Museum included replicas of old fashions, which you could try on for yourself. I would have liked to try something on, too, but a group of young women were monopolizing all the women's clothing!

Finally, around 4pm, Doug was able to confirm that they had a rental car for us, and we Ubered over to the rental car place to pick up what turned out to be a bright orange Vauxhall car (Vauxhall is a British car company). We've noticed that a lot of the cars we see on the roads are small cars, and we can understand why. Many roads in England are quite narrow! 

Doug has been quite a trooper in daring to attempt driving here. I'll say more about roads and signs and driving in another post; for now I'll just say that we made it to Oxford in about two hours (it would normally take closer to 1.5 hours, but roads were busy and we missed some turns).

Allison sharing some of her 
mint tea with me, at a lovely
place called Kazbar

Next post

Tomorrow is an Unplanned Day! We are spending five full days in the Oxford area; we can afford to be relaxed about our planning. Who knows what tomorrow may bring? One thing it's likely to bring is the first significant rain of the trip...

BATH: Roman bathhouse life, Medieval church stair climb

I'm standing by the entrance to the Roman Baths, 

behind me is the Bath Abbey church. These top

two attractions are right by each other.

Bath has been an interesting, lively place to be for the past two-and-a-half days. It is physically very attractive, due to a consistent architectural look and a lovely natural setting, and it is also very walkable and engaging, with lots of small shops and eateries, and lots of people watching opportunities. Bath was deemed a World Heritage Site in 1987, by UNESCO. 

The Roman Baths

I have to start with talking about the Roman Baths, because that is Bath's biggest claim to fame. Bath is naturally in an area with hot mineral water springs. The Romans revered the presence of this magical hot water, and they built a temple near it in 60-70 AD, to worship Sulis Minerva (shown at right). 

Over succeeding years, an extensive bathing complex was added, next to the temple. After the Romans left Britain in 410 AD, the baths fell into disrepair and were buried as land filled in. Over time, other bathing facilities used the spring water, in the 12th century and later, but the full extent of the original Roman baths was not discovered until 1878. In the time since then, much work has been done to excavate and appreciate the wonders of the original Roman complex.

Plan of the original Roman Baths complex: The square at

upper left was the temple, the middle circle was where the 

spring water came up (and still does), the big rectangle is

what's visible now; you get to see remnants of the rest.

When we paid to enter the "Roman Baths" on Sunday at 3pm, I had no idea that the exhibits and museum would be so extensive. It includes excavated areas of hot rooms, changing rooms, temple altars, drainage systems, and more. You are given an audio handset which provides narration about what you are seeing, and you also view video reenactments at various locations. We spent three hours there!

One of my favorite displays was small metal inscriptions people had thrown into the hot springs, called "curse tablets". They contained requests for help with some issue, often petty theft, and some are quite colorful, e.g. "Docimedis has lost two gloves and asks that the thief responsible should lose their minds and eyes in the goddess' temple." There's a great Wikipedia article specifically about the curse tablets found at Bath, and there's even a Youtube video about how to make your own curse tablet!

If you're not interested in history at all, this place may not be for you. But because you control the audio handset (you don't have to listen to everything), and because they work creatively at making the past come alive, it's hard not to be intrigued and impressed. 

This swimming pool area is the most commonly depicted part of the Roman Baths,
as it is outside. Only the pool itself and pillar bases are original; everything higher
is of a later construction. The original pool had a roof over it, in Roman days,
and presumably no algae!

This "Immersion Pool" room  has built-in seating, just like  a modern hot tub!

I'm watching a video re-enactment of women changing, displayed over the ruins of what was the changing room

Bath Abbey

The second most notable feature of Bath is Bath Abbey, a beautiful medieval age church built in a central area of Bath. There's records of there being a church in the same spot since the 900's AD, but the current one was built around 1500-1600 AD, with many significant updates made later (e.g. flying buttresses and fan vaulting were both added in the 1800's). The tall church is a helpful landmark in the city, and the wide plazas on two sides of it are full of people relaxing on the benches and listening to a varied range of busking performers.

It is a very beautiful church, outside and inside. During open hours, anyone can go inside, but on Monday we also decided to pay the additional fee to get a "Tower tour" and actually climb to the top! There were something around 200 steps to get all the way to the top, and I was glad I've actually been regularly doing stair climbs (at a parking garage in Palo Alto), because the tour guide ascended at quite a speedy clip—and the other seven people on the tour (other than Doug) were probably all 30 or more years younger than me! We climbed ~120 steps to get to the bell ringing room, then another 50 or so to get to the bells themselves, then another 30 or so to get to the very top. 

The stairs

The bell ringer room.
One way bells are rung is pulling
on the ropes currently looped up high.

In the actual room with the bells!

Us at the very top! Looking out, at bottom left is the open-to-the-air swimming pool part of the Roman Baths which is shown earlier in this post.

We did other cool things in Bath, too; you'll have to just ask us about our visits to the Circus and the Crescent, about the woman who dared to paint her door yellow, about "hanging loos" and about seeing a redwood, a sequoia, and a dawn redwood tree in Sydney Gardens...

Next Post and Question Answer

Tomorrow we hope to try doing a version of Roman bathing ourselves in the morning... we tried today, but for various reasons it didn't work out. After that, we'll be renting a car and Doug will drive us to Oxford! 

In the meantime, according to a Pew research article, the answer to the question I posed yesterday, "What % of Americans have never been abroad?"is 27%. It was actually smaller than I thought, but if you add in the percent of Americans who have only gone to one another country (19%, likely to be Canada and/or Mexico), the total number goes to 46%.

It was nice to chat with the Queen.

A nice 12-hour sleep

Our lovely B&B breakfast—I'm 
having Scottish oats laced w/ whiskey!

This will be a short post because during the time I usually work on the blog (evenings/late night), I was sound asleep! Not only did I not time shift before the trip, as Doug did, but I also stayed up late Saturday, doing the previous post about arriving in England. Which means I ended up being pretty exhausted by the end of Sunday. I crashed last night, after we came home from dinner (~8pm) and slept quite soundly til Doug woke me up for our lovely B&B breakfast this morning (~8:30am). The plus side is I think I'm caught up to England time now!

I will just post a couple of quick things and catch up more later today. The first thing is the answer to question I posed in the last blog: Why did I take this photo, reprised here? If you look at it closely, it's because all five cars in the photo are parked nose-to-tail to each other. I've noticed that parking pattern fairly often. I guess if you see a good spot on the other side of the street, you don't need to do a U-turn, you just sidle over and park! 

Next Post

In the next post, I will hopefully catch up on what we did Sunday, which  was a walking tour of Bath, and a visit to the Roman Baths museum. The latter visit was quite spectacular, much more involved than I had expected! Today we will see more of Bath, and then Tuesday it's on to Oxford, and Allison! Here's a question for today: What % of Americans have never been abroad? 

We are in England!!

Glorious Paddington Station—I love the beautiful, arching skylit roof
with decorated ribs. It was the first moment I felt I was Somewhere New...

It still seems like an astonishing miracle to me that people can climb into a large metal tube, spend hours flying through the air, and come out of the tube alive and in a place thousands of miles away from where  they started. But that's what we did, climbing aboard a Virgin Atlantic flight Friday at 6:30ish in San Francisco, and less than ten hours later (the pilot saved time on the flight), emerging from the flight at London's Heathrow airport!

(Departing SFO photo courtesy of Nick, as part of his limo service)

The flight

The flight we were on was conveniently scheduled in the evening so that one could theoretically spend much of the flight time sleeping. Unfortunately, both of us had a very hard time getting comfortable enough to sleep, and did a lot of fidgeting all night long. Also, somehow the plane had a notably bad audio system; flight announcements were foggy and hard to hear, and though the flight offered 117 movies (!!), including recent ones I was interested in, in the end I found the sound (through provided headphones) too sketchy to make it worth it. One highlight of the flight though, was that we both happened to wake up around 1am (6.5 hours into the flight) and saw what we think was icy Greenland from the air!

Arrival process at Heathrow

The process for international arrivals was thankfully quite straightforward, if not very glamorous. By not glamorous, I mean that there was never any really cool "Welcome to London" sort of graphics, as we've encountered in other airports. 

You got shunted into a large arrivals area, with arrivals from selected countries going through one line, and any others going through another line. The selected countries included the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the European Economic Area (EU + a few others), Japan, Singapore, and South Korea—check an official UK site for the exact list. The vast majority of arrivals were in the selected countries line. If you have a passport with the biometric symbol (circle with a line on each side), you can go through the eGates. At the eGate, you feed your passport into a reader and then the machine snaps a photo of you on the spot, and if your in-person photo matches your passport photo well enough, you pass through. Doug did not pass through—he thinks it was because he forgot to take off his glasses, thereby failing to match. He had to go through another line staffed with a real person, but it was pretty fast still. 

Getting to Bath from Heathrow

Doug had psyched out that we could get to Bath by train (postponing the need for an expensive car rental until Tuesday), and had already gotten us digital tickets. We took a Heathrow Express to Paddington and then a Great Western Railway train to Bath (~1.5 hour ride). The process was very smooth, and the trains were great! Doug commented on how much better the train experience was than say, Caltrans. Not that Caltrans is bad, but the English train was newer and the ride was smoother and quieter.

The COVID/masking situation

As daughter Allison had told us, in general outdoor settings, most people don't mask anymore. We have found this to be true. There are still signs of COVID precautions (e.g. stand 6 ft. apart signage and spots on the ground), but overall people here seem pretty relaxed about COVID now. 

Most passengers on the plane flight were still masked (maybe 60-75%?), and also I'd say more than half on the train were masked. But I was surprised that the Virgin Atlantic flight attendants weren't masked (because it's a high-contact role) and our hotel concierge wasn't masked (again a high-contact role). Hopefully this degree of relaxation is warranted... we'll know if we manage not to get sick on the trip!

On being in England

England is an easy country to visit, as foreign countries go. The language is the same, and there's a lot of cultural overlap, too. However one difference has caught our attention, besides the standard vocabulary differences (lifts instead of elevators, crisps instead of potato chips, a "stopping train" instead of a local). The announcements on the train were so cheery, perky, organized! It was hard to put a finger on the exact difference, as a lot of the content was the same: don't forget your belongings, the next stop is XXX, etc.  Something about the tone just seemed different than in the US; I tried to record an announcement, but didn't think of it early enough to be successful.

On being in Bath

I will write a lot more about Bath tomorrow, but it is a very charming, touristy kind of town. We spent about five hours today just wandering around the town. What makes it so visually charming is that much of the central architecture dates back to the Georgian period (early 18th century) or even earlier, including a couple of beautiful churches, and an arched bridge. It's also famous as the locale for ancient Roman baths (hence the name Bath!).

Arriving on a Saturday, we found the place thick with tourists, mostly English tourists. We could tell because of listening for what languages you overhear. We rarely heard languages other than English, and much of the English we heard had a British accent. The central tourist area was lined wall-to-wall with shops; Doug said it made him think of the Stanford Shopping Center; we also thought of the touristy areas of Santa Cruz. Still, the natural beauty of the town shines through.

Here are just a few photos from Bath; more to come...

On the left is a bridge Bath is famous for.
On the right are kayakers preparing to take on the spillway waters.
We watched them start on the upper level and kayak down the artificial waterfalls.

A beautiful old cobblestoned square with a magnificent tree.
(Doug is standing by it for scale.)

What did I find funny here, that caused me to take this photo?

Unusual dessert at a lovely little vegetarian restaurant, Oak.
It's rhubarb (on the right), with star anise 
ice cream under an almond tuile

Where are we going?

Our itinerary: We will start off going to Bath, then Oxford/Cotswolds,
Lake District, York, and end with 4 days in London 

Why England? Where in England?

Most people reading this probably know why we're going to England—we're going to England to visit our Most Beloved and Extraordinary Daughter, who is doing an MBA at Oxford University's Saïd Business School. Our daughter has been the root cause of most of our wonderful trips abroad—she goes somewhere different and interesting (India, China, Australia, Taiwan), and we take advantage of the opportunity to go there, too! We are spending the longest part of our England trip in the Oxford area, to spend time with her, but as long as we're going all the way to England, we figured we might as well see some of the rest of the country too. 

Doug planned the trip using suggestions from Rick Steves Great Britain (23rd edition). We like Rick's approach to travel, which tries to get you away from just seeing other tourists at touristy spots. His advice led to our staying in a wonderfully perfect location in Paris, 23 years ago (!) when we were there for three days. Anyway, it is his advice that is leading us to see London at the end of our trip rather at the beginning. We did see London once before, on the same long ago trip where we went to Paris, and we already saw many of the classic tourist sites at that time—changing of the guard, crown jewels, the prime meridian at Greenwich, etc. It'll be nice to get a different take on the city this time, and also to see more of England's countryside.

I'm really looking forward to the excitement and adventure of being somewhere new. 

Understanding the British Isles vs. the United Kingdom vs. Great Britain

I've always been a bit fuzzy and unclear about the differences in the above terms; fortunately daughter Allison showed us a meme that helps sort it all out. Here are the key three terms:

The British Isles (bottom white layer) is the term that encompasses all the bits of land in the general area.

The United Kingdom (light orange layer) is England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It is what functions as a "country" in many respects; it is the unit that exited the EU.

Great Britain (orange layer) refers to the large island that contains Scotland, England, Wales.

Here's also a helpful article on British/English terminology from the Smithsonian magazine.  It points out that the term "British" is actually rather ambiguous.

I was surprised to read in Wikipedia that the original coming together of the Great Britain countries as a United Kingdom happened back in 1707. Ireland was added in 1801 but then much of it left in 1922. The UK seems unique (in my limited knowledge of world politics) in that the UK is a country but its four constituent parts are also widely referred to as countries. We will only be visiting England this time, but at least I better understand now how everything fits together.

Next Post

The next post will be written from England! England is over 5,000 miles away, and 8 time zones later than California. If we get up at 8am here, it's already 4pm in England. To help himself acclimate, Doug has been shifting towards English time already this week, getting up earlier and earlier, to more closely approximate being awake when he'll need to be awake when we're there...

Our elapsed flight time will be about 10 hours; 
with the time change we'll arrive 18 hours later.

First major COVID-era trip!

New packing essentials: masks, tests, sanitizer

Venturing out of our cocoon

Our trip to England will be the first major travel we've done since the start of the "COVID-era." We did do two local road trips last spring, in that brief halcyon period after getting vaccinated and before the Delta variant's summer surge. This will be our first trip by plane, and our first trip abroad, since the pandemic started.

Many friends and acquaintances have already traveled by plane with no adverse outcome, especially in the past year or so (post vaccines). So it doesn't seem as scary as it once did, though I personally wish the mask mandate on planes had not been lifted before our trip. However, things in both the US and UK do seem to be at a reasonable point. We're hoping for an enjoyable, COVID-free trip, but we're certainly bringing good masks and some test kits.

How are things in the US?

Sign as of 4/26

Things have settled down a lot in the US, although the possibility of another variant and another surge is always lurking. California lifted its indoor mask mandate on February 15th; now it's more of a personal choice whether to mask or not. I've been happy that significant numbers of people still wear masks, because it makes it an easier option to take, if one feels the need. Also some businesses do still encourage mask wearing.

As luck would have it, due to a fluky ruling by a Florida judge, as of April 18th, masks are no longer required on plane flights. We still plan to wear them, especially in the airports, which we understand can actually be riskier than the well-ventilated airplanes.

How are things in the UK?

Things also look relatively good in the UK, by now. COVID restrictions and requirements within the UK were lifted on February 21st. Mask wearing is still encouraged on public transit and in certain other contexts, but it is no longer required. As of March 18th, there are also no longer any particular requirements for international arrivals to the UK (such as needing to test and/or show proof of vaccination). The US will require a negative test from us upon re-entry, at the end of May, but we hear it's easy enough to get at the airport.

A second booster

Being older and more at risk, we were already interested in the option of getting a second booster--but it seemed even more advisable now, given that we don't want to get sick on our trip!

Within the past two weeks, both of us have gotten a second booster, at CVS stores, and both of us have taken the "mix and match" approach, which theoretically can give you a slight added edge of protection. There's not definitive proof of the advantages of mixing and matching, but there's no known downsides either, so it seems a reasonable thing to do as long as it's equally convenient to get either one, which it is in our area.

In my case, I'd gotten Pfizer for my first two shots and booster, and switched to Moderna just for this second booster. I was a little afraid the side effects might be worse with Moderna; I hadn't been affected much at all by the Pfizer shots, so I was apprehensive that I might get more woozy with this one, while at the same time thinking that then I'd be more assured that something was happening. As it turned out, I wasn't affected much by the Moderna shot either, other than my arm hurting for a few days, and maybe feeling very slightly more tired. I never had a fever or needed to doze for several hours though.

Next Post

In the next post I'll outline our planned itinerary and talk more about the nature of our trip—why are we going to England anyway? Where in England are we going? Are we going to rent a car??