The Wales (and England) Adventure – Bath and the Malvern Hills

Today I am grateful for the kindness of strangers…

It wasn’t our favourite morning – I had to ring the company the truck driver works for and sort stuff out with them, and send the pics of the car damage to the rental place, and figure things out with them, then find our way to their Bath location to swap the car, and deal with a somewhat mean woman, and get rorted on the petrol too, sigh… And then for even more fun, we had to find a laundromat, and wait around to do our washing…

But if the worst from the accident was a wasted day and lots of annoyance, I reckon we’re doing okay. And a really sweet girl at the laundromat gave us some of her detergent, and wouldn’t take money for it, and I almost cried in gratitude. And the lovely couple who helped us yesterday texted, and were so sweet. It’s funny/cool how the smallest kindness can turn around someone’s day…

And finally we shook off our regret at losing half a day and set out to explore hazy, grey-skied Bath, and its brooding, old, slightly gloomy buildings. Our apartment – where Jane Austen lived from 1801 to 1806 – is beautifully located, opposite a museum and a park, and a five-minute walk, if that, down Great Pulteney Street and over the bridge into the heart of the town.

We roamed the streets for a while, then headed home to make dinner and drink more tea, and for me to stay up stupidly late again, determined to make a good start to NaNoWriMo 2016… And it was an… okay… start. Not the whole 1667 words, cos my eyes kept closing and I finally had to go to bed, but not too bad, and it was kinda cool to be sitting at the little old writing desk gazing out into the same darkness Jane Austen would have seen…

Today I am grateful for the beauty of Bath, and pots of real tea…

The morning dawned blue-skied and sunny, so Juz and I spent a gorgeous day exploring the city, and capturing its transformation under the winter sun. We did an open-top bus tour, which we don’t usually do, but it was fascinating to hear all the little historical anecdotes, and the guide was hilarious – Juz thought it might be boring, but ended up liking it because he was so funny.

After that we walked back over where we’d been, and had lunch at Sally Lunn’s, cos you have to have a Sally Lunn Bun in Bath, and their tea had leaves not bags, hooray! (The Sally Lunn Teahouse claims the recipe was brought to Bath in the 1680s by a Huguenot refugee called Solange Luyon, who became known as Sally Lunn…)

Then we wandered through the old Roman Baths for a while, soaking up the history there, and the melding of pagan and Roman spirituality with their combination of the Celtic goddess Sulis and the Roman goddess Minerva into one deity of healing, wisdom and water. Interesting that they named the town Aquae Sulis after the local goddess, and amazing that the hot spring there still pumps up more than a million litres of water a day. And it seemed half of the people visiting when the Baths were open were appealing for healing, the other half making sacrifices to accompany their curses – more than 130 curse tablets have been found in the sacred spring!

After one last early evening wander through the town (it gets dark so early now), we headed back home for dinner, and I eventually tried to write a little more for NaNoWriMo, although my eyelids kept drooping again, and I stopped at just over a thousand words…

Today I am grateful for time with a dear friend, and closeness despite distance. We met one of his buddies, who asked if we were family. I shook my head and said we’d just known each other most of our lives, and he nodded and said yes, you’re family then…

I got up and did Jillian yoga first thing, which felt good, and then we headed north to the beautiful Malvern Hills to spend the day with a friend. A long steep climb up and down and round and round, with a stop to drink the healing waters, and hang out with some cows, and freeze our butts off on the summit, and talk and laugh and catch-up on life over pub curries and pots of tea…

It still catches me by surprise, how quickly and completely the night falls now, and I’ll never tire of the gorgeous autumn colours here.

It was a nerve-wracking drive home though, since it seemed the high beams didn’t work on the new car either, but we managed to get it sorted eventually…

It was super-late when we got home to Bath, but I made myself sit down and write a few hundred NaNo words before bed, despite my constantly drooping eyelids. I’m so behind, and am a little bit nervous that I’ll never catch up, but I’m stubborn, so it will get done…

Today I am grateful for all we have seen so far, and excited about starting our final week…

The day dawned soft and silver and wet, which was good in one way, because I would have felt obliged to go out and see more stuff if it had been sunny. We got up early, I did Jillian yoga, then we packed up and left our cute little Bath apartment, heading to Lacock Abbey, where some of Harry Potter was filmed.

And it had a cool (and massive) cauldron, which made it worth the price of admission, and the autumn colours of the gardens, even in the rain, were gorgeous. But really we were just filling in time until we could head to our home away from home…