Bath, England was completely my idea. I’m not going to pass off that visiting the Jane Austen Center & having tea time next to a portrait of Mr. Darcy was husband’s idea… But he was gracious enough to let me get my Regency Era fix as long as I promised not to tell how much he enjoyed it.

View enlarged. The Royal Crescent

A visit to the Jane Austen Museum:

Doodling with a pot of ink & quill is much more difficult than typing on my laptop. I barely write with a regular ball-point pen as it is!

Tea time at the Regency Tea Room. It was delicious!

Hello Mr. Darcy.

After tea time we headed to the Roman Baths / Pump Room. It was incredibly crowded inside. It receives over 1 million visitors a year… When we were there, it seemed like all 1 million were visiting that day! It’s so crowded you’re literally rubbing butts with every other person.

Deep beneath the King’s Bath lies the Sacred Spring, a natural hot spring spouting 250,000 gallons of water every day, and has been doing so for thousands of years.

The bathing complex was built around 70-75 AD but fell upon disrepair until about the late 18th century when they were rediscovered and excavated (around the time when bathing became “fashionable”).

Fragments from the Temple of Sulis Minerva. The Romans could not believe that the hot springs were a natural, geological phenomenon & believed the hot spring was the work of the gods.

Run off from the Sacred Spring. The water is high in minerals & therefore stains the rock it runs down.

I might pass on bathing in that. The water still pumps through the still-functioning lead pipes constructed by the Romans.

After the crowds of Bath, we headed towards our next destination. Along the way we made a random stop at one of the cute Cotswolds Villages, Stow-on-the-Wold, for a little bit of antiquing.