Take the water of life freely!

"Oh! Who can ever be tired of Bath?" . . . So said Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Don't credit me for actually memorizign the quote, I found it in the guide book under Bath and thought you might enjoy it! Anyway, Bath was really gorgeous! It took us about 45 minutes by tube and another hour and a half on the train to get there, but I felt it was worth it. Bath looked very different from any of the other places that we've been so far. It was very hilly and the buildings were mostly white with very intricate architecture, but really beautiful against the green of the hills and the blue of the river near it, no clue what the name was. The buildings were white stone, presumably limestone, but I don't really know that either. The architecture had a gothic feel to me even on houses and shops. We passed through the town's most famous street, Great Pulteney St. and our tour guide told us that houses there sell for over 200 million pounds!!! I mean they were nice, but not overly big, they were just white stone row houses one after the other. We also saw where Jane Austen lived when she resided in Bath, at No. 4. Today it's a private residence so you can't go in or anything like that. There is a Jane Austen Centre but we didn't have time to take the tour, so we plan on returning for that. We did take pictures with the Jane Austen statue outside and the Coling Firth/ Mr. Darcy welcome plaque at the entrance. Our entire group toured the Roman Baths which was interesting, but not as cool to me as the Jane Austen Centre. The Baths have evolved over time from the Roman occupation of Britain to the 18th century when they were a fashionable place to visit for the upperclass to the museum that currently stands there. The Romans used the Baths as a temple to the goddess of water, Minerva. It was interesting that many Romans used to make pilgrimages to the baths to make an offering to the goddess and today hundreds of thousands of people make a different sort of pilgrimage to marvel at all the Romans accomplished with so little technology! It was neat to walk around the Baths where the Romans might have walked and toss in a coin to the pool where they may have made an offering to the goddess. It was incredible to see the way that the Romans were able to build plumbing of a sort and control the water the way they wanted to.
Bath also has an old abbey which was really pretty on the outside, we didn't go in. On one side of the abbey there was a statue of a woman with a water jug and a inscription that read "Take the water of life freely." So we all took goofy pictures of drinking from the water fountain there. None of us drank from the purified Roman Baths water, which is supposed to taste like sulfur. Bath also had a lot of cute shops and cafes, and although there were a good number of tourists didn't feel overly 'touristy.'
After spending a few hours in Bath we drove an hour to visit Stonehenge . . . more on that in the next post.