A day in Bath.

So a day in Bath lay ahead, my resident weatherman indicated there would not be another monsoon as happened yesterday, he even tried to wear shorts.  This was not met with approval, but I managed to find him a clean pair of trousers.

We both achieved the long jump off the boat and decided to walk down into the city centre going through The Sydney Gardens.  The canal was built right through the very posh end of town, with its large stone villas, this was in the gardens.

 Minerva's temple

View from Sydney Gardens

Very nice they were too.  We followed our noses a bit more and found this.

Poulteny Bridge, not completely sure what that line is....

River Avon.

I realised I was leaning my phone and my credit cards over the river at this point.

The famous weir

We wanted to take the tourist bus and jumped on one as stopped, we went upstairs after parting with £26 (a reduction had been made due to me having our NT cards on me), disappointment was swift when the sound system failed, we changed seats, nothing, changed seats, nothing changed seats to mumblings of "Muscial chairs again!"  coming from behind us….  
Then a gruff Yorkshire accent pipped up “Its not working love….?”  

“Yes” says she the commentator, we are doing all we can but some people can hear.

I wasn’t thrilled to hear that, and nor were others.  She invited us to make our feeling known to the manager who was onboard.  I was delighted to  do just that at the end of the ride.

Anyway the sun made it a lovely day and following that we went into a cafe on Poulteny Bridge looking over the river to have a bite to eat.  

Afterwards we walked through Bath Market which was sort of on the way to the next bus tour, (this one had a working sound system, I checked first) and took us steeply uphill for a Skyline Tour, which went along a ridgeway almost on three sides of Bath looking down right over the city.

We hopped off here at Priory Park, a NT wooded restored garden in the Romantic style of when it was created back in 1780-ish.  The House which was a stunner built in Bath stone was built for himself by the wealthy Bath Stone Quarry owner and is now a school and not open to the public.  

The school, formally a house, "To see all Bath and to be seen from all of Bath"

Not a bad place for a school methinks

Some mighty fine railings oh and the view of Bath.

Did I tell you I love gates, especially iron ones.  So NT....

The gardens were lovely but tricky to get to, they are out of town, no parking that we could see and extremely steep.  Consequentially quiet!

Back into town and right past the locks and the river.  Next stop a good tearoom where we shared a pastry.  Then a stroll nose following again then dinner al fresco in a stone walled courtyard that was away form the traffic and felt like Italy. 

Some dramatic skies as we walked back but not downpours.  A relaxing evening back in the boat.

This is Great Poulteny Street, only one row deep of houses built but many more were planned.  The war with France was the reason they were not built

Miss J Austen lived here with her family for several years.

Although she did not like Bath herself.

Our mooring at Bath, David going in the cratch head first after a "Leap of Faith"

Then….

The total Git strikes up again at 8:30pm, he carefully avoided my eye of course as I pointed out the time to him….  This evening it was his engine not the generator which was much louder than the and was accompanied by clouds of blue smoke into our cratch.  

Now I am not a confrontational person and would not like to approach him so we put up with it.  But we plan to leave in the morning early, gosh wouldn’t it be awful to accidentally wake him?

I found this shot when we arrived. I was trying to photo the view.     Total Git's boat, no name, no number and the only tax disc was on the water side.  I would urge you to consider his personal habits before mooring up behind him...