Day 5 of London

(Originally Written April 7, 2015)

This was our first of two excursions from London on our trip. We left the hotel to get to the Travel Company in route to Bath, Lacock & Stonehenge. First, off we saw this, which was utterly disappointing and an indictment of today's culture. The line on the left hand side is a line for the Harry Potter WB studios tour and is filled to capacity. Two busloads of tourists would be going to this tour in the hour and two more in the next. The line on the right (two people) would be going to Stonehenge. That said, there was only about 25-30 travelers with us on the trip so we had the place basically to ourselves which was very cool.

The first stop on the tour was the Roman Baths at Bath. We toured the ruins, checked out the Abbey at Bath and sort of quick walked a little bit of the town. There were a lot of cool sites to see in the area. The statues surrounding the bath were pretty amazing, some of which were very well preserved. The main "bath" area however was a odd green color and we were instructed not to touch it for health and safety reasons. For once I suspect that this was not overkill as the greenness of the pool looked rather menacing. At the end of the tour though we were able to drink the water from the natural

Note the green water...

spring and it tasted a lot like mineral water because it was in fact, mineral water. Our tour guide was very informative and had a good delivery. She also had a dry enough sense of humor to suck all the moisture out of the room. One of the most interesting facts that I learned about why the baths seemed to have such great healing powers in them was how the minerals interacted with the Roman Britons and Medieval British drinking habits. Everyone always seemed to get sick back then and the likely cause was the fact that their drinking vessels and storing vessels for their wine were led-lined. So it's likely that they always had a mild case of led poisoning. The minerals in the hot spring seemed to suck the led out of the body when they bathed in it, so the people would feel much refreshed out of the bath. Unfortunately, they would go home and have some wine and once again give themselves minor led poisoning and have a need for another bath.

After Bath, was the village of Lacock. It was interesting, a good look at Medieval England, but we were only there for 40 minutes and I could've spent some more time exploring Bath and had another pint of Cask Ale.

The highlight of the day and probably the trip though was the trip to Stonehenge and the inner circle. Just coming up on it was incredible, though the landscape was blotted somewhat by the new Stonehenge Welcome Center and its hideous architecture. We arrived at Stonehenge close to sunset and to watch the sun go down over the horizon from the middle of Stonehenge was an incredible feeling. However, when I was asked if it was a "spiritual" experience I had to say "no". Being inside either Saint Paul's or Westminster Abbey or the Abbey at Bath was much more of a spiritual sensation than being in the middle of some rocks arranged in circular fashion, but then again I'm not much of an animist, shamanist, neo-druid or have much sympathy for reconstructed modern paganism either. In spite of the lack of spirituality at the site it was an incredible thing to behold.