Taking the waters at Bath

Photos: top row Views inside and outside The Pump Room, the restaurant attached to the Roman Baths, with refurbished C18th interior by Beau Nash. His statue is in the alcove at the end of the room, above the grandfather clock. The marble urn with patinated fish serves up lukewarm spring water. 50p a glass, or free if you've visited the museum.
2nd row: the sacred spring and the main pool of Aquae Sulis built C1st to C5th AD. Museum's dynamic recreation of what the temple pedimentlooked like, showing mix of Celtic and Roman images, and projected coloration
3rd row: the Pulteney Bridge, and taking tea under the watchful gaze of Mr Darcy in the Jane Austen Center's Regency Tea Room
Bottom row: The Circus and Royal Crescent, Palladian style, built by John Wood

It's school break for my friend, so we did an overnight trip to Bath. £44 bought me a discount ticket from Paddington Station to Bath Spa. Pricing for train trips is very dynamic. You can book [or try to anyway] through the National Rail website, but the discounted fare on Great Western Rail I'd selected proved impossible to buy. I ended up working with the window staff at Epsom Station to find a fare cheaper than the £67 we started with. I used my weekly rail pass £53 to cover the Epsom to Waterloo, then tube-to-Paddington part. According to the queue of people at Epsom that day, my experience with the website wasn't unusual. Several people snorted when I mentioned I'd tried and failed to complete the e-commerce transaction. It's fast ride, more than 1 hour, less than 2, whisking you through some very green and pleasant hills. As you approach Bath, the train slows and you get a front row view of curving rows of the C18th honey-colored sandstone buildings. The weather was perfect for the 2 days, so it's quite lovely.

I'd used the Bath Tourism website to book a hotel. We chose the Halcyon, for £99. It's billed as a boutique hotel in an historic building. They were right. It's only been open 3 months, in a C18th sandstone building, with narrow staircases, leading to tiny but totally remodelled rooms furnished with C21st amenities. The stairwell was great. Has a whitewashed clam shell, complete with cherub's head and various plaster fruit and flowers, set into an alcove over the tall many paned windows. And the hotel is located about 5 minutes from Bath Abbey, the Roman Baths, the Pump Room, etc.

On Wed, we bought £6.95 adult tickets to the Jane Austen Center, which is at 40 Gay Street, a few houses down from where Jane actually lived. Her old house is now a dental clinic. We attended a short lecture on th author's residence in Bath and the two novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion that were set here. Then an interesting video hosted by Amanda Root [who played Anne Elliott in the BBC's terrific version of P], plus displays on the clothing, the local newspaper, letter writing formalities, and other topics that really made these wonderful books come to life. Plus we had tea and scones in the Regency tea room, under the haughty gaze of a painting of Colin Firth as Darcy from P & P.

Next we amused ourselves with a stroll to the Circus and Royal Crescent, a visit to the Fashion Museum, which is part of the Assembly Rooms. If you've seen any of the BBC Jane Austen adaptations, it's all familiar to you.

Thursday we visited the Roman Baths, the Pump Room and Bath Abbey. We'd bought a joint Fashion Museum/Roman Baths ticket for £15, which was well worth it. All amazing in their own way. The Roman Bath was built in the first century AD over a sacred spring, and the archaelogical finds thrown into the baths, of which there are several, include jewellry, combs, hair ornaments, buckles, coins, pottery, metalware and hundreds of curses etched on lead and rolled into tight bundles. The curses are hilarious, nearly all concerning the theft of things such as cloaks or shoes. The angry owners implore the gods to bring retribution on the thieves that is totally disproportionate to the actual crime. As part of the tour, you have use of a free audio guide, and the narrations by Bill Bryson are particularly fun. In the Pump Room I tried a glass of the spa water. It bubbles out of a marble urn surrounded by 4 copper salmon. It's lukewarm and tastes of various chemicals. I'm not sure of the magic or medicinal properties of this water, but I don't seem to look any younger this morning when I checked the mirror.

Back to London on the 6:18pm train, whizzing back through rural southwest England. Outside Swindon, I caught a glimpse of a chalk horse carved into a hillside on I think what's called the Downs.

This was a great trip.