Day 3 - June 11th 2014

The third day dawned bright and sunny.  We cooked up crepes, eggs and bacon for breakfast.  This day we planned on visiting Glastonbury and Bath.  We rolled out of the house about 1030, headed north.

Map of the Southwest.  Glastonbury is in red in the center.

As soon as we were moving the boys were both asleep.  Tracy and I dozed off and on throughout the day.  Glastonbury was easy to get to.  We found a car park and walked around the block to get into the abbey.

Kid pile in the back of the car.

The abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII.  They took the lead from the roofs and looted all the treasures.  The abbot and two young monks were beheaded, drawn and quartered and the rest of the monks fled.  Over the years much of the stone was looted by the locals.  Glastonbury abbey was reputed to be the resting place of King Arthur and Gwenivere.  

They boys were happy to get out and run.  They loved the "castle" and insisted on playing soldier and fighting orcs and goblins.  In the exhibit hall there was a treasure hunt.  Each boy got a piece of paper with various artifacts on it.  When they found them they checked a box.  Upon completion, with a little bit of help from their parents and the Dosen, they each received a pin.

The Abbot's kitchen.  Perhaps I love it because of the food.

The fire hooks.

Rhys and the baby pigs and chickens.

Baking oven.

They had dough for the kids to play with.

The most striking piece, for me, was the abbot's kitchen.  It is still intact because it had a stone roof rather than a lead roof like the rest of the buildings.  The building had four huge fireplaces, one in each corner.  The smoke vented out of a chimney directly above the fireplace.  In the top, center, cold air was sucked in, venting the room and keeping the air fresh.  It's a remarkable bit of engineering and a good reminder that our ancestors were really quite clever and all we have is built upon what they discovered.

Carp in the pond.  The boys were looking for frogs and trying to figure out if they could catch a fish with their hands.

Owyn spent some time studying the map and realized that he had not seen everything.  I was very proud of him for reading the map.  He and Rhys and I went up and looked at the gardens and the carp pond, completing Owyn's map study.

As we walked back to the car Nana did some shopping and we bought a flat of strawberries.  They turned out to be the best strawberries I've ever had.  We ate half of them before piling back into the car.  The only reason we saved any was because the though of finishing them with clotted cream was too good to pass up.

Clotted cream.  It tastes so much better than it sounds.

Leaving Glastonbury started another disjointed journey on our way to Bath.  We mostly dozed in the back so only caught parts of the journey.  Once we got to Bath we circled through the city looking for the Roman baths.  There were no signs on any of our routes.  We blasted right through town, turned around, and found a sign that eventually got us to a car park near our objective.

We needed lunch first though.  We found a pub that was serving for ten more minutes.  We quickly ordered food and had a nice pub lunch, accompanied by a nice local pint.  Owyn picked at some food but Rhys cleaned a plate of nachos.

We then wandered through the streets of Bath.  It was very pretty.  The day was warm and sunny and there were people everywhere, enjoying the great weather.  The Roman baths and the Cathedral are right next to each other.  We found the bath, which was our objective.

The baths are a tea room, museum combination.  We went in through the tea room, making both ladies want to skip the museum and get high tea.  Valiantly resisting temptation they carried on to the museum.  Each of us got an audio tour.  You enter the numbers on an exhibit and it gives you narration to go along with what you are seeing.

The museum was packed with people.  There were several tour groups of European teenagers who didn't seem to be nearly as interested in the history around them as they were in their fellows.  Between the crowds and trying to keep track of the boys it was hard to pay enough attention to the exhibits.  The boys were fascinated though and asked a lot of questions.  They were very disappointed that there were no dungeons.

By the time we were spit out through the gift shop it was 1700 and we decided to head, generally, back towards Exeter.  We still needed to get groceries and it was a couple of hour drive...

An hour later we finally left Bath.  Between hitting the streets at rush hour and there being a fire on a major route traffic was a nightmare.  Happily most of the four of us slept through it.  Unhappily for Nana and Grandad they were both awake and trying to navigate through the chaos.

One of Grandad's co-workers grew up in Cheddar, world famous for its gorge and less famous for some sort of cheese.  The gorge is, more or less, on the way from Bath to Exeter, so off we went.  It was an amazing drive for the UK.  It reminded me of driving through the mountains of Colorado, just not for as long.  We almost killed some sheep and goats, there must be a local lottery or something.

Once out of the gorge we continued on to where we had seen a Sainsbury's earlier in the day.  We found a Tesco instead, so stopped there for our shopping.  Tracy always loves grocery shopping in the UK.  I think it is the novelty of the items.  The boys stayed in the car with Nana while Grandad, Tracy and I went looking for the food on our list.  We found everything except for the clotted cream, which we just plain forgot.


We got back to the cottage at 2100 and threw together some dinner.  We were all in bed by 2300.