Roaming Tales

This is a guest post by Natasha Judd, a New Zealand writer, traveller and self-described web geek, currently living in London. Her first novel Lessons to Learn, which deals with the challenges and culture shock faced by a Kiwi English language teacher in Korea, was published by Cape Catley in 2007. Natasha also runs the writing resource website WebStuff4Writers.com. Here she shares the tale of her recent birthday weekend - a surprise trip to Bath with her husband.

Normally, I’m a bit obsessive about our holiday planning. I can agonise for days about where we’re going to go, what we’re going to do, where we’re going to stay: checking the local tourism websites, reading reviews, comparing prices and breakfast menus. So, when my husband said that he was going to take me away for my birthday this year – that all I needed to organise was a day off work on 21 January – I didn’t know what to expect.

On the Saturday morning, I definitely didn’t expect the car, hired from streetcar for three days, but it certainly made a nice change from the crowded buses and trains that are our day-to-day transportation here in London. In a car, you can take alternative routes, you can stop in Reading for lunch in a pub. If you’re my husband, you can drive west in perfect confidence that my total ignorance of UK geography means that I have absolutely no idea where we’re going.

We ended up in High Littleton, a small village on the outskirts of Bath. My husband had hired one of the Greyfield Farm Cottages – a perfect place for a winter weekend retreat, with both a log fire and a jacuzzi to keep us warm. As I flicked through the guest book in the lounge, what I noticed was the number of repeat visitors, people who returned to these self-catering cottages year after year, or came back for special occasions in their life. It hardly surprised me. From the cider and chocolates when we arrived to the complimentary Thermae Spa voucher, the Greyfield Farm Cottages oozed a vibe of relaxation and escape (and if that wasn’t your intention, there was also an on-site gym).

Sunday was our history of Bath day, with museums and historic restaurants and walking tours. You certainly get the feeling that Bath has been a significant area for quite a while when you walk around the Roman Bath Museum. In the second century AD, the conquering Romans were already coming here to bathe, throw their offerings into the Sacred Spring, and to worship at the temple of the goddess Sulis Minerva. Much later, in the early 1800s, Bath was home to one of the UK’s most famous writers, Jane Austen. Two hundred years later, Miss Austen is still making her presence known, courtesy of Jane Austen walking tours (which my husband had downloaded onto our iPods from the Visit Bath website) and the Jane Austen Centre.

When it was the centre of Bath Society, Jane Austen may have been an occasional visitor to the Pump Room. Today, it’s more a gathering place for tourists. We sampled glasses of the Bath spring water – said in the past to cure a whole range of ills – but on the whole, I preferred my hot chocolate. Dinner that night was at Sally Lunn’s House, the oldest residence in Bath and the home of the Sally Lunn Bun. The famous buns were a central part of our meals, acting almost as a second plate.

On Monday, after a breakfast of local bacon and eggs, we checked out of our cottage and drove back into Bath. An exhausting morning of shopping and spending in Bath’s stores and markets was followed by a couple of hours of relaxation in the Thermae Bath Spa. Outside the wind was blowing a gale, but that only mattered when we were trying to get in and out of the roof-top pool.

So we didn’t have great weather. It rained on our walking tour. It was cold. But then again, it was January, it’s the UK, and on that point at least I wasn’t surprised. I’ve been told that in summer Bath is crowded with tourists and that you have to queue for an hour to get into attractions like the Roman Bath Museum. So, for those looking for a romantic winter weekend holiday, I do recommend Bath.

I didn’t know where we were going for my birthday. I’d had a few vague theories, none of them correct. Our long weekend in Bath was better than I could have imagined, and my lovely husband gets lots of points for that.