Day tripping: Stonehenge & Bath

Trip date: January 12, 2017

We had about a week in London and decided to do a day trip to visit Stonehenge and Bath. Winters in London are pretty bleak, often windy and rainy. Unfortunately for us, the day we chose to do our day trip seemed to be one of the wettest; plus Stonehenge and Bath were even colder than London! There was a chance of snow on the forecast for the day even, brr!

When we got to Stonehenge, it was raining pretty heavily and extremely windy. We got our audio guide tours, but British audio guides don't come with headphones and just plays through the speakers. Between the waterproof casing for the player and the poncho, it made it extremely difficult to hear. That plus the bone-chilling cold meant that we ended up skipping most of the audio tour. 

We did the quick walk around Stonehenge, snapping some photos. It seemed like a part of it was blocked off while we were there, so it wasn't a full loop. They also recently changed it so that you can't get close to the stones, since people were constantly touching them and carving them. The stones were like 10 meters away so it was kind of disappointing to be so far away. Between that and the weather, we ended up being pretty underwhelmed by Stonehenge. 

Cold and rainy in a poncho

Couldn't stop laughing at Eri

Reconstruction of the village homes from Bronze Age

Inside the village hut

Pull a Stonehenge rock

This was to tell you how many people it takes to pull a stone of the same size as Stonehenge, but it didn't work :(

Our next stop on the tour was the city of Bath. It's too bad that the weather was so crappy when we were there, because it seems to be really pretty but is hard to appreciate when it's so cold and dreary out. We went through the Roman Springs Museum - it was very interesting and impressive that they built all that so long ago. We also really wished that we could take a dip in the bath and warm up our cold limbs!

Georgian architecture everywhere

All the homes look like one continuous building from the front, even though the backs might be varying depths

The Circus

Picture taken from the minibus, hence the water spots

Downtown Bath

Stopped for a quick bite

Cornish pastry - was kind of dry

Roman Bath Museum

Bath Abbey

Bath Abbey

Inside Bath Abbey

Bath at twilight

These shops are on a bridge!

One of only 4 bridges in the world that have businesses on them.

Cider flight!

The area of Somerset is known for their apples, so we tried some apple ciders!

While I'm glad we got to do a day trip, it wasn't the most enjoyable simply because of the weather. We really liked the tour group that we went with though, The English Bus. They run smaller groups so we weren't in a giant bus and were able to take some smaller, more scenic routes. Our guide Andy was super knowledgeable and pretty (British humor) funny, which helped make the time driving around pass pretty quickly. He was a south Londoner with a cockney accent, though he was also good at impersonating all kinds of British and surrounding area accents.

If you're looking to do a day trip from London, we would highly recommend The English Bus. And to visit in nicer weather, aka not winter!