Bath & Bristol

Ahh, the joys of the 'audio tour'

We're not really models, we just play them on tv.

It was a beautiful day in Bath.

You can actually drink the water from Bath or bath-water as 

I like to call it. It's said to both cause and cure gastroenteritis.

Wait a minute, how does that work?

Kristin begged me to take this picture. I kept saying "Don't you

think it's kind of cheesy?" but I took it anyway, just for her.

This weekend we went to Bath and Bristol to visit some friends of ours. Simon and Karen were kind enough to let us stay at their house in Bristol and drive us all around town including neighboring Bath. We took the bus there which was an interesting journey in itself. The bus was fairly comfortable and took only 1/2 hour longer than the train. The people on the bus were another story all together. We knew it was going to be a long journey when the woman next to us pulled out a grocery bag and tied it to the seat in front of her. The purpose of this bag was to contain the massive amount of trash that she would be producing during the long and arduous 2 hour journey. She started with chips (Which everyone over here calls crisps), after wrestling with the bag for a good 7 minutes she proceeded to pull out each chip and bite it in half. After biting the chip in half she fervently chewed in a circular motion, similar to a camel, mouth wide open, again similar to a camel. If you can visualize the amount of rogue chip matter being violently tossed about the bus cabin, accompanied by the sound of her chewing which was reminiscent of one of those machines that grinds up old computers in order to extract the precious metals from the electronic components, you can only begin to scratch the surface of the first third of our journey. After the chips came an ominous yellow bag with a familiar shape, but larger than I remember. Oh yes, they could only be PEANUT M&M's! No, of course they couldn't be the smaller, quieter variety of nut-less m&m's. They had to be the inordinately large and crunchy peanut variety, and the family size bag to boot. Oh the journey was far from over my friends. After the m&m's this specimen of a woman magically produced an extra large portion of Burger King french fries (which everyone calls chips over here, and freedom fries in certain ignorant parts of middle America). Now with the first two items we covered the audio and visual misery that this woman imposed on the quiet and unsuspecting bus goers. This last item would bring an olfactory element into the mix, she had now touched on 3 of our 5 natural senses. Our bus left at 9am and by now it was about 10:30. This isn't the real problem though. Fries that are 1 &1/2 hours old don't smell particularly good, but they don't really smell that bad either. After glancing over and seeing that both the fries and the bag were translucent I have determined that they were probably from the night before. Now I can tell you that day-old fries do smell particularly bad. So she finished the fries and washed it all down with a liter of Fanta (I'm not kidding). After that she spent the last 10 minutes of the trip speaking to various friends on her cell phone. When I say speaking I mean yelling, and not in English, but in a particularly annoying tone of Welsh, coming to assault us once again in our audio sense. Other than that the trip was great. Enjoy the pictures.