We had a late breakfast this morning and didn’t leave our B&B until well after 10am. We put our stuff in our car, then locked it up and walked back into Bath to do a bit of shopping and a bit more geocaching.

The shopping was absolutely critical — both Jeff and I wanted to visit the Bath Sweet Shoppe (which we’d seen yesterday but hadn’t had the time to deal with). I was, as always, in quest of the sherbert lemons I had had during the first GetCoTI; Jeff just wanted candy. I failed in my quest — the sherbert lemons were solid (no sherbert!) and got stuck together; I eventually threw them out. Then Jeff visited the San Francisco Fudge Factory and tried out Marshfield Farm Ice Cream, a local product, and pronounced it “good” (I thought it was too early in the day for ice cream, showing the foolishness of age).

We then walked up to the Royal Crescent in pursuit of our first geocache of the day; Diane found it, though we all searched. On our walk back down to town, it started to rain, so we ducked into the Cornish Bakehouse and had pasties for lunch (standing under an arch near the shop, since it was strictly a takeaway operation and we’d left our raingear in the car). After that, I tried out two ATMs and was disappointed at both (I guess I was over the daily allowance for the US business day, because I was able to get money late in the afternoon) — then we walked back to the B&B, gave them back our parking permit, and got in the car for our trip to the Cotswalds.

We had planned on stopping at Dyrham Park (a National Trust property), but only part of the grounds were open (not the house), and it didn’t seem worth the admission price, especially as it was raining again. But the WCs were fine and free.

I had preloaded a few caches along the route into my Palm, and we decided to try one — a multicache at Marshfield, a village just a couple of miles off our route. We entered the village and parked the car — then I checked the location of the first step of the cache and found that it was half-a-mile away. But the rain had stopped, so we left the car where it was and started walking.

The first step was conveniently located in the town churchyard (that was a fairly good guess, since the directions involved checking information on a headstone). Solving that part gave us the coordinates of the actual cache, another third of a mile down a public bridleway. The actual location was under trees, but the hint in the description gave Diane what she needed to find the cache. Definitely a nice break.

From Marshfield, we decided to do yet another cache, this one in the tiny village of Castle Combe. We took the first turn from the A420, which took us up a narrow unclassified road. In comparision to the roads in the Yorkshire Dales, it was a breeze, but that was only of relative comfort.

As soon as I’d parked my car, the phone rang — it was Brenda, the owner of Little Broom (the B&B we were heading for), wondering when we might be there. We’d said we wanted to arrive at 4, but she had an errand to run — when I told her where we were, she said we’d be doing well to arrive by 5:30, and so she could do her errand without worrying about our arriving while she was gone. I was just glad that the phone hadn’t rung while I was trying to park the car!

Castle Combe is an amazingly cute village — it’s been used in many movies, including at least one of the Harry Potter series.

Our cache was above the village, or so the coordinates told us. We never found it, even with the hint. After we left, I wondered if we might have been on the wrong side of a wall, but I didn’t feel like driving back and trying again. Maybe next visit.

By this time, we all wanted a nosh. There wasn’t anything that fit the bill in Castle Combe, so we got back on the road and stopped at the next moderate-sized town, Tetbury, where we had milk shakes at Two Toads. From there, we pressed on directly for Maugersbury (if you ignore the small errors of navigation along the way) and the Little Broom B&B, arriving about 5:45pm.

Maugersbury is a suburb of Stow-on-the Wold; as far as I can tell, its only business are B&Bs, and one of their biggest assets is the view.

We walked into Stow for dinner (a ten-minute walk) at the Eagle and Child; the food was tasty, as was the beer, Hooky Bitter from the Hook Norton brewery in Oxfordshire.

After dinner, we walked up to the north end of the village to check out the Tesco’s in hopes of finding some socks (I thought I’d packed more than I had). No joy (this was a small Tesco’s, only as large as a large supermarket in the US), but we did pick up some apples for Jeff. Then we walked back to the B&B to unpack and relax.

Tomorrow, if the weather cooperates, there will be more walking. If it doesn’t cooperate, Stow seems to have a lot of shopping available!

This morning, we awoke early so that we could check out of the hotel and be at Paddington Station by 9am to meet today’s London Walks guide, Richard. We succeeded better than we’d hoped — we were at the station well before 8:30, so we wandered around for a while. I’d already done the geocache in the station, but Jeff and Diane took advantage of the opportunity to log it.

Eventually, we found the group gathering for today’s Explorer Walk to Bath, gave Richard our money, and boarded the train. (London Walks must get very good discounts from the train company — today’s tour, including the walk, admission fees, and round-trip train travel, cost us just a couple of pounds more than I’d expected to pay for a one-way ticket.)

The trip to Bath was uneventful — it was very nice not to hear anti-terrorism reminders after spending three days using the Tube, and we arrived in Bath just a few minutes late. I’d phoned our host for the night from the train, and he was waiting to take our luggage up to the B&B, so I didn’t have to miss any of the tour.

We left the train station and walked over to the nearby canal, where our guide told us about the history of Bath and of the canal system (as it happened, we’d be on this particular canal later in our trip, but many miles away).

From there, we entered “New Town”, where Bath expanded after it had gone as far uphill as people were willing to walk — but it was on the wrong side of the River Avon, so it never became as fashionable as the other part of town. The connection to the old part of town was via the Pulteney Bridge, which was modelled after the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.

We crossed the bridge to the “nice” side, only to be confronted with that most fashionable of vehicles, a Trabant.

We escaped via the Guildhall Markets (buying nothing), and explored the downtown area and the theatre district, finishing the morning just outside the baths themselves, with a number of recommendations for lunch and plans to meet just before 2pm for a visit to Bath Abbey.

We had lunch at Cafe du Globe, which had an interesting menu and was reasonably tasty (some of the pubs looked interesting, too, but we didn’t see any which clearly catered to non-smokers). We then reunited with our group just outside Bath Abbey for the afternoon walk.

There’s an organ concert every Wednesday afternoon, but it ended just before we went in; we were there, however, in time for the hourly prayer led by one of the Abbey’s clergy. After that, Richard guided us to some of the interesting sites in the Abbey,

and then it was up to the fancy part of town, beginning with a visit to the Assembly Rooms (where photography was not permitted), followed by a trip to The Circus, and finally a visit to the Royal Crescent.

From there, it was all downhill to the Roman Baths themselves.

We left the group there — they returned to London, I guess, while we walked down to the train station, found the Hertz office, and picked up our vehicle for the next week, a Ford Mondeo 1.8 with manual transmission and air conditioning. I can no longer drive a stick at home, because my right hand has been weakened by too many years of mousing, but in the UK, one shifts left-handed. And since renting an automatic there costs about double what renting a stick costs, I am happy to shift for myself!

We left the car behind and hurried back into town before the stores closed so that we could pick up a current AA Road Atlas and an OS map of the Cotswalds — then it was back to the station to drive the half-mile to the B&B.

The drive would have been better if I’d really known where I was going, but we eventually found the right place, figured out where to park the car, and met Jill and Keith, our hosts for the evening. Our rooms were up two flights of stairs, so they suggested we leave our suitcases in their sitting room and only bring up what we needed for the evening, which made good sense to us.

And then it was off on the great adventure of the evening: laundry. There was a laundrette about a ten-minute walk away, but it closed in 90 minutes; we had to hurry if we were going to have clean clothes.

I’m not a big fan of spending time in laundromats, but this one (the Widcombe Laundrette) was even less pleasant than the average. There wasn’t anywhere to sit, and the machines were iffy — in fact, the first washer we tried ate our £2.50. But eventually, we got the job done and returned to the B&B with clean clothes.

After that, it was a pleasure to walk over the North Parade bridge back into Bath proper for a fine Thai dinner at the Mai Thai Restaurant. We finished the evening with a quick cache, then ran through the raindrops back to the B&B, where we called it a night.