Jon Jermey's Travel Blog

 One would think that the people of Bristol would be sensible enough not to have two railway stations with nearly identical names, in similar places, on different railway lines to the north of the city, but they do; and it was only after I had arrived in Bristol Pathway instead of Bristol Patchway that I discovered my mistake.  Getting here was something of an adventure in itself, since I got to the station just in time to miss the first train to Bristol Pathway -- the Cardiff train, incidentally -- and asked the station attendant where to catch the next one. He advised me to go to platform 5, which I did, but when I consulted Google it suggested the next train on Platform 3. So I returned to platform 3, and a few minutes later they announced that the train from there would be cancelled due to a 'problem' in the Severn Tunnel. So my question is: did he know about the problem ten minutes in advance of the announcement, or was he just wrong? Anyway, there was only five minutes d...

 Happy birthday to me! But another grey day. After breakfast I set out to walk along the river Avon to see the famous suspension bridge at the other side of town. The river is very tidal here, with a daily rise and fall of up to 9 metres, and when I started out it was very low and grey and muddy. It got higher as the day went on, but no less grey. The walk was mainly through a residential area, but one sidestreet led through the suburb of Bedminster, which had some impressive old buildings, including an old school that looks like a jail, an old police station that looks like a castle, and the old cigarette factory that featured in several of the Bristol Museum displays. This was apparently a haven of happiness and joy for the -- mainly female -- workers there, who were apparently treated very well and thoroughly enjoyed their jobs. But one wonders how much that had to do with all the tobacco dust floating in the atmosphere. A footbridge that I had planned to cross was closed, but I...

One more Full English breakfast from the buffet, and I headed out to the station to take a train to Cardiff. I missed the first one by about thirty seconds, so I had to wait half an hour, which gave me time to read the historical signage around the station. This was taken from a number of different sources, and seems to have been compiled at different times under different conditions, so it's hard to extract a coherent narrative, but basically the station was built on reclaimed land by Brunel, and parts of it were then sold off and bought back again. At the moment most of it seems to be held up by scaffolding. And like Gloucester, it has several sub-platforms along the length of the one long platform.  The train was relatively empty and fairly quick, stopping only at a couple of regional stations before taking the tunnel under the Severn into Wales, where it stopped at Newport and Cardiff. Wales has its own regional railway system, and of course the signs here all appear in two lan...

 I checked out of the hotel in Bath and walked to the station just in time to catch the train to Bristol. Lots of Brits complain about the train system here, but compared to Australia it's an absolute dream; half an hour between trains is about the most I have ever had to wait, and they have always been within a few minutes of time. The daft segregation into local private companies makes it a bit of a pain to use, but in general it all seems to work well. Anyway, I was in Bristol twenty minutes later, and after a wrong turn at the railway station I reached the hotel by about ten. I had planned to just leave my bag, but they were happy to provide me with a room for no extra cost, so I ended up on the 7th floor, in a quiet corner, with a large warm room and a grand view over the skyscraper construction crew working next door. Yesterday afternoon they poured the concrete for the whole floor, which was fascinating to watch.  Out again then to walk up through Bristol to the museum ...

 After breakfast I made my way up to the north end of town, carrying two bags of dirty washing, to find a laundromat called the Dolly Tub. It was in a quiet courtyard and nearly deserted, though one person did pop in while I was there. Luckily I had been saving pound coins, and had just enough for a wash and dry. I brought the clothes back to the hotel, intending to go out again to the same area and visit the museum at Royal Crescent, but a quick check online showed that they weren't taking any more bookings, so instead I walked out to the south-east intending to explore Prior Park, where I had failed to find parking on Tuesday. After crossing the Avon and going under the railway I found myself in the less salubrious part of Bath, following narrow streets past slightly run-down housing projects, but in a few minutes I was out in the country again, in a place called Perrymead. I passed the Paragon School and turned off to visit St Thomas's Church, which was built in the 11th cen...

 After a buffet breakfast I went out to visit the Roman Baths. At 9:30 I was early enough to beat the rush, but people soon came crowding in, and I was glad once again not to be here in tourist season. Glenda and I did the tour in 2007, but I remember nothing of it, and they have revamped the buildings a bit, so it's a bit different anyway. It's not a particularly large structure in itself, but they hand out free audio guide devices, which tends to slow down your progress as you listen to the narrative.  So it took about an hour and a half over all to wander through the history of the baths, their construction, the local archaeology and so on. The bath itself is the centrepiece, but nobody showed any interest in swimming in the warm green oily water. A slight smell of sulphur pervades the area, and you can see the water in the supply pool bubbling up from the hot springs. There was a temple attached to the baths in Roman times, and they have managed to reconstruct some of it, ...