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Day 21 - Around Bath - 1.5 miles
Day 22 - On to Oxford by train, riding around Oxford - 8.6 miles

Day 21 - Around Bath

    Day 21 started with some confusion. I usually beat Jeanette to the breakfast table and today was no exception. I had already finished when she came down the stairs with her luggage. I had moved the bikes around to the front of the hostel and was fastening on the bags when she came out and told me that she wasn't allowed to eat breakfast because she didn't have a breakfast ticket. I checked at the desk. It seemed that we didn't pay for breakfast with our reservation! Once brought to mind, I remembered that when we made the reservations while at Arundel, we decided we were getting tired of the, "traditional English breakfast" and were not loosing any weight as well. We had decided that coffee and tea and a pastry snack at one of the many bakeries we found would be a good substitute. I volunteered to pay for Jeanette's breakfast but she was so miffed that I had not "taken care" of her that she just huffed off in a pout.

    Bikes loaded, we pointed ourselves down the hill and held onto the brakes for the ride down and into the old town to the YMCA. The ride took only minutes. The manager allowed us to pile our bags in back of the registration counter until we returned in the afternoon. We were scheduled to meet Richard for a few more hours of touring in the morning. We passed a bakery featuring chocolate goodies and I asked Jeanette if she wanted to stop. She was still miffed and opted to just push on. Fine, I wasn't the one that hadn't eaten!

    We rode the few blocks to Richard's house and went on another walking tour after locking our bikes in his apartment. He showed us the Crescent and the Circus and told us of some of the notorious tenants that had lived in the houses and some of the attempts to modify the building's outward appearances. We walked up the hills to the east of the town and saw a smaller version of the Crescent. We finished by going to a local market and buying the supplies for a home made lunch of ham and cheese sandwiches at Richard's flat. Jeanette did a good job of eating her lunch, the confusion about the breakfast now forgotten.

    We thanked Richard for his time and invited him to visit us in California before parting, something he promised he would do in the future. Once by ourselves we did the typical tourist things and first visited the Costume Museum where I pretty much sat on the benches and napped while Jeanette went from glass case to glass case, reading some of the history of English clothing styles. Next on schedule was a ride on an open topped double-decker bus, tour included. The "guide" had a number of scripted jokes that he improvised on as we rode around the town. Even though his lines were well worn, he was enough of a character that he brought out a fair number of laughs. 

    We finished with a visit to the Roman baths. Jeanette was amazed on how much the baths had been expanded and improved since her last visit, 15 years ago. We spent several hours there reading all of the plaques and examining the remains of the Roman architecture.  

    Jeanette had a yearning for some Italian food and with the confusion about breakfast so recent, I thought it best to satisfy her craving. We found a fancy Italian restaurant and ordered pasta dishes while sitting on the patio. We even sprang for an overpriced bottle of wine with the dinner. Truthfully, neither of us were impressed with the meal. No recommendations here.

    We returned to the Y, gathered up our panniers and headed up to the co-ed dorm where we were to sleep. To gain access we had to pass through an electronically locked door, operated by the hotel manager. The room was hot and when all the guests were there, every bunk was full. We opened the window wide to allow some breeze in. Party goers were roaming up and down the streets and kept us awake. All of the guests were restless in their beds until the early morning hours when the streets quieted down and the air in the room cooled. The Y was noisy and we felt somewhat like prisoners with the locked doors. However, with the international volleyball tournament taking place in town, it was the only place we could find besides the college student crash pad that Richard had offered. The TIC did have some other rooms still available, the price tag, $500 per night. Not quite what we had in mind when we budgeted out the trip.

Total mileage - 1.5 miles

Day 22 - On to Oxford by train, riding around Oxford

    The day started off poorly. The showers at the Y had the usual confusing faucet system that make a simple job of turning water on an engineering feet. Neither Jeanette or I could make the shower deliver hot water. We ended up taking very cold showers. A quick breakfast at the Y dining room and we were off. The ride to the train station was only a mile.

    Oxford was over 60 miles away, too far for us to ride in a single day. We were booked into a private room at the new Oxford Hostel and wanted to get there with some time to investigate the home of one of the world's oldest universities. Bath, with its austere and confining architecture, the noisy accommodations at the Y, and the morning's cold showers had put me in a foul mood and I snapped at Jeanette much of the morning. I tried to mend things as we rode along, looking out at the countryside. The tracks followed the canal from Bath to London for some distance. Any idea we had of a future cycle tour along the tow path was put to rest when we saw the condition. A ride would require mountain bikes for some portions and other parts would have necessitated a detour.

    The YHA hostel is located just around the corner from the Oxford train station. It took us longer to ask directions than to ride there. The clerks allowed us to lock our bags in the luggage room and we were free to explore for most of the day. We rode to the TIC to find out what the town offered. Oxford, with it's more traditional English small town architecture, put me at ease and changed my mood from grumpy to exuberant. In a short time we put together an itinerary of museums, castle and garden visits. We saw a Burger King and decided to test the food to see if it tasted like the BK food back home. It was an exact match.

    After lunch we visited the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology and were fascinated by 2,000,000 years of artifacts of human history. We could have spent another ten hours there. The museum closed at 5:30, and we decided we had enough time to see a play after dinner. We had a choice of three and selected Shakespeare's, "The Tempest," to be performed outdoors at a park across town. We rode back to the hostel and ate dinner. The food was well prepared, reasonably priced, and attractively served. It was about a three mile ride to the play and we had a great late afternoon ride with the wind at our backs. 

    The weather was a little chill and we rented blankets and cushions, bought some drinks and settled in on the aluminum seats for an evening's entertainment. We weren't disappointed. Two of the leads, Prospero and Ariel were obviously veteran Shakespearian actors who enjoyed their work. Part of the play has characters "appearing" from space and we're still wondering how people could suddenly spring up from places in open view in a wide open portion of the park.

   The ride home was the first time we had the opportunity to use our headlights and tail lights on the tour. We rode the three miles in light traffic back to the hostel, retreated to our "private room" and were soon asleep. It had been a long day.

Total miles 8.6

Day 23 - From Oxford to Blenheim Palace and return - 22.2 miles

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