London 2024 - Day Six 9/20/24

After breakfast, we set off for a full-day excursion to the city of Bath, dubbed "the most elegant city in England". Perhaps one of the most popular residents of Bath is 18th century novelist, Jane Austen, whose life's work now resides in the Jane Austin Centre in downtown Bath. The entire city of Bath is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

After a driving tour of the city, we stopped to visit the Royal Crescent, a crescent-shaped row of 30 townhouses designed by architect John Wood, Jr. and built between 1767 and 1774. Currently 10 are still full-size townhouses; 18 have been split into apartments of various sizes; one is the No. 1 Royal Crescent museum, and The Royal Crescent Hotel & Spa, which lies at the center of the crescent, is made up of No. 15 and No. 16 and rents for close to £1000 per night ($1300 U.S. dollars)!

Next, we visited the Roman Baths, one of the most preserved Roman ruins in the world. Built in AD70 over hot springs, the site contains thousands of archaeological finds from pre-Roman and Roman Britain and the water is said to contain mystical healing properties.

We wrapped up our visit to bath with...well, a bath of sorts, as the we encountered the first rainstorm of our trip thus far!

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Cordoba

First our morning started with an alarm - or a lack of one; as Mary Jane and Pat's room never received a wakeup call. So everyone else was on the bus ready to go when they finally got a knock on the door. What troopers they were, though! In 15 minutes they were on the bus with everyone and not long after they were able to laugh at the 'chaos' of it all. Our local guide Isabel was just delightful - and clearly has a love for her city. She tells us that filmmaker Pedro Almodovar is from here as we begin our walk. First we go through the old Jewish center. Nearly all of the city's buildings are white-washed (originally by the women we hear). We stop at an old Jewish synagogue and learn some history of the area. Then we stop at the statue of a famous rabbi ( can you name him ?) which legend is that by rubbing his foot and then touching your own head you will get taller and wiser. most of us did that - some hoping for extra height, others for a...

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Stonehill College Alumni Travel

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