Day 9 - Wolverhampton to Bath

We are getting better at this traveling stuff.  Timing is still a bit off though.  We had a lovely breakfast with our host families and walked to the church and then to the train station.  One of the host mothers saved us a bunch of weight and drove our bags (along with Sarah who had fallen down the stairs) to the train station.  No troubles getting on the train to Bristol and then transferring platforms for the train to Bath.  Derek did a pretty good job navigating us to the YMCA Hostel who thankfully had our rooms ready for us because we were a bit behind schedule.
We found directions to the Museum, but since we hadn't lunched, we wandered a bit and found a grocery store to purchase sandwiches from.  Eating quickly, we were only about an hour late to the museum.  This is the Herschel Museum and Observatory.  We had our first scientist talk on Herschel from Alyssa.  It tells the story of Herschel and his sister, how one escaped with his life as an oboeist for the Army in  Germany to England first as a musician and later as an astronomer.  Herschel sent for his sister once he had a good living in England and she helped him as a co-observer and writer for the rest of her life.

I let the students spend as long as they wanted in the museum and arranged with them to meet at 6:30 at the hostel for dinner.  This was the point where some of them realized they may not have been paying as much attention to their surroundings as they thought while we walked from the hostel and they weren't exactly sure if they could navigate back.  Fortunately, old Bath is not that big a city and there wasn't a lot of ways they could get lost.  Did you know that Bath is considered a city because it has an abbey.  It is one of the smallest cities in England with only about 80,000 people.  Meanwhile, after some time at the Museum, I took Jeri for candy and then geocaching.  We checked to see how much it would be to tour the Baths and decided that the cost was more than we wanted to pay.  We did find a virtual cache at the Bath, a film canister near the hanging tree, and another virtual at the Abbey.  I had seen the plaque that the second virtual referred to as we walked in, so I was pretty much guaranteed to get that one.  Next we sat down for tea and ice cream at a shop.  Jeri was quite disappointed that they didn't have the strawberry and cream ice cream that she had wanted.  She consoled herself with half the sweets from my tea.  If I had my way, I wouldn't eat dinner, only tea.
Dinner was at a middle eastern restaurant in the lower level of a shopping center and the students all loved it.  They also shopped at another grocery store for lunch food for the next day.  I grabbed more cash and loitered outside a closed coffee shop for internet access.