This was a crazy weekend. On Saturday, Matt and I went to Bath for a get together and the Christmas Market. The tube was slow and we made it to
Paddington Station about 3 minutes before the train was scheduled to leave. We still had to pick up the tickets from the machine. I didn't think we could do it but we literally ran to the machines, collected the tickets and then ran to the platform where the train door closed right after I got in and the train departed.
In an hour and half, we were in Bath. We had a little time to kill before the meeting time so we decided to indulge in some
geocaching. We found one of the caches easily. The second cache was a two part one. We found the first part with no problem but do to some dodgy math on Matt's part, we ended up looking for the second part in the wrong place and thus were unable to find it. It was time for lunch so we moved on.
We had lunch at Cafe
Uno, by the weir. After lunch, having over 4 hours to kill before we had to take the train back to London, we were left by ourselves to figure out what the heck to do. We gave the cache a second try, with the right math and coordinates this time and found it. It was in a lovely place that is usually overlooked. After that, we wandered through the Christmas Market and did some shopping. Bath is a small town and there is only so much you can see and so much time you can spend walking around. With about 3 hours left to kill, we started looking for a pub/cafe to have a drink and kill time. Every freaking place in the town was jam packed. We walked and walked until we just couldn't take it anymore. We were tired, cranky and pissed off. Thankfully, we found a pub that had tables in the non smoking section. We settled in with a beer and a diet coke and played some Scrabble on my Pocket PC.
With about 40 minutes left till train time, we left the pub in search of a bacon roll for me. I had been craving one since the morning and we finally found it. It was made with organic bacon and it was yummy. By the time we got on the train, I was pretty sleepy and completely exhausted. Our seats were in the cafe car and there were some guys at the other end being pretty loud. I was trying to take a nap so we moved to the quiet car. This was fine, until we got to Reading.
In Reading, some
loud and obnoxious men sat in our car. They were drinking beer, as well as throwing it around and being incredibly annoying. I already have a very bad opinion of this British "drinking culture" and this episode did nothing to improve that, quite the contrary. I won't really say much more about this because I don't want to start getting hate mail but I swear I just wanted to strangle those men.
We finally made it home just after 10:30pm, totally exhausted and pretty crabby. We went
straight to bed, only to have to get up early again in Sunday.
On Sunday we went to Matt's grandparent's for the Christmas visit. We were treated to a huge turkey meal that I am still full from :) After lunch, we went
geocaching with Matt's parents and just couldn't get to the damned thing. Everywhere we went, there was water between us and the cache. It was also very muddy so we decided it wasn't worth it this time.
After we got home at about 5:30pm, I went down to Victoria for another
gtg. It was nice to see everyone again to meet new people.
