Wessex Tour Highlights (2)

You're never far from a lush garden in England. This one is in Laycock, home of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography. The French Daguerrotpe Process managed to preserve an image on a plate, but had no way to duplicate it. To see the image, you needed access to the only existing copy. Fox not only came up with a better way to capture images, he managed to reproduce them on paper, thus trumping a Frenchman and earning himself a kinghthood. Photography was born in Fox's studio, just behind this garden. Give me a greenhouse like this in my backyard and I could invent photography.

I returned to Bath on the Bath to Bristol Canal bike path.

For 400 years Bath was a Roman city.

A hundred years ago road crews fixing a sewer in the center of town got a surprise...Just below, was the center of the great Roman Bath. People had forgotten it was there and built a town on top of it. 2,000 years ago it was used daily. You took your business contacts to the bath, your date and your ailing mother. Everyone hung at the Bath.

You never know what you're going to find under a city street.

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These guys rode up from Bristol through the rain using the canal path. Build it and they will come. I joined them for a beer. Generally, I don't drink when biking, but at the end of a rainy day in Bath it would be truly sinful to walk away from one of those great English draft beers. The Pubs are a great ice-breaker in England. After a few minutes of pleasant conversation we headed our separate ways.