We decided to spend today in Bath and, to make the journey fun, we chose to go on our bikes along the canal. 

Not only is it a fun way to get to the city, but it’s free, healthy and very picturesque.  It also stops me spending too much money as I can only fit a couple of small items in my backpack. 😉

I love the bridges pictured below.  They were erected in 1800 and, for me, signal that we’ve arrived in Bath.  Just got to nip through Sidney Gardens, along Pultney Street and we’re there!

As I’m not going to be doing any paid work for the next 6 weeks, my aim is to try and find lots of fun FREE activities to do.  Our first stop was to Bath Library to sign up for the summer 2011 reading challenge.  It’s a real sign that we’re in recession when you find that the libraries in Bath have actually run out of the reading challenge packs on day 2 of the school holidays… and have no money to buy any more!!! 🙁    

Next stop was the Victoria Art Gallery.  This gallery is free to enter and it’s one of my favourite places in Bath.

The gallery currently has two incredible exhibitions.  The first is ‘Flying Figures’ by Mark Angus, who is one of Europe’s best stained glass artists.  His exhibition features glowingly coloured diving and backlit figures that explore the theme of ‘eternal youth’.

The second exhibition is Jilly Sutton’s ‘Across the Grain’.  Jilly carves her large wooden heads and figures from felled trees and driftwood.  Looking at her figures left me with an incredible sense of peace 🙂

For lunch, we headed to Pultney Gardens (free for residents) and munched our way through the goodies I’d brought in my backpack.  From where we sat, we had a great view of The Empire Building with its strange roof.

 

We loved this sculpture, which was made out of plants.

 

We had a wonderful day out and Lil’ L couldn’t wait to get started on his new library books when we arrived back home.  While he read, I prepared one of our favourite rice dishes… vegetable and nut pulao, which we normally serve with a side dish of chapatis.  As I was short for time tonight, we served it with toasted flour tortilla segments, which made a nice change.  Lil’ L described the dinner as ‘scrumdiddlyumptious’ and gave it 5 stars. 🙂  The recipe can be found here.