We cannot recommend having breakfast at the Copthorne hotel - the scrambled eggs had an afwul smell, everything was slow, the buffet closed at 10:30 sharp and the staff was unfriendly and looked tired. We left a note about this in the hotel survey.
We left latish - I wanted to catch up with blogging. We charged in Bristol-M5 and proceeded to the Cheddar Gorge. The road departs from Cheddar (we didn't join the huge crowd of tourists in the quest for the "real Cheddar cheese"). It starts with a very spectacular stretch where it "cleaves" a mountain in two, forming a real gorge. Later it transforms to a mountain road leading into hills, nice, but been there done that. From the end of the road we changed course to Bath and Waze sent us through a set of very local roads where the car barely fit - also no pockets so we couldn't possibly resolve an encounter with opposing traffic in any reasonable way.
Somehow we managed to reach a normal road and arrived to Bath shortly.
Amazon Echo!
Waze Maze
Bath emanates a wonderful atmosphere. Something between student youth, culture and laid-back. It has a Royal Theatre, Roman Baths, an a spectacular Abbey. We had a delicious lunch in Kingsmead Kitchen. Before leaving we visited Maplin's electronic shop - I couldn't leave cause I wanted to buy everything, we don't have shops like that in NL - and we bought 2 Amazon Echos which are not for sale in NL.
After Bath we had one more stop: Stonehenge. Despite being quite touristic, the site is well organized: the visitor center is 2 miles from the site itself and there are shuttle buses going back and forth all the time. The monument is impressive but the story around it is even more so: it turned out the stones are 4500 years old but even long before that, the site has been used as a burial place. We recommend you get an audio guide and take your time (at least an hour and a half) for visiting.
After Stonehenge it was a direct route to Winchester - Norton Park. That supercharger has only 2 stalls and it is hidden away at the end of a winding road leading to a 4-star hotel called Norton Park.
For the next day we needed 150km, so since charging was slow - we had a neighbour charging at the same time - I thought charging to 200km would be enough. Beginner's mistake - I forgot that we needed 18km to get to the hotel. To our joy we found a Type 2 charger in front of the hotel entrance! A Mercedes C350e was happily connected to the bottom socket. To our disappointment, the top socket turned out not to work :-( I checked Zap-Map and saw that this socket was reported malfunctioning since ages. I complained to the reception and they said that they would pass the information on to the provider of the charging equipment.
