As I Xi It

Last weekend, I was on the ‘moors. Dartmoor to be exact. It was a flying visit, went over on Saturday and back Sunday. I went past Stonehenge yet again, I wonder how many more times I’ll got past before the end of the year.

We didn’t go in search of anything specific.  We stayed in the converted stables of some pub/b&b in a teeny town/hamlet called Drewsteignton called The Drewe Arms. It was an old pub, lots of little rooms (roomlet?) and there was a Rayburn warming up the restaurant area we dined in, it was rather cosy. However, the converted stables where we slept was a touch chilly, dark,  damp and complete with cobwebs. Very atmospheric. Good job we only stayed there a night. It smelt mouldy, but I didn’t see anything visible and the beds were noisey and saggy. Amenities were shared, so, a bit of a stroll to the bathroom/showers.

Dinner at The Drewe Arms was spectacular. I had the chicken and leek pie followed by the phenomenally mega fantastic white chocolate mud pie. It was lighter than a cheesecake and denser than a mousse!! It was so good and we each had a generous portion along with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. I’m still thinking about that mud pie a few days on. It was that good.

We visited Castle Drogo, can’t say that I was all that impressed by the exterior. Didn’t look castley enough. Took a few shots of Dartmoor scenery and ponies after which my 40D promptly showed the dreaded Err 99 code repeatedly, battery and lens changes didn’t fix it (I managed to resurrect it the day after when I got home, more on that in a separate post). We also visited a butterfly/otter sanctuary! After that, we took a sojourn to Plymouth for cream tea! You kinda have to in those parts. Since we were on the coast, we also had fish and chips. Well, Kamil and I had fish and peas, Randy, fish and chips. It was really rather good. I wanted mushy peas, but they didn’t do them, however, what I got looked like semi-mushy peas and they were mighty tasty!

In Plymouth, we also stopped off in the aptly named “Tuck Shop” at Barbican. It was full of old skool tasties. I brought a selection of fudge. Mmm… fudge.

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I’m writing my second consecutive entry! My day was pretty dull so I’ll write a bit about the trip up to Northumberland a few weeks ago when Jac and Randy were in town! So we four (including Kamil) went up north with the main objective of landing on one of the Farne Islands to shoot puffins! Jac, Kamil, Vincent and I tried with Skomer a few years ago but were turned away due to adverse nautical conditions. I was successful in my puffin hunt while I was in Iceland (you couldn’t miss them on Grimsey) but Jac wasn’t there with me, however, being the thoughtful person I am, Wingo and I sent her a postcard.

On the way up, we stopped off in Whitby (not impressed, just another quiet seaside town) and Newcastle for dinner (ate at a chain, everything was pretty much closed) before arriving at the hotel for the night. It was one of those service station roadside affairs, but I’ve got to say, it was much nicer than a Travelodge, there was even free WiFi.

The next day, the weather was looking very uncooperative, clouds, rain and choppy seas. Unsurprisingly, when we got to Seahouses, the boats weren’t going out. Nevermind, we still had a few more days to try again. So we went to Berwick-Upon-Tweed, it was cloudy and fairly unexciting, on the way to our next destination we stopped off at a place called “Pot-a-doodle-do”, with an amusing name like that, you can’t really ignore it. It was one of those places where you can paint your own pottery. Really a kids thing. We had lunch there and decided that we’d head up to the Scottish Seabird Centre where we amused ourselves in the gift shop. Once we had lost interest, we went to the near-by littoral zone where we reconnected with nature, there were more jellyfish than you could shake a stick at along with the usual suspects of barnacles, limpets and periwinkles. The weather had perked up and the others wanted to go to Edinburgh. Everytime I’ve been, I’ve been less than impressed in its gloomy, rainyness, I wasn’t particuarly keen on this occasion eventhough blue skies and sun had broken through. So, off to Edinburgh we went, its quite amazing what nice weather can do for a place, no longer was Edinburgh this dreary miserable place, it actually looked kinda aesthetically pleasing. I’ve never noticed before, but it’s a bit of a wannabe city, a lot of their monuments were reminiscent of existing ones in other European cities, some of the churchy things reminded me of Bruge, cobbled streets like Vienna, there was a statue opposite Jenners (I guess that itself is kinda like a Selfridges) which wouldn’t look out of place at Hyde Park where the Albert memorial is.

On the following day,  the weather had improved, but there was still some swell which prevented boats from landing on Staple Island (Farnes is a collection of little islands), however, we did manage to get a boat out to Inner Farnes and Jac finally saw her puffins. The island was all a bit zoo-like where we could only walk along the designated path, there were terns everywhere, babies and adolescent birds walking aimlessly across the paths more or less oblivious to the humans they encountered, puffins were there too, but I wasn’t all that impressed with the whole set up, you could get up closer to the ones on Grimsey, but to be fair, it was good for puffins in flight shots. Saw some other seabirds too, cormorants/shags and kittiwakes. The whole Farnes thing pretty much took all day. Once we were back on the mainland, we brought a kite and flew it. Jac had excellent command of the flying device, too bad I couldn’t say the same for Kamil, needless to say, there was much crashing involved.

We decided to head over to Holy Island on the last full day which could only be accessed by car during low tide while the tarmac road was uncovered by the sea. There, we explored the ruins of the old priory and took some interesting group photos. After than, we decided to head over the Northumberland National Park which was much further than we thought, drove along a bit of Hadrian’s Wall, picked up free light bulbs and drove along forest drive which was suppose to be a bit off-roady, but it wasn’t really. But of a waste of £3 really (yes, it was £3 to drive on a poorly maintained road). When we came out of the national park, we crossed the England/Scotland border again and made a brief visit to Jedburgh. It was rather quaint and we were greeted by three cats, a black one, a black and white one (looked a little like Cici, but not) and a ginger and white one. All rather friendly, but the ginger and white one wanted to fight the black and white one. They were all smaller than Cici, probably around 4-5kg, Cici’s almost a monster weighing in at 6kg (perhaps more since I last weighed him). He’s not obese, just bulky and ever so cuddly.

On the way back to London, we stopped off at York, I can’t remember if I’ve ever visited during those family staycations we used to have in the UK. We probably have, I distinctly remember we stayed in a place in the Yorkshire Moors so it’d be odd if my parents didn’t take my brother and I to York.

I quite like travelling (difficult to guess isn’t it?), and like most of my trips, it was pretty tiring. I was looking forward to coming home, not to sleep in my own bed, but to see Cici. He really is just that cuddly!

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Well, having had a moan in my last post about lazyness in blogging, I now feel like getting through the backlong of things to post about.

First up, the New Forest! The last time I was there was when I was a kid, we were passing through on a family holiday, probably back from Corwall or something and I remember Dad going on about Robin Hood. Jac was in town and I thought it might be nice that we pop down to the New Forest. It was only about a 2 hours drive from London and Kamil our driver would be chauffering us… in his three doored compact (indeed it was, especially for 4!).

It was a Monday like no other, out in the country with chums I haven’t seen in a while. Driving through the forest reminded me of Kruger, the sound of gravel parting under the wheels of the car, the sun and that anticipation in looking out for four legged mammals. Kamil and I reminisced about Kruger as we’ve both been on separate occasions, but Jac hasn’t, poo her!

So yeah, the New Forest was good. Not sure what else to say about it really. We had fish & chips for dinner, earlier, Jac and I had scampi & chips for lunch. How imaginative.

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