So far, our weather in the UK, whilst not exactly hot, has been dry, apart from the trip up for a few miles and a couple of light showers. In fact, overall, of all our trips to the UK over the years, the weather has been surprisingly good. Thursday is Dave’s weekly ice skating day and we turned down the opportunity to skate, fearful of the potential for injury before the next cruise or flight home.
We let him go before returning to the shopping area, where Paula had to return her top and Sue wanted to pick up a shirt and tie for Dave. On then into town and parked in zone 2 (cheaper than zone 1), £1 for the first hour, 50p each subsequent hour. Zone 1 is of course more expensive.
Over to Nottingham’s ‘Torville and Dean’, or National Ice Centre. Dave came off the ice at just after 11am (the session finished at 11:30 anyway), and we retired to the café for a coffee and a breakfast bun (egg, bacon, sausage) etc., just as the Zamboni went around the cleared ice rink, so that the Team GB Speed Skating squad could practice. Amazing watching them skate, so close together and totally in step with each other. Interestingly, the team emptied buckets of water over the corners and part of the set up was to put crash barriers up. Just like racing motor cyclists, these guys skate at impossible angles and apparently, because they only skate anti-clockwise, only one side of the blades are sharpened. (I wonder if that will appear in trivia any time soon?) Lacrosse may be Canada’s national sport and Nottingham may have a world class cricket ground; two soccer teams with vast history and even a modicum of success, but the only sport that has banned visiting spectators due to a shortage of space, was the Nottingham Panthers ice hockey team, when they reintroduced the sport after a few years without a team.
We strolled a street or two closer to the city centre, to a model shop that has been around since I was a boy. Tempting, but restrictions on luggage space meant no 1/18th scale model kit of a vintage Bentley would be coming home with me this time.
On then to Maplin’s electronics (this was a boy shopping trip…) and I was very tempted by a pair of glasses with a built in video camera – but a £99 price tag was enough to make us do some research. When we did get home, we found that there was also a company selling a similar (not identical) item for just £20! So cheap. So much of travel these days is that of price and availability comparisons. Shopping via the internet makes it so much easier, but it is postage and shipping which can be crippling.
Sitting outside in the garden, until after 6pm, we weren’t missing NZ too much. Paula decided to give Sue and Dave a dancer demo on the lawn, but with her head held up high – as Richard, her teacher insists - she misjudged the location of the water feature and several pot plants and crashed down amongst them, with both legs somewhat bruised, trousers wet, but she found it hilarious and we couldn’t help her up until she’d stopped laughing!
We took Dave and Sue out for a carvery meal but were thwarted a wee bit. Unlike most NZ carvery/buffet meals, they served the meat onto your plate and therefore made sure you didn’t get (too) much. In fact, they advertise as having 4 carvery meats, but the beef was off and they’d already run out of pork, so we were left with gammon and turkey. Hard luck if you are vegetarian or prefer fish. They still managed to serve out just one thin slice of each, instead of two, so I opted to pay an extra £1.50 for a larger plate and more meat – plus two wizened cocktail sausages… The veg was good though and I piled my plate high, as I had no intention of saving space for a dessert!
Back home to more computer stuff as our thoughts return to deciding what not to take. A cruise of just 12 days around GB means we’ll probably need to dress for cool, not hot. On the TV, we noted not such good weather around the location of the Sea Princess, so hopefully, they are all still enjoying it.
Friday 17th July
Whilst on land, a bit of a chance to catch up with one or two emails I hadn’t read and even a quick dive into the Cruise Critic roll calls for this year and a couple of message boards back home. It is the motorsport off season so not too much happening there anyway.
Paula and I opted to go back into town (via Costa’s coffee…) and this time, we parked in the Victoria Centre, even though it is a zone 1 and therefore more expensive. We’d only been in a couple of minutes when I managed to find a pair of leisure shoes - in my size and at a fair price, (Skechers too!). I’d just paid when Paula also found a pair she liked... So, a successful trip.
There is a bit of Kiwi in Nottingham as in addition to the poster, we also found a show selling Kiwi jade jewellery and whalebone carvings, but little signage on the shop itself. Quite a few of the trams have been named after local celebrities such as writers D H Lawrence and this tram, Alan Sillitoe (writer of the ‘60’s books/films such as ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’).
We wandered through the town and managed a couple of codeword puzzle books. I’d almost finished my NZ book and wasn’t impressed with some on offer as they looked too easy. We settled on a couple of Daily Telegraph books. Once home, I found out that they included hyphenated words, phrases and proper nouns, which really makes a huge difference.
Guided by Dave, and ready for a drink, we headed into the Lost City. This is under the casino and is two 18 hole crazy or miniature golf courses, complete with dinosaurs and other animatronics. The setting and scenery were most impressive but as with too many of these courses, to avoid a build-up of queues, the actual golf holes looked straightforward. We settled for the drink only.
Back to the Vic Centre lift down to the car park, level 3, Blue, but when I paid at the machine, it said we were parked in White. I hadn’t realised you couldn’t walk through from blue to white, so back in the lift and along, then down again into white, much to Paula’s amusement.
For the evening we caught up with my school pal since the age of about 8, Richard, who we nearly lost last August when a burst appendix, just a day or two before his planned wedding in Las Vegas, not only delayed his departure from the UK, to catch up with Sue and her 2 children, but then went horribly wrong, with septicaemia. That meant no trip at all – or wedding. He’d already insisted Sue went as planned, as he thought the appendix op was no big deal, but it just shows how wrong you can be.
Anyway, we headed out to a small, but popular pub, tucked away behind Lowdham village. “World’s End. This time, the gammon was off and they’d just run out of fish! (We aren’t having much luck at the moment.) One of the downsides of small places only dealing with fresh food. However, we had a great meal and the hottest plates I’ve ever had on the table – which I’d never complain about. Yes, I tried their home-made chicken curry too, but the large wedge of steak and ale pie would have been a good choice, as it smelled delicious. Paula and Sue were happy with their hickory chicken and bacon. Thankfully, Richard is on the mend, albeit slowly - those NZ friends who were at my 65th will probably remember the piece that was read out from him, by Trevor.
I’d checked up on Murray’s blog from the Sea Princess (see the link on the right) but no recent news as we watched some rather grim weather on the television. Another fine day here though!
For some reason, my camera’s auto focus has gone on the blink and isn’t working half the time, which is very frustrating, as I have had to dump a fair few pictures over recent days. Sadly, I therefore couldn’t show a good picture of the ‘World’s End’ - but we have been there and I also have the Mastercard receipt to prove it.
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