Tapp's Travels

Tuesday saw us relocating to Whitley Bay.  Angela and Bruce (the Bruce of several sideways comments on historical issues in earlier posts) had just returned from three weeks in Australia.  Before they went they had foolishly insisted that we should visit.  Well, three weeks of non-stop touring of six major cities and towns in Oz (plus a stop in Hong Kong) had taken a bit of a toll – as was predicted.

On the way to the coast, it was necessary to go via Barker and Stonehouse (in Newcastle) to re-assess their sofas for comfort.

Then to the Biscuit Factory where I had looked for parking the day before – but this time to look at the artwork on display.

A certain Australian flavour was detected.  But there was no picture or piece of artwork which said that it HAD to be bought.  Sadly, a number of years ago we did see a picture which WAS claiming wall space in our house.  At that time we dillied and dallied, and in the end didn’t purchase it.  We have regretted that indecision ever since.  The moral of the story is that if you see something that you really like, you should just buy it.  Don’t you agree Gran?  Think “Gran-trees”!

Of course, as you would probably realise, we then had to go back to Delcor to re-assess THEIR seating options.

Angela was feeling “a little jaded” so didn’t join us that evening for fish and chips at the Harbour View restaurant at Seaton Sluice.  However, Bruce had miscalculated the days and the restaurant was closed.   So, we did take-away instead.  We had been warned that their portions were “over-sized”.  Between three of us we bought one large and one small f&c.  I am certain their “large” was the biggest I’ve ever been served – and that includes the jumbo portions at the Start Bay Inn at Torcross which, until Seaton Sluice entered the fray, held the record by a country mile.  The small fish went in the freezer!

On Wednesday, we went looking for a new lightweight suitcase.  First we tried the Boundary Mill Shopping Centre, one of the huge discount stores and came out with a shirt (for me) – as you do!  Then we hit the outlet centre at South Shields  – one of the originals (and beginning to look like it).  Built on the site of former docks, and containing the pre-existing North Shields International Ferry Terminal, the area was renamed Royal Quays in 1990 and redeveloped with housing, a shopping centre and a water park known as Wet n Wild.  A hotel and a sports centre were also part of the development.

Glenda wanted a pair of shoes and a toiletry bag, but we found a pretty blue/green suitcase instead.  Bruce and I checked out the local beauty store (for toiletry bags obviously).  What we found was an amazing bit of makeup – a spider with a lady painted on it.  Apparently it takes 30 minutes to put on in the morning – but I’m guessing the spider only does this at Halloween!

On the way home we diverted via Cullercoats for one last blast from the past…

The Dove Marine Laboratory.  It was because of this institution that I chose Newcastle University at which to study marine biology….  52 years ago!  OMG.  Almost half way back to the Victorian era!!!!  Enough said.

A late afternoon (cool) walk along the newly refurbished promenade took us for a daytime view of the Dome which we had visited a few evenings ago.

The American trait of “Trick or Treating” seems to have really taken off up here in the near-Arctic.  Every third house seemed to be decorated with pumpkins, cobwebs, ghouls and ghosts.  There were signs painted in “blood” and skeletons hanging about…

And there were gangs of threatening-looking four and five year olds out with buckets extorting sweets from very suspecting households!

We have just heard that our caravan is NOT ready for collection this week as we pass Taunton.  That’s a real pain.  We will have to make a special trip to collect it next week.  Still that leaves us free to hesitate on the way home in the Worcester area.  Maybe there’s a sofa to try out at Holloways!

Our trip took in the Tyne Tunnel, the A19, the A1M, the M18, the A42, the M42 and the M5.  What a lot of busy roads.  Where is everyone going?  And why can’t they go tomorrow and leave us to travel in peace?

We eventually stopped near Droitwich, North of Worcester at the Hadley Bowling Green Inn.  This is a 16th century half-timbered building.

It gets part of it’s name from the village up the road and the other part from the crown bowling green attached to the pub.

Crown Green Bowls is played on a specially prepared short-cut smooth grass surface known as a bowling green or simply the green.  The green usually has a raised centre known as the crown which can often be as high as 30 centimetres above the edge of the green.  The green has a ditch around the edge, and slopes on all sides from the crown towards the ditch.  Greens are usually rectangular or square, but L-shaped and circular greens also exist.  The surfaces also often feature ridges, hollows and slopes to make the game more difficult!

This is the fifth type of “bowling” we have come across so far this year: curling in Norway, skittles-of-nine in Portugal, 10 pin bowling in Torquay and indoor bowls played by Jan and Gran.  Now this!

However, we discover that our hotel has some recent scandalous “history”.  Apparently, the two men who owned the pub in 2007 had bought it for £1.2 million with cash from drugs dealing.  We did wonder about the hash browns at breakfast!

Accountant Malcolm Carle, aged 57, of Wilmslow, and his boss Walter Callinan, 59, were jailed at Winchester Crown Court for five and eleven years respectively.  A lady accomplice failed to turn up in court and is still on the loose!

Fortunately for us, the place had been re-opened and served excellent food!  Like I say, stick with us for adventurous living “on the edge”!

… and, yes, Holloways does have a couple of hour’s worth of sofas to test and assess.  They are about to decorate the store for Christmas.

The first (apparently of several) delivery of decorations from store!

And the stove in the coffee shop where I’m writing this stuff…

I’m always fascinated by these “heat fans”.  They rely on a thermoelectric device which creates voltage when there is a different temperature on each side.  At the atomic scale, an applied temperature gradient causes charge carriers in the material to diffuse from the hot side to the cold side.  That is, as you will know, called the Peltier-Seeberg effect after the independent discoveries by French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier and the German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck.  I put those historical points in especially for Bruce!

We walked with Jan and Gran along the River Severn and found the Worcester Swannery – one of the biggest collections of mute swans in the country.

There are so many of them and so little natural swan-food in the area they have to be fed.  And there’s a crowd-funding project arranged to deal with this problem!  … and lots of children chucking bread into the river!

Anyway, there’s so much to tell but we’ve arrived home now so this has to be the end of this chapter…

But I did promise to tell you about Glenda’s crocheted dolls…

Glenda has a shoe-box that I’ve never been allowed to look in.  On my 70th birthday she relented and showed me the contents of the box.  There were a couple of crocheted dolls and about £50,000 in cash.  I asked her what this was all about.

She told me that right before we got married her mother had told her that the secret to a happy marriage was to never argue. “She said that if I ever got angry with you, I should keep quiet and crochet a doll.”

I was really touched. There were only two dolls in the shoebox – she had only been angry with me two times over the course of our marriage. I scooped her up and gave her a kiss.

“But where did the money come from?” I  asked her.

“Oh, that?” She said with a smile, “that’s the money I made from selling the dolls.”

Well, travel disasters apart, that’s the end of this series of reports.  Things will go quiet now until we leave for Myanmar and Australia in mid-January.