Monday 28 August 2023. It dawns as a summer's day and more or less stays that way. Hooray!
Before breakfast, having crossed the road from the hotel to the seafront. Today another excursion on the coach awaits us but we are not travelling very far today. We are heading for Seaton and its tramway, where we once spent a week using Seaton as a base in 2014.
We have a half hour before the tram ride. Due to a late departure it was getting towards lunch, but having stayed in Seaton before, we knew we were unlikely to find anywhere to eat and so it proved to be. So we wandered slowly looking at a very few and very closed cafes and went back to wait for our tram. As we were a coach party we had a tram of our own. Everyone else made a dive for the bottom so it was either climb the very narrow stairs or not go. I made it...
All the historical details about where and when the tramway and trams came from can be found in the 2014 articles. I'll just clarify here that only three of the tramcars were originally full size and have been cut down and the rest were all scratch built but based on actual tramcars. There's even one modelled on a Blackpool open-air Boat tram.
We reached the far end and trooped into the cafe for a cuppa and a sandwich, then a look around the station - this used to be a branch line originally - and gift shop. Then our tram came back out of its siding and the queue of people waiting to go back had to let us through due to it being a special charter. They weren't particularly happy some of them...
Then it was back to Seaton and onto the coach and a short hop to the donkey sanctuary. Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't have any great interest in donkeys. In any case after climbing up and down those narrow stairs twice over I just wanted to sit down on a bench and stay put. So Miss Franny went to give the donkeys my apologies and I found a nice nearby bench and sketched the view. Which only contained one donkey a long way away. Good, because I'm hopeless at drawing donkeys. So that weird-looking cross between a bison and an anteater is a donkey, ok? Miss Franny said one donkey had complained I wasn't interested in them but to be honest: he-aw he-aw he-aways complains, that one...
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