Seaton Trams and a Donkey Sanctuary

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...

Coach Trip to Sidmouth, August 2023, Index

Torquay and a Donkey

Okay, so first I need to explain something for those readers who read this blog as it is published rather than via these new-fangled index pages that I've been creating to try to make navigation a bit easier. This is the sixth article describing a holiday spent in Devon in 1993. Of course, the Internet was only just starting around then and the first five articles were written in April 2009.

At the same time I was writing about other stuff and had somehow misplaced the film negatives (this was a long time ago!) from the holiday. We were camping in Sidmouth. It is now April 2023 so 14 years after the articles finished. So, here, for the very first time - Ladees and Gentlemen! I present... the rest of this holiday with three or four articles to come over the next few days. Following that, I'll create an index page so you can read them all in proper order.

Wednesday 11 August 1993. Ooh! In a Sidmouth cafe we were served with two huge scones each, half a pound of strawberry jam, and a dessert bowl full of clotted cream. You feel somewhat delicate after that... The above is a postcard image. Clotted or "scald" cream has been made in Devon and Cornwall for generations. Legend says that Devonshire people were taught the art by the pixies. The cream should be made the day before and served with scones that have first been spread with jam. You can safely ignore any poor misguided person who claims the cream should be put on first with the jam on top.

Get ready, get set... hey! Come back! This is Torquay where we headed for the afternoon. Nice place but it was very windy and later it rained persistantly! We huddled in shelters and got fed up of shops... Well I got fed up of the shops... It doesn't take much to be honest. There's all these jokes these days about nurseries for husbands in shopping centres, but honestly, it would be a brilliant idea!

We had parked the cars in a car park up the hill to our left and were heading to the seafront and then down this road towards the centre of Torquay where the harbour is waiting to trap us in the rain and the shops wait to drag us in to feel miserable. I miss the days of toy shops and musical instrument shops and record shops with 12-inch LPs in racks stretching as far as the eye can see. Kids play with electonics these days so toy shops only cater for toddlers. Even back in 1993 new makes of PCs were starting to replace the first generation of Amstrad 1512 and 1640 computers.

Torquay harbour and marina. It's not quite started to rain yet but no-one else seems to want to pedal a boat out into the English Channel to see if we can reach Brittany before dark... So it starts to rain. Then it gets dark. It's still raining. We went to see a show at the local theatre about the life of Elvis Presley. Three actors played him at different ages. When we came out I missed the rest of the family and got soaked in the rain looking for them. They were of course still inside... Whilst they were inside and I was outside they decided to ditch the programme so I've no idea who was playing Elvis. It could have been Shaking Stevens or Vince Eager, who knows? I don't and suspect I never will now.

Thursday 12 August 1993. We spent the day at the tent mostly, playing games, flying kites, tripping over tent ropes and running off quick, hearing muffled shrieks of rage from inside the collapsed mounds of canvas... After tea we walked to the nearby donkey sanctuary. By gum it was exciting this day... I know - you're wondering why I ever restarted this series, but stick with it, it does get better...

Return to Sidmouth and Devon Holiday 1993 Index Page