A series of articles about a rather optimistic week's holiday along England's south coast in February!!! 1996. Our itinerary will take in Southsea, Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, Bognor Regis, Brighton, The Isle of Wight, Bournemouth, Poole, Corfe Castle, Weymouth, Maiden Castle, Wookey Hole and Cheddar. And a fair bit of snow and ice...
Clicking or tapping the photos below will take you to the articles for each day. A link on each page will bring you back here.
Friday 23 February 1996. It's the last day of our holiday and we are heading for home today.
On the way north though, we'll stop a couple of times in Somerset. Our first stop is at Wookey Hole, where there is a large cave system that you can go through and also a fine collection of old amusement penny slot machines. The guide showing us around the caves was very funny. The fairground museum had some old roundabout or carousel carved animal figures.
The carvings included this carved but unpainted horse's head.
Then it was back to childhood with a flood of nostalgic recognition as we entered a couple of rooms filled with old penny slots. We bought a handful of big old copper pennies and lost ourselves in the 1950s and 60s, playing these machines which filled every seaside arcade before electrics started to replace mechanics.
You just can't beat a good old whirring sound and then the CHUNK-CHUNK-CHUNK as the reels of a one-armed bandit came to a stop, one after the other. The Beromat was a German-made machine and a staple of arcades for many years. And look! I won tuppence for a cherry on the first reel!
Then there were the games where an eye for the movement of the ball, a bit of skill and co-ordination, and a grasp of the Laws of Physics helped you win... or otherwise... Allwins, Payramid (featured here) and other machines where your pennies dropped and bounced off a series of pins whilst you tried to get one into a winning cup or slot.
Our pennies ran out - when was it ever any different? So we got back in the car, resigned to the fact that our holiday had come to an end. Or had it? "Come on, we'll drive down Cheddar Gorge and head that way towards the motorway."
It was deserted. And it was once again well below freezing point. We stopped - the only car in sight - and looked briefly into the cave opening but without being in the slightest bit tempted to go in to explore it. Those caves run for miles and can flood too, if water manages to stay in liquid form...
I'm not sure about inside the cave, but outside it was far too cold even for water to run down the cliff face and be able to reach the ground!
Tuesday, 20 February 1996. You will remember (if you read my account of yesterday's wanderings - or you were alive at the time and have an extremely good memory) that the weather forecast for the week had said wintry weather was moving towards us from the east.
Well it arrived overnight! This was our early morning view when we opened the curtains to gaze bleary-eyed at the new day from our Southsea hotel.
As I drew the curtains back a couple of ships were just coming into Portsmouth and I grabbed the camera to take the shots here. We decided that seeing as it had snowed and the worst weather was supposed to be to the east, we would not travel towards Dover as we had planned but would instead take the ferry over to the Isle of Wight. It was our last night at the Glendower Hotel so we gathered bags, had breakfast and set off for the ferry terminal.
The pic shows us in lane 10 of the ferry queue. Once in, there there's not a lot of chance of changing your mind and you don't find out the charges until you are in the queue and go to book. No such thing as Internet on the go back in those days!
Staying in your car is not allowed and most people went into the lounge deck but we were made of sterner - oh well... stupider - stuff! We stood on the top deck and watched as Portsmouth slipped out of sight behind us. The open deck was the equivalent of being on the roof of a three storey building. The wind could be described as icy! We stayed on the deck, watching the officers in the bridge and watching the few craft that passed us on the 35 minute journey. We saw a few other ferries and one hovercraft - which turned out to be the only one of the day crossing the Solent.
Having got to the Isle of Wight we decided to drive around the coast road in an anti-clockwise direction. We had to miss out Cowes due to roadworks which took us down almost to the centre of the island and we eventually made it back to the coast road, calling at Yarmouth just in time for lunch which we had in the Gossips Cafe at the head of the small pier.
The wind here was absolutely ferocious. Sitting in the cafe, we were over the beach and although the tide wasn't properly in, the wind whipped up the waves enough for them to cover the beach and crash up the sea wall behind us. A collection of yachts and boats were piled on the beach, in danger one would think of being dragged unmanned into the sea. The whistling sound of the wind through their rigging made conversation next to impossible.
Despite the wind we clung onto each other in an attempt to stay upright and had a short - a very short - wander. The carved plaque was on the window of the Town Hall.
Due to the extreme weather we were back in the car after 15 minutes look round and heading west towards The Needles. Snow was in the air. By the time we got to the Needles it was in the air, on the ground, floating on the sea and blowing in the wind. Especially blowing in the wind...
I wasn't going all that way in freezing temperatures to come away without some sort of record of the attempt, so I braved three inches of snow at The Needles in order to get the photos. Snow slipped down the inside of my shoe to confirm how stupid I was...
We drove all the way round the island stopping every time we found something interesting - that would be twice then... Not that the Isle of Wight doesn't have lots of lovely places to visit and fabulous views, it does. But we were sticking to the coastal road and therefore missing places like Carisbrook Castle and any other inland attractions such as gardens and amusement parks which were quite understandably closed in February anyway. Views out to sea were limited to a few yards of swirling snowflakes. You get the idea. The first place we stopped was at a pearl shop where I bought Miss Franny a few grains of grit that some oyster had vomitted over - or whatever it is they do. The second place was here where the sun came out briefly, the sheer novelty of which made us stop and get out of the car long enough for the blood to freeze in our veins, forcing us back into the car again. I have no idea where this is.
And so by mid afternoon we were almost back at our starting point and admiring the hovercraft parked up at Ryde. We could have looked for accomodation in Ryde, but it was just as cold there as it had been at Yarmouth and not really fit for wandering about on foot.
We caught the four o'clock ferry back to the mainland and drove westwards until we reached Bournemouth, where we found somewhere to stay for the night.
Monday 19 February 1996. The weather forecast for the week says snow will move in from the east. We decide that it would probably be best to go east today, before the weather comes too close!
A glance out of the hotel bedroom window before we venture down to breakfast shows us this dredger battling against the current as it makes it's way into the shelter of the harbour.
This is the delightfully deserted beach of Bognor Regis, whose inhabitants obviously were too wise to set foot out of doors. The sun was undoubtedly shining but the temperature was hovering around the freezing point. We didn't stay too long on the beach, I have to confess. I taped the surf onto Capt Slog (my portable cassette recorder) for a short while, but then a freezing cold wave submerged my trainers and the shock made me lose interest in sound effects...
Fran wasn't all that sympathetic as I explained what happened! We wandered back up towards the Promenade and found a cafe that was open. I thought the sign for ice-cream was a bit optimistic but we had a coffee in glass cups that instantly brought memories of the 1960s back to me. Of cafes with jukeboxes and milky coffee in glass cups and saucers and the sound of the Espresso machine behind the counter... So after the coffee we reminded ourselves just how cold it was and decided to bid farewell to Bognor Regis, reflecting that there was probably more life in the empty lobster pots!
After a warm in the car we found ourselves in Brighton, where I marvelled at the splendour of the Royal Pavilion, built at the whim of the Prince Regent, later George IV. It gave him an excuse to get out from the under the gaze of disapproval and spend his time cavorting with his mistress, Mrs Fitzherbert, or eating and drinking himself into a right royal stupor.
We toyed with the idea of walking round the Pavilion but a Closed sign changed our minds for us and we went off in seach of other equally splendid ways of keeping warm and amused. George spent a fortune - several fortunes - on it both inside and out with rooms wallpapered in specially produced Chinese-inspired designs. Only a couple of streets away from the seafront, Queen Victoria was later to hate it and the constant passing curiosity of locals and tourists.
We had a look round the town, which was pretty much deserted and very very cold. We came back to the Seafood Restaurant later for some tea.
The Palace Pier. Apart from a short length nearest the Promenade entrance it was closed, as was it's companion pier a bit further west and most of the seafront attractions. Shame really because I wanted to see the museum of antique amusement arcade machines. We found somewhere to have a coffee. Plenty of warm drinks and even the odd snack or bowl of soup were necessary to keep warm. Despite the sun which had been out for most of the day, the temperature was still stubbornly down towards the freezing point!
We went round the Sea Life Centre which I thought was supposed to be the biggest in England. lt may well be, but most of it was blank corridors with not even a poster to brighten up the walls let alone a fish tank. Most of it looked like the old dingy cinema that the building was originally designed for. Walking through the glass tunnel made me realise how spoilt we had been going to Sea World in Florida as here there were many more people in the tunnel than fish outside it. The biggest shark looked as though it would choke on a toe...
A series of articles about our one and only winter holiday actually hoping to see snow, as we head for the Austrian Tyrol for a nine day trip with Leger Coaches. Two days at each end will be spent travelling but we will try to fit in as much as possible on the other five days!
Clicking or tapping the photos below will take you to the articles for each day. A link on each page will bring you back here.
