mattwhite.me

Right up to the Scottish border today as I visited Carlisle in Cumberland. The place itself is just a nice typical small English city with all of the usual shops, tourist-y bits and pieces and so on. The one bit which does set it apart is Carlisle Castle, there are some photos that I put up on my Flickr pages.

This might well be a bit of a cop-out for me. I have been to Kendal and Windermere before (when we were kids, camping up here) but Westmorland is really small and I couldn’t think of anything else to do on a cold, wet May Monday. What I don’t remember doing is the Windermere boat ferry which takes cars across the lake. I suppose I should mention that Lake Windermere is in the Lake District National Park amid absolutely stunning scenery, even on a cold, wet May Monday. I told the GPS to avoid main roads so I ended up going down some really tiny tracks to get around, great fun just driving around, enjoying the views and the cracking roads. Kendal (home of the famous Mint Cake) is really just a sleepy country town at this time of year but I would guess that come the summer months it gets extremely busy with all of the tourists heading in. Even today there were quite a lot of the hardier types of walkers around.

Another city that I had never been into and comes as a great surprise is Liverpool. It’s really gearing itself up for when it becomes the 2008 City of Culture for Europe. They obviously have a huge amount of money to spend, especially on the waterfront. The Albert Docks is a great success with a mini Tate gallery and more bars than you can shake a stick at. The only problem you might encounter is if you don’t like the Beatles as litterally everything has some Beatles themed element to it. I suppose that’s what gets the tourists in, but there’s plenty else to see down there apart from them.

When I was a student I went all round the country but never really saw it. I played hockey (field that is for the Americans among you) for UCL 2nds (and once or twice 1sts but I was never really that good, more of a social player). Anyway, although we went to lots of other universities we rarely ventured beyond their sports fields and the SU bar, which is a whole set of other stories and not relevant here. The point is that although I have driven to lots of cities around England I can’t really claim to have been to them. One of those is Leeds which is surprisingly nice in the centre. There has obviously been a lot of regeneration in the last few years and it has really paid off. I always like Sunday mornings in city centres, they are so unlike any other time of the week. People just chill out, read the paper, have a coffee and so it was here. This is one city which I will definitely be wanting to pay a proper trip to at a later date.

Just down the road is Bradford, not a city which sets fire to the imagination, but as I was driving past I saw a sign for the National Photography Museum. This is obviously the first step in an urban regeneration program and not a bad one at that. Along with some kiddy friendly display about how TVs and cameras work there’s an iMax theatre and various other exhibitions. And given that it’s free not a bad way to spend a couple of hours.

This was always going to be the easiest county, as Simon and Fiona live there and so could plan everything for me. And so it turned out but much better than anyone could have hoped. Given it was a bank holiday weekend in England, it would have been a fair assumption that the weather would be rubbish. As it was it couldn’t have been nicer.

On Saturday we headed into Nottingham itself. More to go and see the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, but as we had an hour to kill we wandered down to the Trip to Jerusalem, a very old pub which is actually built into some limestone caves.

On Sunday we managed to get out relatively early (well by 11ish anyway) and drove the few miles to the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest. It’s a really well done, understated set of walks through the ancient Sherwood Forest that is well worth a visit. The tree itself is now so old and big that it only survives with props and cables holding it up. Things were beginning to get very busy as lunchtime approached so we left the forest behind and headed to… another forest. This time it was Sherwood Pines, which is set up as a rather more active area with monkey ropes, zip wires and bike rentals being the order of the day. Obviously not for us, we just had our picnic lunch and got sunburnt. In May, sunburnt, things were just great!

Because we were doing so well, already three local sights done, we headed on for a fourth to the Papplewick Pumping Station which is a Victorian steam pump which used to send water into Nottingham from underground sources. It doesn’t often fire up these days but on Bank Holidays it does and quite a sight it makes, the pumps themselves are hugely impressive feats of engineering.

The day was rounded off with a barbeque in the back garden. Honestly, you don’t get much better long weekends than this.

Update…Photos uploaded.