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lady_t_220OK, I'm a little more awake and coherant now. I really should do this after I get the photos organised tomorrow but *eh* You'll have to wait for the visual side.
Monday - Got there ok and with minimal hold-ups. Had an hour's delay at Norwich cause the Yarmouth train broke down but aside from that it all went ok.
The B&B was, on the most part, very B&B-ish. It reminded me a lot of the Garendon, as it was an old, converted Victorian terrace with lots of stairs and weird little corridors. It was a bit in need of some redecorated sprucing but *eh* things were functional enough and it was clean and relatively comfy and the hot water was very hot indeed. There's not a lot else you can really ask for. I'd stay there again, the landlord was a bit weird but breakfast was good and it was in staggering distance of almost everything we could have wanted.
Though... as I discovered, they didn't take credit card. Which I found highly odd, but there you go. No credit card. Luckily for me I had actually packed a cheque juuuust in case (blame my paranoid side) otherwise I'd have been a little buggered until I could find a branch of my bank in the town (There was one, I later discovered, though I didn't know it at the time) but still... how in the heck can you run a B&B and not take credit cards? Liz and Klaus at the Charnwood took credit almost exclusively and I guess I got so used to the working proceedingls there after working with them for a year that I didn't really realise that some people didn't do that.
However for once my double-checked paranoid weirdness was handy. Yey me!
All that aside... We unpacked and, as it was only 3-ish headed down to the beach for a while. Scoped out the sand (Yellow and slightly gritty) and discussed the giant, dune-dwelling French sand-rabbits that inhabit the beaches after getting lost taking that left-turn at Alberquerky (Alberkerky...? How the FUCK do you spell that anyway?)
Wandered into town just as the shops were closing and hunted down a Weatherspoons because the food is uniform, the prices identical everywhere you go, and they're pleasantly reasurring in their sheer boringness. Once you've been in one Weatherspoons you've been in all of them and that evening it was almost like popping in somewhere substantially more familiar than the rest of Yarmouth.
We spent the rest of the evening unwinding back at the hotel, watching TV and dozing away the after-effects of all that travel.
Yarmouth, like most of the Fens, however, doesn't seem to get Channel 5. This was really our biggest complaint as we all missed CSI and I've not yet found out if mum remembered to record House on Thursday.
Tuesday morning we staggered down for breakfast wherein our slightly weird landlord made sure to get EXACTLY what we wanted in our cooked breakfasts and calculated it all with great thriftiness so there was never any wasteage. Which IMHO is all very bizarre and almost Welsh in its obsessive penny-counting frugality, but in the process I did learn that I quite like fried tomatoes with my bacon.
The day was spent pretty much completely on the beach-front. Many things were discussed, a lot of which centered around buttered toast and cats landing on their feet.
I shall attempt to explain.
If, as is normally accepted, buttered toast lands butter-side-down, and a cat always lands on it feet, what happens if you attatch a piece of toast to the back of a cat and then fling them off the table?
So it goes that the cat/toast will fall a certain distance then stop, spinning at the speed of rationality about a foot from the ground as the toast and the cat have created a paradox. Now as a paradox is more than likely capable of ripping apart time, space and reality, a safety valve cuts in turning both the cat and the toast into a duck-billed platypus.
The platypus being, of course, the physical manifestation of a paradox.
Of course this line of thought further goes on to postulate whether if no one sees the cat and the toast fall, does it turn into a platypus or does the cat just eat the toast instead? But by then I think we'd lost the plot a little bit and started building a replica of Hogwarts out of sand instead.
(They're very BIG children, said one passing mum to her little boy as he asked why grown-ups like mummy were playing in the sand. Oh the filthy look she gave us. BUWAHA!)
In general we burried Bunny up to his knees, dug a hole deep enough to find the water-table, paddled in the sea, at ice-cream and chips and generally wasted away close to six hours with only a short break in the middle to buy plastic swords, pirate flags and sticks of peppermint rock.
Then we invaded the beach (properly this time, waving swords and flags and shouting Arrrrrrgh! Yo-Ho! Avast behind, ye scurvy pig-lemurs!) and were generally quite silly because apparently we regress to the state of 5 year old boys when left unattended.
I forget where we had diner but I'm pretty sure it was unhealthy and involved chips. It may well have been KFC because I seem to have a spork from there with the Colonel on the end of it and his bow-tie thing makes it look like he's got a stick-man body but I'm fairly sure we wound up in the pub for an hour or two and then wandered back to the B&B to enjoy some mindless Tv before passing out exhausted.
Much to the bemusement of our landlord once again, who seemed perplexed that a bunch of young, student-aged things like us were not out getting hammered and lurking in nightclubs till 3am. It just didn't fit his mental profile and he seemed pretty convinced we were really very mad from the outset.
But then we poke people with sporks and mock the sea with plastic swords for 3 hours so really, that's not terribly surprising.
It was a day of odd thoughts, though. Chief among them being the reason people never get lost in an inflatable dinghy off the coast of Poland. I mean, Polish people are found in inflatable dinghies off the coast of other countries, why not their own? Possibly because, as someone pointed out, the Polish have misplaced their own coast. It's out there somewhere in a really BIG Dinghy floating around the edge of somewhere else, and that's why all the Polish people are bobbing about trying to hunt it down so they can at least next time get lost a little closer to home.
The thing was, of course, by Wednesday morning no one could actually remember if Poland even HAD a coast to get lost off of, detatched in a dinghy or not. (Still don't know, my geography's crap.)
Wednesday, Wednesday, we explored the town and shops a little, and cruised up and down the beachfront.
Yarmouth really is an unutterably awful place, it really is. The Pier's theatre has the Chuckle Brothers, Jim Davidson and Joe Pasquale headlining the summer season. The marine parade itself is lined with tacky amusement arcades, fast-food, screaming bellowing arguing chavtastic tourists, obnoxious music and overpriced souvenir tat.
But the beach itself is a merciful 12 miles long and taking the time to walk 10 minutes in either direction will bring you to areas of gloriously uninhabited sands where you can ponce about as much as you like and never have to tollerate other people in the process.
The town proper, behind the touristy bits is nice enough too. Pretty generic, with a Woolies and week-day market and a smattering of banks and all the usual town-center stuff you would expect to find. Nothing wildly exciting, and all the weird little stores are closer to the beach to net the foot-traffic, but it's pleasant and not quite so busy as the seasonal parts.
Proof really however that the location is really the least important part. It's the people you're with that matter because we did manage to amuse ourselves with remarkably little trouble.
Oh, I also managed to find a new copy of that Red Dwarf book Robbie ate. All of four pounds in the discount bookstore which made me very happy indeed.
Wednesday afternoon we took ourselves down to the local swimming pool and basically made iditots of ourselves for a couple of hours. They have a wave machine that nearly drowned poor Rachie (Charlie and I just bob like corks. Sadly R's not as bouyant nor such a strong swimmer) but once she got the hang of it and not drowing in a hideous and unpleasant way, it was all a lot of fun. Made me really miss the swimming I used to do though. And appreciate exactly how out of shape I've gotten in regards to that. But it was all good fun and we've decided to go swimming more locally as soon as they oput the roof back on the leisure centre here.
Dined once more at the Weatherspoons and we had Beeeeer and cheesecake but were really so genuinely wiped out from all the physical activity of the day (Rachie built a T-Rex nest in the sand, big enough for her to nap in) that everyone kind of collapsed again to watch some mindless TV and I think we were all asleep before midnight rolled around.
Thursday, I woke up a little groggy. Between the swimming and the Strongbow I pretty much passed out and didn't move at all all night. I woke up rather stiff and a little achey and dozed until breakfast in a warm, lazy stupor.
We spent a little time on the beach that morning. Enough for the tops of my ears, and the tops of me feet to get a teeny bit sunburned (The only two parts of me I forgot were exposed and therefore didn't obsessively sunscreen - oops) and then hit the tacky arcades just for a bit of a laugh really.
The UFO catchers were all either amusingly rigged, or so very floopy you never stood a chance of picking up anything. You line it up right, you lower your crane, you grab the bear and *FLOOP* the claws just wobble loosely at you. Though it was funny to watch people trying to hard to win impossible things.
On the other hand the slot machines that catapult the tuppences was a LOT of fun and Bunny won 2 toy cars, a glittery elephant and 2 barley sugars in the process.
Random thought of the day was that Kerrigold would be more impressive if it came from wobbly cows, and that tigers turn into butter if they dance around palm-trees. (Don't ask.)
We dined from the nearest local chippy and OMFG they fried everything in real dripping! :-O
Which I know has half of you going Ewww and the other hanf going "So what?" but it was a new experience for me cause they all use veggie oil up here and it makes the batter really crap and greasy.
Best damn chippy experience EVER.
That brings us all back to this morning. Which was deeply uneventful, wafting from breakfast to checking out, to the station, to a series of alarmingly on-time trains and swift connections, to home, to this long-assed rambling post about my week.
Though the Norwich-Notts train was so full we had to stand for most of it but *eh* could have been worse. I have, however, I think probably killed my Cons. I have a split in one part and he lining's rubbed through in many others.
Hm.
Also my bag seemed about a million times heavier than it did when I left on Monday even though I'd only added a book, 9 sticks of rock, a fantastic Nightmare Before Christmas wallet, a sword and flag and a set of vynil Puccas to put with my Hello Kittys from NYC. All together on the bed that does NOT make up the insane additional weight. I can only assume I brought home half the beach or something because there's fucking sand everyehere...
So yeah, that's it in a nutshell. There was a lot more but then again I don't think anyone really needs or wants me to attempt to transcribe 5 days worth of innane and insane rambling, anime jokes, multi-fandom weirdness, or the reasoning behind "Giru, Giru, Bub" and how come the sky is Canadian. Because frankly trying to explain it makes my head hurt and it doesn't make any sense anyway.
Now... now I'm going to try and find my film, hope it's not too sandy, finish off the roll taking dumb pictures of the dog, and then go see if my mother actually remembered to record House for me last night because if she didn't I am going to be very sad.
Oh, and I should also note that I hadn't previously spent a lot of time with Bunny and didn't really know him terribly well, but he's officially an absolute sweetheart and if he wasn't so adorably devoted to one of my best friends I would steal him away all for my very own and call him George...
*ducks Rachie's right-hook* KIDDING! *ow*
Monday - Got there ok and with minimal hold-ups. Had an hour's delay at Norwich cause the Yarmouth train broke down but aside from that it all went ok.
The B&B was, on the most part, very B&B-ish. It reminded me a lot of the Garendon, as it was an old, converted Victorian terrace with lots of stairs and weird little corridors. It was a bit in need of some redecorated sprucing but *eh* things were functional enough and it was clean and relatively comfy and the hot water was very hot indeed. There's not a lot else you can really ask for. I'd stay there again, the landlord was a bit weird but breakfast was good and it was in staggering distance of almost everything we could have wanted.
Though... as I discovered, they didn't take credit card. Which I found highly odd, but there you go. No credit card. Luckily for me I had actually packed a cheque juuuust in case (blame my paranoid side) otherwise I'd have been a little buggered until I could find a branch of my bank in the town (There was one, I later discovered, though I didn't know it at the time) but still... how in the heck can you run a B&B and not take credit cards? Liz and Klaus at the Charnwood took credit almost exclusively and I guess I got so used to the working proceedingls there after working with them for a year that I didn't really realise that some people didn't do that.
However for once my double-checked paranoid weirdness was handy. Yey me!
All that aside... We unpacked and, as it was only 3-ish headed down to the beach for a while. Scoped out the sand (Yellow and slightly gritty) and discussed the giant, dune-dwelling French sand-rabbits that inhabit the beaches after getting lost taking that left-turn at Alberquerky (Alberkerky...? How the FUCK do you spell that anyway?)
Wandered into town just as the shops were closing and hunted down a Weatherspoons because the food is uniform, the prices identical everywhere you go, and they're pleasantly reasurring in their sheer boringness. Once you've been in one Weatherspoons you've been in all of them and that evening it was almost like popping in somewhere substantially more familiar than the rest of Yarmouth.
We spent the rest of the evening unwinding back at the hotel, watching TV and dozing away the after-effects of all that travel.
Yarmouth, like most of the Fens, however, doesn't seem to get Channel 5. This was really our biggest complaint as we all missed CSI and I've not yet found out if mum remembered to record House on Thursday.
Tuesday morning we staggered down for breakfast wherein our slightly weird landlord made sure to get EXACTLY what we wanted in our cooked breakfasts and calculated it all with great thriftiness so there was never any wasteage. Which IMHO is all very bizarre and almost Welsh in its obsessive penny-counting frugality, but in the process I did learn that I quite like fried tomatoes with my bacon.
The day was spent pretty much completely on the beach-front. Many things were discussed, a lot of which centered around buttered toast and cats landing on their feet.
I shall attempt to explain.
If, as is normally accepted, buttered toast lands butter-side-down, and a cat always lands on it feet, what happens if you attatch a piece of toast to the back of a cat and then fling them off the table?
So it goes that the cat/toast will fall a certain distance then stop, spinning at the speed of rationality about a foot from the ground as the toast and the cat have created a paradox. Now as a paradox is more than likely capable of ripping apart time, space and reality, a safety valve cuts in turning both the cat and the toast into a duck-billed platypus.
The platypus being, of course, the physical manifestation of a paradox.
Of course this line of thought further goes on to postulate whether if no one sees the cat and the toast fall, does it turn into a platypus or does the cat just eat the toast instead? But by then I think we'd lost the plot a little bit and started building a replica of Hogwarts out of sand instead.
(They're very BIG children, said one passing mum to her little boy as he asked why grown-ups like mummy were playing in the sand. Oh the filthy look she gave us. BUWAHA!)
In general we burried Bunny up to his knees, dug a hole deep enough to find the water-table, paddled in the sea, at ice-cream and chips and generally wasted away close to six hours with only a short break in the middle to buy plastic swords, pirate flags and sticks of peppermint rock.
Then we invaded the beach (properly this time, waving swords and flags and shouting Arrrrrrgh! Yo-Ho! Avast behind, ye scurvy pig-lemurs!) and were generally quite silly because apparently we regress to the state of 5 year old boys when left unattended.
I forget where we had diner but I'm pretty sure it was unhealthy and involved chips. It may well have been KFC because I seem to have a spork from there with the Colonel on the end of it and his bow-tie thing makes it look like he's got a stick-man body but I'm fairly sure we wound up in the pub for an hour or two and then wandered back to the B&B to enjoy some mindless Tv before passing out exhausted.
Much to the bemusement of our landlord once again, who seemed perplexed that a bunch of young, student-aged things like us were not out getting hammered and lurking in nightclubs till 3am. It just didn't fit his mental profile and he seemed pretty convinced we were really very mad from the outset.
But then we poke people with sporks and mock the sea with plastic swords for 3 hours so really, that's not terribly surprising.
It was a day of odd thoughts, though. Chief among them being the reason people never get lost in an inflatable dinghy off the coast of Poland. I mean, Polish people are found in inflatable dinghies off the coast of other countries, why not their own? Possibly because, as someone pointed out, the Polish have misplaced their own coast. It's out there somewhere in a really BIG Dinghy floating around the edge of somewhere else, and that's why all the Polish people are bobbing about trying to hunt it down so they can at least next time get lost a little closer to home.
The thing was, of course, by Wednesday morning no one could actually remember if Poland even HAD a coast to get lost off of, detatched in a dinghy or not. (Still don't know, my geography's crap.)
Wednesday, Wednesday, we explored the town and shops a little, and cruised up and down the beachfront.
Yarmouth really is an unutterably awful place, it really is. The Pier's theatre has the Chuckle Brothers, Jim Davidson and Joe Pasquale headlining the summer season. The marine parade itself is lined with tacky amusement arcades, fast-food, screaming bellowing arguing chavtastic tourists, obnoxious music and overpriced souvenir tat.
But the beach itself is a merciful 12 miles long and taking the time to walk 10 minutes in either direction will bring you to areas of gloriously uninhabited sands where you can ponce about as much as you like and never have to tollerate other people in the process.
The town proper, behind the touristy bits is nice enough too. Pretty generic, with a Woolies and week-day market and a smattering of banks and all the usual town-center stuff you would expect to find. Nothing wildly exciting, and all the weird little stores are closer to the beach to net the foot-traffic, but it's pleasant and not quite so busy as the seasonal parts.
Proof really however that the location is really the least important part. It's the people you're with that matter because we did manage to amuse ourselves with remarkably little trouble.
Oh, I also managed to find a new copy of that Red Dwarf book Robbie ate. All of four pounds in the discount bookstore which made me very happy indeed.
Wednesday afternoon we took ourselves down to the local swimming pool and basically made iditots of ourselves for a couple of hours. They have a wave machine that nearly drowned poor Rachie (Charlie and I just bob like corks. Sadly R's not as bouyant nor such a strong swimmer) but once she got the hang of it and not drowing in a hideous and unpleasant way, it was all a lot of fun. Made me really miss the swimming I used to do though. And appreciate exactly how out of shape I've gotten in regards to that. But it was all good fun and we've decided to go swimming more locally as soon as they oput the roof back on the leisure centre here.
Dined once more at the Weatherspoons and we had Beeeeer and cheesecake but were really so genuinely wiped out from all the physical activity of the day (Rachie built a T-Rex nest in the sand, big enough for her to nap in) that everyone kind of collapsed again to watch some mindless TV and I think we were all asleep before midnight rolled around.
Thursday, I woke up a little groggy. Between the swimming and the Strongbow I pretty much passed out and didn't move at all all night. I woke up rather stiff and a little achey and dozed until breakfast in a warm, lazy stupor.
We spent a little time on the beach that morning. Enough for the tops of my ears, and the tops of me feet to get a teeny bit sunburned (The only two parts of me I forgot were exposed and therefore didn't obsessively sunscreen - oops) and then hit the tacky arcades just for a bit of a laugh really.
The UFO catchers were all either amusingly rigged, or so very floopy you never stood a chance of picking up anything. You line it up right, you lower your crane, you grab the bear and *FLOOP* the claws just wobble loosely at you. Though it was funny to watch people trying to hard to win impossible things.
On the other hand the slot machines that catapult the tuppences was a LOT of fun and Bunny won 2 toy cars, a glittery elephant and 2 barley sugars in the process.
Random thought of the day was that Kerrigold would be more impressive if it came from wobbly cows, and that tigers turn into butter if they dance around palm-trees. (Don't ask.)
We dined from the nearest local chippy and OMFG they fried everything in real dripping! :-O
Which I know has half of you going Ewww and the other hanf going "So what?" but it was a new experience for me cause they all use veggie oil up here and it makes the batter really crap and greasy.
Best damn chippy experience EVER.
That brings us all back to this morning. Which was deeply uneventful, wafting from breakfast to checking out, to the station, to a series of alarmingly on-time trains and swift connections, to home, to this long-assed rambling post about my week.
Though the Norwich-Notts train was so full we had to stand for most of it but *eh* could have been worse. I have, however, I think probably killed my Cons. I have a split in one part and he lining's rubbed through in many others.
Hm.
Also my bag seemed about a million times heavier than it did when I left on Monday even though I'd only added a book, 9 sticks of rock, a fantastic Nightmare Before Christmas wallet, a sword and flag and a set of vynil Puccas to put with my Hello Kittys from NYC. All together on the bed that does NOT make up the insane additional weight. I can only assume I brought home half the beach or something because there's fucking sand everyehere...
So yeah, that's it in a nutshell. There was a lot more but then again I don't think anyone really needs or wants me to attempt to transcribe 5 days worth of innane and insane rambling, anime jokes, multi-fandom weirdness, or the reasoning behind "Giru, Giru, Bub" and how come the sky is Canadian. Because frankly trying to explain it makes my head hurt and it doesn't make any sense anyway.
Now... now I'm going to try and find my film, hope it's not too sandy, finish off the roll taking dumb pictures of the dog, and then go see if my mother actually remembered to record House for me last night because if she didn't I am going to be very sad.
Oh, and I should also note that I hadn't previously spent a lot of time with Bunny and didn't really know him terribly well, but he's officially an absolute sweetheart and if he wasn't so adorably devoted to one of my best friends I would steal him away all for my very own and call him George...
*ducks Rachie's right-hook* KIDDING! *ow*
