I'm aiming for Portsmouth, where I'll take a ferry to Wight. They run regularly, the ferries do, and the land and water transit groups do a good job of coordinating times. Portsmouth has some interesting buildings as well as beach front.The ferry from Portsmouth is like a DC-10 interior but without the drop-down tables--two aisles with a row of five or six seats in the middle. The water is fast and smooth, but the chop at the landing pier had many of us grasping rails, walls and seats for balance while disembarking. A dalmation puppy onboard was all flailing feet at one point.
My hotel on Wight is a 5-minute walk from Sandown, which is about 20 minutes from the pier by a very bumpy train that's more like an obsolete subway brought above ground, or an aging coaster stretched out flat. Rickety-rackitta, rickety-rackitta all along the rails. The conductor slams doors with gusto as he moves from car to car to collect fares, and then mashes a set of three buttons at each station to bring us to a halt and open doors.
My hotel is The Malvern on Leed St. I am greeted in the lobby by a large bronze statue on a sideboard--an elephant-headed, multi-armed Indian god standing on a row of rearing cobras. It is surrounded by other gleaming bronze statues of India persuasion. The proprietors are gracious and kind and in the middle of renovating a six-bedroom house next door for a B&B.I had a choice of a twin, en suite room in the hotel, knowing that 26 children and 4 teachers are coming for the next two nights, or of staying in the under-reconstruction house in a room that contains three twin beds, a bathroom down the hall that's so big it dwarfs the clawfoot tub that sits in the middle, a shower upstairs, and piles of dismantled dressers and wooden planks in the rest of the place. I would have had the whole house to myself.
I declined the larger space. No fun living alone in a construction zone. Besides, the kid time will be nutty and fun to experience.
I walked town a bit after getting myself settled into my room and making calls to arrange my Scotland time. Got a B&B in Dumfries and hope to schedule a hostel in Inveraray and Glasgow. Also checking into the WWOOFer service opportunity in Torlundy at Fort William.
The beach today was packed. Sandown is a destination spot for Brits on holiday, and it has over a mile of beach that's only a few blocks from my hotel. Coaches were dropping people--mostly families and elderly--at the beachfront hotels.
The sand here is the same color as Bath stone--dark creamy yellow, like a light curry, or ground-up Bath buildings. Lots of orange and gray flintstone in the whole south of England, too. The flintstone has a smooth white outer layer; break it open and the color of carnelian or transluscent slate shows up. People use big chunks of it to build their garden walls. Their smooth slices invite fingers to touch, and I half expect them to be sticky like chunks of rock candy or toffee.There's an arcade on the pier--video games, casino, gambling machines that push coins off a ledge as you drop them in. Maddening, that one. People stood at it for half an hour at a time, feeding tuppence or fifty pence coins, watching a tray move back to front while the coins pushed each other forward and over the edge a molecule at a time.
The place also has an arcade shoot-'em-up that you play with your feet, dancing a mad jig on a grid of four pads to shoot guns at the enemy. You hang on to a bar behind you to keep your balance. By the looks of it, its grander purpose is to give teenage boys the chance to watch pony-tailed teenage girls jiggle up and down on the platform.
Played a game of indoor "adventure golf"--a themed miniature golf game that, in this very crowded venue, consists of 11 holes ingeniously contrived in 3-D space. I traveled up and down stairs following a different set of wild animal tracks for each hole--wolf, deer, cougar, raccoon, etc.
The set is designed like something you'd get if you turned a Rainforest Café into a miniature golf course. Lifesize stuffed animals, flashing lightning, forest foliage, yowling jungle monkeys, grotesque stone masks leering down from aztec-like ruins. I half expected to see Indiana Jones swinging from a vine, archeological prize in hand. Pretty engaging as these things go, although the greens themselves were tame.
Am eating supper at Simply Scrumptious on High St, one block from the beach. A very cheesy macaroni and cheese, made with white cheddar and gorgonzola, it tastes like. Salad has sprouts (uncommon here) and "rocket" (arugula), which is as ubiquitous as cole slaw here.
While going home walking, I went to the Spar and got Lotto based on a lotto card that someone threw away in Salisbury on Friday's draw. I picked it up for fun and did Mega and regular Lotto for £11 over the next few weeks.
If you don't ever hear from me again, I won.
