Warspite wheel

 

M&D 50th anniversary

This was at Moonfleet Manor near Weymouth over the bank holiday. It's a hotel in the Luxury Family Hotels chain. I'd quibble slightly with the luxury tag, just because the rooms were a bit small, but the facilities for kids were brilliant - indoor swimming pool and huge playroom included. Ours loved it. The trouble was, they were all in one room, which was so tremendously exciting for Jim that he didn't go to sleep until about 10 the first evening, after being allowed to stay up late watching Harry Potter. C had gone up relatively early as she was feeling rather coldy, and a little while later I had a request via reception to go upstairs. As soon as I got there they fell asleep, of course.

We went for a big family walk to Abbotsbury the next day, in unaccustomed sunshine and mucho complaining (initially) from Amy and Minnie. However, they settled in to it and all did extremely well - the longest walk they had ever done at about 5 miles. The only problem Jim had was with th very soggy cow field, where he wailed upon getting water in his shoes "but this is mostly COW WEE!" Very welcome pub at the end, then a swim at the hotel. Another nice meal, and children inevitably fell asleep much earlier. They slept until 8!!! Said goodbye to everyone and came home via the FAA museum at Yeovilton. It was good, especially the Ark Royal "carrier experience" but they really need a big carrier and some F35s to talk about.

Was good to be home. At Fleet services we all crammed into a photo booth and took a stupid snap. Felt like a proper family.

 

 

Open letter to Richard Branson

Dear Richard,

 

I have recently had the misfortune to have had to fly on the abject tube of woe that is the BA service between Bridgetown Barbados and London Gatwick. We had to book late and, as there were no seats in Premium on the Virgin flight, we decided to go for the equivalent on BA (we were not desperate enough to go to Barbados to risk economy) There was no problem getting seats on the BA flight, and I can now, with awful clarity, see why. The BA 777s are in a scruffy and their cabins aged. My seat was broken (in subtly different ways) in both directions, although I count myself lucky not to have booked row 25, where the poor victim/passenger's seat was soggy from some deeply worrying fault involving air conditioning and condensation - the cabin staff's solution was the provision of a second (presumably waterproof) blanket for him to sit on. I found questionable stains on my cup holder on the way out and some hideous food-related gunge on the underside of my (floppy, broken) table on the return leg. The service was ok, but the memory of the glass of champagne and general happy welcome one gets on embarkation in Virgin Premium was but a distant and painful glow. The entertainment on BA was on fixed loop videotape - videotape, Richard, In 2012!! I won't go into detail about the food because I'm afraid it may crystallise a traumatic event in my memory, never to be forgotten, but suffice to say I have never been so closely reminded of school dinners in the 1970s as I have been on that flight. The little plastic tub of despair that was the alleged pudding was a microcosm of the whole experience, and the "breakfast" (I use that word in its broadest sense) was positively insulting. It was all made worse at Grantley Adams International on the home leg by having to walk past one of your proper 747s standing next to our toy aeroplane. We were sorely tempted to make a break for it across the Tarmac and hope they let us on the Virgin flight. In summary, I am just writing to say, that whatever it is you're doing to make your flights so much more pleasant than BA ones, please keep doing it, and in return I promise never to go on BA when there is a Virgin flight to the same destination available.

 

Yours etc,

Mr S D Bell

Navigational triumphs

This morning we packed and then sat in the lounge where the signal was decent to do a bit of blogging, photo uploading etc. Eventually cleared out at about midday with the hire car and a couple of hours to kill, so we headed through Holetown (swift stop to photograph the cute Methodist church) and up the hill to the Earthworks pottery. The hotel was full of their wares so we thought it would be nice to go up there and buy some stuff to take home. However, they obviously operate on island time because we arrived, after much zigzagging hither and yon, twenty minutes before the advertised closing time to find them thoroughly shut up and gone to de beach. C not impressed.

 

With something like an hour or an hour and a half before we wanted to check in, we decided to attempt to find the Gun Hill signal station, which had been recommended as a "heritage destination". It was marked vaguely on our poor-quality map so we attempted to go cross country, as it is situated somewhere between the pottery and the airport. I followed my nose, but my nose led me down increasingly potholey roads until we ended up at a dead end in a sugar cane field. Barbados has no road signage of any significant description and lots of interconnecting roads. Also, none of the villages have names so even if the maps were remotely accurate, which they aren't, you wouldn't be able to tell where you were. Anyway, we went back towards civilisation (the bus stops helpfully have "to city" on them when you are going towards Bridgetown, and "away from city" when you are headed anywhere else - sometimes this is the only way of orientating yourself that does not require knowledge of mosses on tree trunks etc) and hit the main road, after which C got us to Gun Hill in a remarkable feat of navigation. It was nice, with a good view, some cannon, and bits of info about how early 19th century regiments had decamped up there from the garrison to avoid the yellow fever etc. it was used as an observation post to warn of approaching ships, rebellious slaves etc. 

 

After the signal station it was time to go, so in another navigational triumph we arrived at Grantley Adams international in plenty of time and checked in. Instead of going through security we went next door to the Barbados Concorde Experience, where they have an actual Concorde in a display shed. It is really quite well done - I have only been in the Duxford prototype before so it was good to see in a genuine passenger example. Made us feel somewhat sad that such an outstanding bit of engineering should have been retired with nothing remotely as interesting or advanced to replace it. A retrograde step, even if we would never have been able to afford it - there was a price list for 1988 there and it was 3000 return to Barbados even then. BA gave this example to the island because it was the only holiday destination it was used for on a regular scheduled basis.

After that to the terminal and the mocking presence of the Virgin 747 standing next to the toy aeroplane we have to fly in. Bought lots in the souvenir shop, had some quick food then it was time to board.

 

Off

Some last pics of our room, the main house and the garden. Oh and the lounge with a thieving brown bird in it...

Caribbean tree frogs, the soundtrack to our evenings...

 

 

Last day

OHW-UH!! As the children might say. UnFAIR! Don't WANT to go home!! But I suppose we have to tomorrow. The hire car arrived this morning an hour later than it should have, at 10:30. This is 9:30 island time, apparently, but we had some more relaxation here so not such a bad thing. We headed off north and ended up after a few reversals, at North Point i.e. the most northerly bit of the island. 

The country in St. Lucy parish at the top of the island reminded me (to rolling of eyes from Caroline) of St. Just in Cornwall but not so wind-scoured and of course an awful lot warmer. And with more sugar cane. You know - rolling hills above the sea with scattered settlements, not too many trees and much agriculture. And with a fresh Westerly, which in this case, came from the East, of course, and was warm rather than bone-numbingly cold. But that's detail. North Point was at the end of a rather potholey road and completely unmarked apart from a handpainted sign saying "nice view" and some Germans in a hire car. There was also a man in a shack selling coconut-based bird feeders. He seemed very nice, and told us we could walk from there to the "animal flower cave" marked on the map nearby. Intrigued as to what a cave could have to do with animals or flowers, we walked the couple of hundred yards around the (Cornwally, but hotter and more coral-based) cliffs to the capitalist outpost that is Barbados's Animal Flower Cave. There were some excellent viewpoints where we took photos and the we decided, due to a communicative misunderstanding, that we would visit the cave itself.

We paid our BDS$20 to a strange man in the adjacent bar and went down into the cave, which turned out to be a sea cave in the soft coral-rock cliffs, which had windows out onto the wild Atlantic and seawater pools which were only refreshed at high tide and when the surf was up, being (as they were) significantly above sea level. The "animal flowers" in question turned out to be what we would call sea anemones, and a few tenacious examples were present in one of the pools, along with some small marooned fish the likes of which populate every rock pool in Cornwall. Not that I'm comparing this with Cornwall at all, obviously. Famed 1980s pop star Billy Ocean had apparently visited the cave once and so one of the windows was called "Billy Ocean's Window" because he had sung one of his songs there. Hallowed ground indeed. It all sounds a bit naff, but actually it was unusual and interesting, and we liked Val, our Rastafarian guide, who told us about the parties they had in there in the summer, and his 18 month old boy Dylan who likes playing in the pools. Val was obviously on a deal where he would take us round the cave and then sell us some of his craft, so afterwards we were directed to a stall where we had the opportunity of buying various trinkets. Bought some bracelets in Bajan colours for the kids then back to the Yaris.

We then headed down the East coast on mostly better roads, and stopped for a sandwich. The beach reminded me of Southern Queensland in October, but unfortunately much rubbish. Difficult to tell whether it had blown in from the sea of been deposited by locals. Either way,  it was a bit of a shame. The island is very focused on the west coast, where the sheltered water and expensive properties are, but the east is beautiful and wild and should be an asset. We motored down to a small place called Bathsheba - apparently there was once a railway that brought hot Europeans here from Bridgetown to take Atlantic air, and the 1930s Atlantis Hotel is still here, with a recently resurgent trade in day-trippers wanting a break from the beach. We had a short walk along the shore and took some shots of the mushroom stacks offshore then headed south again.

Next stop was Sunbury, a Georgian plantation house currently run by the Bajan national trust. The estate had been established in the late 17th century, and the current house dated to the late 18th, with all the land around still worked for sugar cane. The house was really interesting, although I think I annoyed C by saying it reminded me of Gar-Tul, only bigger and hotter and with more sugar cane. Actually, the only way it really was like Gar-Tul was the 3ft thick walls (good for withstanding hurricanes) and the high Victorian decor of the interior. Oh, and the water cistern in the roof, and the lost garden feel of the exterior. C was intrigued by the "punishment chair" in the nursery, and I liked some contemporary cartoons about slavery which chimed with the themes of the book about the Preventive Squadron I am currently reading.

Then off to Bridgetown, a bigger and more congested metropolis than we had anticipated. We drove through the world heritage listed barracks area, which is indeed a miraculously preserved 18th century original, with a racecourse in the middle where the parade ground once was. The trouble is, it is all government property so there's no point really in stopping. In fact, the best maintained bit is still occupied by Barbados's military, with an impressive Whitworth gun out front. So we drove on, over the Carenage (the Bridgetown water course) to a car park where we paid five dollars to someone who was almost certainly not authorised to take it from us. Had a wander around downtown Bridgetown at rush hour, which was v. busy and a bit like Windhoek but with loads more people. Despite their attempts to spoil the main drag with horrible concrete modernisms, most of the architecture is colonial, and it is easy to imagine how it would have looked in the 19th century. We also wandered past the oldest synagogue in the Western hemisphere, built in the 17th century. It has been beautifully restored externally but was unfortunately closed. 

The Bajans seem friendly and polite in numbers, and we were quite relaxed after a bit of acclimatisation. The main drag has a lot of posh jewellers, and we ended up in the Colombian Emerald Co, where C indulged her hankering for a new ring - diamonds and rubies :-) the quality seemed good and the price acceptable, so I bent the credit card a bit further. 

That was it really. We headed back up the east coast, past the famous cricket ground and got back to the hotel around six, to be greeted with th first rain of the holiday. Singapore slings at the bad and another nice dinner and that's it. Am finishing this off with some fairly convincing tropical rain falling and the frogs singing as enthusiastically as usual. Hope we can have a last swim tomorrow morning before taking the hire car to Holetown and the pottery for souvenirs...

 

Thursday eve

This morning we went to swim with turtles. The taciturn Bradley took us up the coast in the hotel speedboat to what is obviously well known to the local turtle population as a turtle feeding area. He threw bits of fish in while we snorkelled and watched the big shapes loom at us. Slightly scary at first as some of them were so big, but just amazing to get so close. They move very gracefully and surprisingly fast through the water but came near enough to touch. There were about five or six of varying sizes as well as lots of fish taking advantage of the easy food supply. I held a small turtle briefly by the sides of its shell and pointed it in a different direction. It didn't seem to mind, especially for something that is critically endangered - you'd expect it to be a bit precious. I forgot to bring my waterproof camera (much to Caroline's annoyance) but here's a picture of exactly the Kind of turtle we saw (green, apparently), and me blogging...

 

After the turtle excitement we decided we needed to do something else, so after a certain amount of prevarication over whether to get the reggae bus to Bridgetown, we decided instead to go back into Speightstown and visit the art gallery. C bought a nice small oil painting of a helliconia flower. We then walked the mile or so to Mullins bay past Bajan chattel houses and had lunch in the restaurant on the beach. Perfect location, but the food was not as good as at the hotel. C was unimpressed with her salad, but my prawns were nice. On the way there we ran into Andy the coconut salesman, so I had to (over-)pay him for Sunday's coconut. Still, he went home happy.

 

Another lazy afternoon. The weather forecast the turn-down service leaves in our room has proven to be 100% inaccurate so far - it predicted rain every day until today, and the weather was perfect, but yesterday it said today would be sunny, so of course it has been the cloudiest one yet. Not very cloudy, but a bit, and a breeze from the north which has made swimming very slightly less pleasant than before. 

Have hired a car for tomorrow. A Yaris, which around here seems to be a Corolla.