To the seaside!

It's the end of May. Flowers are blooming and birds are tweeting and it is nice and sunny quite often. However, as we have been slowly learning, it is also pouring rain quite often. Almost always with the laundry on the line...

The kids are on a break from school (again!) and we thought that this time we'd see the local scene instead of going on a big expedition. So, I decided that we would go to Great Yarmouth, to the seaside. The kids got their shovels and their sunhats, and I packed a bag of sweaters and jackets and some sausage rolls, and off we went. Two trains, passing cows and calves and little lambikins and flat, flat fields, and we get to Great Yarmouth.

Walk towards the ocean, feel the first drops of rain. Huddle in the market and eat some chips and gravy. Feel even more rain, run for the shelter of the big church, St Nicholas. It's an unusual church: it goes back to 1101, it's very large for a parish church, there are lots of model ships, because of all the seafarers involved, and it was totally ruined by an incendiary bomb in WWII. And more! When it was rebuilt, they painted the ceilings as they would have been originally, and they are beautiful!

Rain stops, run for beach, dig in sand. The beach is actually quite nice and sandy, though it faces right onto the North Sea and would always be windy, I think. The fact that there's a wind farm just offshore supports that! We did get a bit of digging in, and of course a bucket of water became necessary, so Arthur got wet beyond his knees. When I suggested we stop for a hot chocolate, they decided that one eats ice cream at the beach, not hot chocolate, so that soon they were cold inside and out. Lucky them, Mommy brought that bag of warm clothes. We continued along the waterfront, looking at the pirate mini-golf place, the pier and arcade, the big diggers moving the sand around for some reason... We got dumped on at regular intervals, and the kids were, not surprisingly, losing patience with this lark!

We headed for the river side of town, where there was an Elizabethan House I thought we could shelter in, but we didn't quite make it. On our way, we saw the public library, which had a hexagonal Victorian pillar box outside! Definitely not a 1980s reproduction, this one! Arthur took these pictures, and I just love the one of the top of it! He couldn't even see what he was doing, but held the camera up and clicked, and managed to get a great picture, I think. These were taken after our half-hour of hanging out in the library while the clouds opened up once again.

We finally made it back to the train station and, with perfect connections, made it back to Cambridge in time for supper. And look, I got quite a bit done on sock #2 for Elaine (sock #1 has been finished for some time!). The stole is too big to carry around now, and the other socks are too fiddly, and this is easy!

It's another beautiful morning, but I'm taking my umbrella if I go out!