Slick-U-Blog

Today I went to sunny Chirk. Chirk is a little village just over the border in Wales, infact throughout the day I was flitting back and to between England and Wales several times.

Ruth, one of my co-workers lives in Chirk so I figured I would go and see what the place had to offer. I looked on their website on Friday night and I saw they have a Castle, a railway Viaduct and a Canal Aquaduct so as the weather was forecast a nice sunny day I thought what the hell.

My original plan was to hit lands end, as I had promised to make it back after getting to john o’groats a year or two ago, but I checked the times and its 6 and a half hours driving each way so I thought “sod that”. I then thought about hitting some welsh castles, they have some lovely ones in wales such as Conwy, Beaumaris, Caerphilly etc etc so I was going to a mini road trip to see 6 or so castles in one day. However, my alarm failed to go off (or I turned it off subconsciously) so I was left with what was now Plan C, to go and visit Chirk. 1 Hour and fifteen minutes away via road from my house. I left my house at 12:00 midday.

Upon arrival at Chirk, I parked near the Bridge Inn pub, which I later found out is actually in England, in Chirk Bank on the Shropshire side of the border. From there I walked up to the canal and wandered along the bank, I presumed that if I follow the canal long enough I should find the Aquaduct and Viaduct. I walked about 200 yards round a corner and there they were. A stroke of luck and fortuitous parking had dropped me very close to both bridges.

I wandered across, taking various pictures along the way of the bridges, a narrow boat was chugging along so I took a few pictures of it and walked up to the Tunnel. This half mile long tunnel is not lit, and only has a narrow towpath in it. I ventured in about 100 yards before my claustrophobia kicked in big time and I quickly reversed course and scurried out the way I had gone in. Not a pleasant experience.

I walked over the top of the tunnel and headed for the train station which I remembered was near the castle. I walked up to the main gates and was pointed to the walkers path to the castle, which was a leasurly 1.5 miles. Upon arrival I realised that I had no money, so could not pay to gain entrance to the grounds, so I decided to walk around the outside of the castle and back to the exit, which was about another 2 miles in total .. Phew!

Once I had gone around the castle and I was back at the station, I wanted to see the Pontcysyllte aquaduct as well as I was in the general area. Ruth had given me the direction I needed to head in via text message and I set off along the towpath. About half a mile down, the towpath had turned into quagmire. I decided to call it a day on that aquaduct and headed back into Chirk Village centre.

I noticed as I was wandering around the village that I could smell some very nice sweety style smells as I was wandering round, and as I walked back to the Village centre, I passed a Cadbury’s factory. “That explains the smell”, I thought, and it was making me hungry.

I ventured into the Co-op, the only store I could find and got some Chewits, I asked for some cashback so I could get some food from the Bridge Inn when I got back to my car, only to find 3 cash machines next door .. D’oh. Ah well. I took some photo’s of the local church, St Mary’s, then wandered off back up some side street which I thought would bring me out near the pub. Nope, its a legendary Slick wrong turn and I ended up walking down some housing estate… A quick glance to my left showed me I was on the wrong side of the Aquaduct still, so I backtracked and then walked down the hill to the field below the aquaduct and viaduct. A few more pictures later and a walk under both the ‘ducts and I beat a hasty retreat to the Bridge Inn as it was now 3:45pm and I had not eaten at all today and had not stopped walking.

I had Ham, Egg and Chips from the menu, and while the ham and egg were quite bland, the Chips were proper homemade chips, big wedges of real potato and cooked in Lard, you can tell when chips are cooked in Lard as no other chips taste like them. I’d not had chips like this in over 12 years and my god were they good. I finished up and walked up the hill to my car.

There was a bench nearby so I took refuge on the bench for 10 minutes or so to allow my food to settle slightly before the journey back. The drive back was un-eventful and I stopped off at Warrington tesco’s to get some washing tablets and some bits of food. I picked up a nice thai green curry and rice meal for myself tonight to eat so I have some carbs in me for the Cycle ride tomorrow at Lady Bower. Yes, its been a long long time but i’m finally going back to Lady B for a damn good beating. I expect no mercy, I expect a lot of pain. This will also be the first time I have put the bike in the new car, so I expect a few scratches to the paintwork also. Time to go to bed, up at 7 in the morning for my cycle.

Pictures of Chirk, Here.

Pics up in the gallery shortly .. link to follow.

Link here as promised. also click on the RetroFusion link for pics from that event .. (Not many, I was having far too good a time )

Well, where to start

Most of the trips exploits you can read over at mike’s blog, so I wont repeat too much here.

I’ll just say that, yes I did have a car accident whilst over here and its kinda knocked me for 6 with regards to driving …

All occupants are ok however, so at least that is something.

I’ve taken some pictures, we went to the zoo yesterday (Yes, the wild boys are back in town ) and i’ll post them when I get back. We are currently based in the Stayokay in Arnhem, using it as a base to see the surrounding area, today we planned to go to the war cemetary ni Oosterbeek but unfortunately the weather has taken a decidedly Warrington approach and gone all rainy on us. Hopefully we will see the cemetary tomorrow if the weather holds off a bit.

On sunday, we will take a train from arnhem to Rotterdam and use that as a base to explore locally, such as Den Haag (The Hague), Gouda etc. Running out of money (but thats the usual thing that happens on holiday).

All in all, trying not to let the accident get me down and enjoy the rest of the holiday … Turned down a G7000 console today (€30) which looked complete and boxed … hope that wasn’t a bad decision.

So to recap, Holland is good, driving over here is good when you avoid psycho grannies in dodgy masda’s and the Stayokay is a good place to stay (although the arnhem branch is a tad expensive).

I’ll post another update when I can, for more info though, see Mike’s blog.

Auchenmalg

Thecko’s 25th birthday is today. We had great plans to go around the southern peninsula beneath stranraer but when we woke up, it started to snow. So we watched some TV and played on the Xbox until the snow had stopped and then allowed me to drive. We changed the plans and decided to try the Cock Inn for lunch.

We set off and I drove slowly and deliberately as driving on snow is not fun and is quite dangerous as the road is on the coast with some severe drops. I only skidded once which was very very slight.

We arrived and entered the Bar to be greated by a very jovial affable barman who had just come back from a holiday in Tenerife to the first snow he’s seen in the area in 4 years. Thecko had a strongbow, mike had something called McEwans 70 shilling and I had a coke. We asked about some food and the barman said we could eat in the bar (seems there is a restaurant part open as well .. we didn’t notice it) and when he mentioned steak mikes eyes lit up like michael jackson watching home alone.

We each had a 12 ounce steak, well done with chips, peas, mushrooms, tomatoes, carrots, roast potatoes and a lovely peppercorn sauce. It was delicious, the best food we had had all holiday. When we go back in the summertime we’ll be sure to pop back there.

We left and after a quick game of “hit the bench with a snowball” we drove back. The cottage needed a clean before we leave so the rest of friday was spent tidying up (thecko even did some hoovering) and playing xbox and packing up ready for an early start tomorrow.

Thats the end of my holiday blog entry, saturday was just a drive home. Total mileage covered on the holiday was 494 miles.

Dunragit, Stranraer, Belfast

Woke up at 2am for the nighttime drive to stranraer. We had a breakfast of scrambled egg, sausage and bacon. We left the house ar 3:05am which gave us about 1:20 to make a 50 minute journey as we were unsure of the roads and it was also -3c outside.

We made good time, reaching the A75 in about 40 minutes (I was taking it easy) as I turned onto this road, I noticed the car was behaving erratically, at first putting it down to strong winds (the turn is on a steep hill) but as we got close to a place called Dunragit (a place which we wanted to get pictures of, as its a funny name) we pulled into a layby and i noticed I had a flat tyre .. great, and my hubcap was missing .. double great.

Mike suggested we try reinflating the existing tyre incase its just a slow puncture, which was a good idea so out came the electric pump and off it went for 5 minutes inflating the tyre. When it was up to pressure we stopped the pump and heard the tell-tale hissing sound of a puncture :/ We’ll have to replace the wheel with the spare. I jacked the car up (on an incline) and removed the existing wheel and got out the spare … which was flat .. great. Put it on, and inflated it with the electric pump and we set off for stranraer with only seconds to spare.

The puncture was bound to happen as I had tempted fate with lots of comments such as “Plenty of time to make it to stranraer” … I never learn.

We arrived at the terminal with no time left, so I dropped mike and thecko off at the terminal while I parked the car. We met up neat the terminal and we all power walked to the check in terminal, we checked in and once the police had checked our passports and made us fill in a little green form each .. we were on our way onto the ferry, the last people to board.

We arrived in Belfast after an uneventful sailing at 6:50am The vessel was the Stena HSS Voyager, which does the crossing in 105 minutes, at about 40 knots, it is a huge catamaran design and the sailing was smooth. It had snowed overnight in belfast and it looked very nice. We took a cab into the centre of town and went into a starbucks for a morning coffee and to figure out a plan of action for the day.

We wandered around waiting for places to open, we wrote our names in the snow. After 3 large coffee’s and no toilets since the boat I was now desperate to go so we headed for what looked like the main shopping centre, and went to the toilets. We popped into a bargain bookstore and I picked up a 3 book set on the american civil war and mike bought some quiz type books, might help us with the pub quiz

We wandered around a bit more, we went into HMV and had a mooch around there, I didn’t realise the chaps had gone outside while I was wondering around upstairs looking at the games and what-not. I nearly bought a SF2 pad (chun li version) for the PS2 .. but I hardly use mine anyway so no point.

We had plans to visit some of the local attractions but as with scotland, most of the places were closed. We were going to take a bus tour around the city but we decided against it when we saw the price (£10 .. each). We decided to call it a day and we would try and get an earlier ferry back to stranraer. We wandered round a few more shops inclusing the BBC shop, where I picked up 2 Micheal Palin books, Sahara and Himalaya. Our original return time was scheduled to be 22:55, but we got the 12:20 instead. Sailing back was a little bit choppy but uneventful. Mike got some kip. When we got back to Stranraer I check the wheel, tightened up the bolts and finished inflating the tyre and we set off for a nice, uneventful journey home …

No such luck. On the drive home I was in a convoy of trucks when someone decided to turn right into a petrol station causing the truck infront of me to slam on (luckily I was keeping my distance) He avoided the car and an accident was averted.

We stopped at “the cock inn” to arrange some sort of meal type thing for thecko’s birthday on friday but it was closed. I did get to look at the view tho as usually I miss it as i’m driving. We got back at 3:30 and thecko and mike flaked out and had some kip. I went and played on my nintendo DS for an hour or two, playing advance wars. Its bloody good.

At about 6pm mike woke and decided to make some grub i’d just finished one round of advance wars and the battery needed charging anyway so I helped, stir fry with rice, mince, peppers, onions and peas. Thecko woke up at midnight and ate his tea before going straight back to bed. Thecko is not someone who functions well on 2 – 3 hours of sleep it seems.

Newton Stewart, Glentrool, Bladnoch

I woke up a tad late today, 8:40 instead of 8. Mike made a nice brekkie of Sausage, Bacon and Scrambled Eggs. Today we were going to walk around the Loch at Glentrool. We stopped in Newton Stewart and due a fortuitous piece of turning we found a Somerfield supermarket .. which was really useful. We got money from the cash machine a bit further down than we parked as the RBS one was not giving out money and Thecko owed money to the kitty. We went back to Somerfield and grabbed some odds and sods for the day (fruit bars, some Lucozade (energy drink for you non-brits)) and then we popped to the cafe next door and had a “Chocolate to Die For” and a scone each. Well myself and mike had scones, thecko had to make do with something else as they only had 2 scones left. I’d forgotten how nice scones were i’m going to have to get some from asda or maybe make my own one day.

We filled up the car. We had done 420 miles now since warrington and we didn’t want to get stranded on the way to the ferry in the morning. I reset the counter and off we went to Glentrool. We parked in a car park near to Bruce’s Stone, apparently this was where Robert The Bruce kicked off against the english and started the war … Took a few photos of the stone and the surrounding hillside and loch when Mike popped up and said “There is a 4 mile walk up that hill if you want” .. so I said Yeah.

We brought the car from the lower carpark to the upper carpark (a little bit closer) and I changed into my newly acquired hiking boots I’d bought the day before.

Mike was knackered after 200 meters, as in seriously knackered. Here is a picture of mike and thecko after 400 meters.

We managed to keep mike going and we covered about 1.5 miles in about 1 hour before we turned back. Mike was strangely more chipper on the way down. We stopped on the drive back at the Bladnoch Distillery where Mike and Thecko bought some whiskey and I bought a little fluffy wild haggis for sitting on my Mac Mini. Not much done at night, as we were getting an early night for the trip to Belfast tomorrow morning.

Port William, Dunragit, Stranraer, Isle Of Whithorn

Awoke at 8am and we fixed a breakfast (can’t remember what we had now) and we decided that we would go to stranraer today and sort out the tickets for the ferry on wednesday. Start the day as you mean to go on, within a minute of getting into the car, a nice scrape on the bumper as I reversed into the bank on the side of the road. Great.

We decided to leave TomTom behind (we didn’t use it for the rest of the week) and use the old fashioned GPS system which consists of a Map and Mike reading it as we go along. We arrived to find most places were closed but we got a bit of shopping at tesco and also farm foods after we booked our ticket. We decided on the early ferry to maximise our time in Belfast so we were booked on the 4:55am HSS ferry (High Speed Service) which takes 1:50mins to make the crossing compared to the normal ferry which takes 3:30 minutes.

We left stranraer and journeyed back along the coast road to a local tourist attraction called “St Ninians Cave”, this is allegedly a cave where St Ninian (who introduced christianity into Scotland) went to “contemplate” alone. Its about 2 miles from the cottage so we thought we would get the close one out of the way for now. We arrived at the car park and set off on the walk to the cave. A nice gentle 1.5 mile walk along a dell to the coast. We arrived on the shingle beach and walked to the cave. Now if you say “cave” to most people, i’m sure they would expect some vast cave stretching into the rock and thats what we expected from St Ninian’s Cave … and what we got was this…

More of a dent than a cave. We were most dissapointed. Those pebbles are not the easiest things to walk on either.

We left and drove to the Isle Of Whithorn which is about a mile from the cottage. We were after some food so we went to see if any of the local pubs etc would still be serving food (as you would expect at 3:00pm on a sunday).

I drove us down to the harbour and we found one pub that was open so I turned the car around.

*crack*

“What the **** was that?” we all said. I’d hit a concrete bollard… quite strongly. We pulled into the pub anyway and enquired about food while I worried about the damage to my car.

“Sorry we’ve stopped serving” they told us after about 5 minutes of the locals eyeing us up suspiciously. We left to make some food back at the cottage (and I could have a look at the damage).

Its not as bad as I first thought, i’d bent part of the substructure where the bumper attaches to the main chassis. It was touching the exhaust pipe now and making my diesel (which normally sounds like a tractor) sound like a combine harvester. I tried to bend it away from the exhaust pipe but I couldn’t get enough purchase on it with my hands or with any tools I owned. We would fix this at a later date, at least no major damage was done.

Played the old classic “Links 2004″ on the xbox and we all started with brand new characters to even the playing field. Much fun was had and we retired late at night for another day exploring on Monday.

Warrington – Whithorn.

I awoke late, not a good start, I had some things to do to the car before we set-off such as checking the oil and water and also freeing up the passenger side water jets to clean the windscreen as well as make sure i’d packed everything.

I picked up Mike and Thecko and we set off for Tesco to grab a few bits and bobs before we made the journey and also to get some breakfast in us, we had a nice fried brekkie of bacon, sausage and eggs .. more on those eggs later…

We filled up the car and off we went, tom tom guiding us on our 220 ish mile journey and we made good speed. We stopped at a few stops to have a walk and for thecko to inhale his death sticks, at one service station mike had the pleasure of visiting the toilet after someone decided to leave some “modern art” on the toilet seat … lovely.

We arrived at the cottage at about 5 o’clock I think, Tom Tom took us to the correct road but we slightly overshot the cottage and stopped at the Lower Ersock Cottage to ask some old dear the directions .. we promptly turned around and drove the 50 yards back down the road to High Ersock Cottage. The local roads are a dream to drive on in the nice dry early afternoon day, no traffic and fun with sweeping curves and sharp blind corners .. great stuff.

The cottage was unlocked, so we unloaded our stuff and mike telephoned the cottage owner (Mrs Lesley Murray) who came down and told us a bit about the place, what there is to do and things we might like to do on our planned day trip to belfast on Wednesday.

We unpacked our stuff and started to make some grub for tea, we made a simple tea of bacon baguettes which was lovely. We unpacked the xbox and sat down to plan the week.

Those eggs I talked about earlier .. they were back .. with a vengeance. I managed to clear the room .. twice. I’m never eating a tesco breakfast again.

We finished off the night playing some games on the xbox and then settled in for a good nights kip.

Well my time has nearly come, its time for that sweet sweet redundo to come along and give me free money.

Thanks to Thecko and Mike, i’ve got a week booked in a cottage in Scotland for a break away from all things PC’s, Internet and the daily grind. I’ve also been looking at a possible trip abroad. I’ve just been doing a mooch on some websites and I can get a 2 week return ticket to Toronto from Air Canada for £180 – £200 .. which is actually pretty reasonable. I also looked at Air Quantas for a trip to Aus but that was about £600 .. bit too expensive for my liking.

So I might have a trip to canada in March sometime, trouble is to get the cheap fair I have to book before the end of Jan .. if any of my Canadian compatriots want to help me with some free accomodation? i’d be much obliged. Course I still have the massive hurdle of my fear of flying to get over but I think I might be able to manage it .. maybe.

Infact its proabbly not a good idea after all .. the longest time i’ve flown for is 4 hours and 20 minutes and I was a quiverring wreck after it. I’ll give it a mull but i’ll probably forgo Canada. :/

Well, here is a little info about my holiday.

Went ot france, off to a good start as I realised on the train to london i’d left my fastticket reservation number at home on a peice of paper. Anyway, I got to london got on the underground and arrived at waterloo. Eurostar was quite frankly superb. No complaints. Even though my ticket cost £30 I was in first class (luck of the drawer I think). Journey was great and I arrived in france about the same time as phil and tufty.
We met at Gare Du Nord and went to the boat. Dom and Aid arrived about 2 hours afterwards from spain.

The first three days we spent in paris, eating, drinking.. the usual holiday stuff. The weather was not great but we did some touristy stuff on the sunday (arc du triumphe, champs ellysse, eiffel tower etc).

Monday we headed out of paris onto the canal, after negociating 10 locks to get out and a tunnel that took 20 minutes to go through, we arrived at a lock and promptly got stuck. 2 hours later someone came and helped us out.

Tuesday I received a call from Egg, whom my credit card was with, someone was charging stuff to my account from Latvia. About £800 worth. They blocked it and I said i’d call them when I got back to blighty. That was to be my main spending money for the holiday so that wasn’t great either.

We came back to paris on wednesday, watched a few games of boules while we had a bbq, that was nice.

Thursday we arrived back at the location we had set-off from, the paris-arsenal next to the bastille. We stayed there until the end of the holiday.

Got a tan, got the eurostar back after waiting 3 hours in paris nord for my train, we had left the boat early so phil and tufty could make their flights. The eurostar this time was scumbag class, but still good, some kind american lady gave me a bit of her sandwich. Arrived in london, waited for my virgin trains train to warrington and came home.

See the pics in my gallery. Thats about it really.

Still waiting for my new card from egg, until then i’ve got no money at all.