Our last full day in Britain on the BBA

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Monday 3rd August
Our last full day in Britain on the BBA
Todays drive to Folkstone doesn’t look too far and apart from the 10 miles or so we will have to reach Dover on Tuesday to catch the ferry to France it will be our last day in Britain on this adventure.
The weather pattern now seems to be settling back into something more like summer and here we are leaving for Europe!!!
The intention today is to take the A27 further east and so after a good breakfast and another walk around the village to take in the church which was closed last night and a couple of pictures of the thatched roof houses we were on our way.
It had been a short but restful stay with Jean and her daughter and had given us more time to talk about the Benvie family background.
Like yesterday the road we chose skirted around the larger towns we came across like Chichester.
The name Bognor Regis has always interested us and we think we first came to hear it in a TV series about a guy called Reggie Perrin who after the person who played the part died, became a bit of a cult like character. Reggie we are fairly sure used to take his summer holidays at Bognor Regis.
Now who in their right mind would want to tell anyone that they were taking their summer break at a town with a name that sounded like it was some sort of bog!!!Or perhaps we were completely wrong in our thoughts of what the town might look like.
And we were quite wrong because Bognor Regis,or at least the small part we saw as we took a detour to find a toilet stop,wasnt’ a bad looking seaside place.Sure,the beach was just all pebbles,but that was the way the coastline is in the greater part of Sussex.One of the big attractions seemed to be a Butlins Holiday Camp with facilities that would keep anyone on holiday at the seaside but where the beach was no good for swimming,completely happy.
With another one of those must see places ticked off our list we carried on the A259 heading for a lunchtime stop in Brighton.
Brighton was the only real large town that we called into while we have been on the south coast as the others like Portsmouth and Plymouth had all come up in our travels when we wanted to either push onto our days end destination or had been when we wanted to make up some time.
It might also be a place where I could get a haircut from someone who spoke English remembering that tomorrow we head back to ‘foreign parts’again.
Well we achieved both objectives.Lunch in a park overlooking the burnt out remains of the Queen Victoria pier which is to be replaced by a tower that will be taller than the London Eye and give panoramic views over the city and coastline and a haircut at Supercuts!!Gretchen even got a bit of retail therapy in while she waited for me although thankfully she didn’t make any more purchases to add to her already over weight suitcase!!!!
Brighton is a seaside city that was bustling with holidaymakers and it was a place we would like to go back to one day and explore in a bit more depth and spend a few days in.The promenade is wide and the beach was the sandiest we have come across today as we drove east.There was a multitude of people down on the beach enjoying the by now warm afternoon temperature in the mid 20’s.
We carried on the A259 that tracks the coast east but rarely actually runs alongside it which at times can be frustrating when all we wanted to do on some occasions was to stop and take a stretch of the legs on a beach.
After passing through Seaford we looked for the road out to Beachy Head,one of those places in the southern part of England that conjures up images in your mind of Spitfire and other RAF aircraft returning to Britain after a raid on occupied Europe.
As we returned to RR after taking photos of Beachy Head and peering over the unprotected bluffs that dropped what looked like a couple of hundred feet to the rocky beach below,a guy came up to us and started jabbering away in French.He got out what sounded like 3 or 4 sentences before we had to interrupt him to tell him we didn’t understand a word he had said!!!!
Oh,he said,he had noticed our French number plates on RR when he had pulled in after us and wanted to test out his quite fluent(or at least it sounded that way) French.He was actually quite disappointed that we weren’t French and could reply back to him in the same lingo!!!
We should add this isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened to us since we picked up RR way back in early June although we don’t expect it will happen after we make it to France tomorrow!!!
As we got closer to our destination for the day at Folkstone we drove across the Walland Marsh an area that is so low lying that tall dykes have been built to keep the sea out from flooding the flat fertile farm land adjacent to the sea.
Folkstone is a confusing place with part of the town built above and back from the cliff edge and the original part of the town below the cliff and at the sea edge.It was at the bottom we had to get to and the route we needed to follow took us on a zigzag course.
The Burstin Hotel is owned by the Brittannia group and it is the largest hotel we have stayed in since arriving in the UK with 10 floors of rooms.We wondered how a hotel in this smallish town in the south east corner of the country could ever hope to fill its rooms every night.
After parking RR and heading up to the reception desk it became clear that this was a hotel for tourist coaches to use en masse as there were OAP’s by the dozens shuffling their way around the expansive lobby on the ground floor.
We decided we would leave the buffet dinner(Gretchen doesn’t do buffets well as she reckons they are a great place to catch someone elses germs)to the OAP’s and head up the hill to see what the town offered by way of a pub for our last dinner on English soil for this adventure.
The town at 6.30pm was deserted of people and after walking around for half an hour or so and not finding a pub we thought we might have to go back and try our luck at the buffet dinner.Actually it wasn’t so much that we couldn’t find a pub,although they were few and far between,but that none of them served meals at night on a Monday.
In desperation of avoiding that buffet Gretchen went into the last one we came across before we returned down the hill to ask the barman if he knew of a local pub serving meals tonight.Yes he did and it was just two minutes walk away up a street and then an alleyway which we would never have found without some guidance.The buffet will be avoided!!!
The British Lion was one of those very old establishments with low ceilings and had been trading for over 300 years and looked to be just the place we should be dining and enjoying a beer on our last night in Britain.So we splashed out(most unusual for the BBA which is usually looking for the cheapest meal on the menu)as we still had a few surplus pounds on the travel card and dined on slow cooked steak and mushroom for Gretchen and a sirloin steak for me,the first since we started this adventure(apart from when we had been in house swap situations and cooked our own) together with a heap of chips and veges!!!There were local beers on tap but our experience of these,even though they give you the local flavour,have not been always that great so we opted for our favourite,Carling Cold!!!
We have had some long days over the past week with extensive travel time on the road and we were ready for a relatively early night in preparation for the ferry across the channel and the start of the next leg of this adventure,France!!

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Photos

Beachy Head
The drop off the cliff took your breath away and no railing to stop you jumping off!!!

The British Lion,Folkstone
Our last pub meal in what has been a truly enjoyable time in Britain

Comments

[Rin]

Brighton
If you're really intent on checking out Brighton some more, about 1 day should do it as there's *really* not much to see there aside from the Pier and the big weird Indian-style palace that one of the Prince's built back in the day. Unless you're a gay man and/or into trance music raves, Brighton's really not a highlight...