Advertisement
Published: October 24th 2008
Edit Blog Post
We arrived early morning at Newcastle and were soon on our way as we had organised for “Kenny’s Canny Car Hire” to drop off a vehicle for us. Susan and Chris were going to visit with Chris’s mum for the day so Lyn and Ken decided to spend the day touring with us.
We decided we would try a TomTom (GPS) for the day as we thought we would venture further afield and tour Durham and surrounds. We were soon on our way navigating through Newcastle, after a few confusing instructions delivered from the TomTom we found ourselves on the motorway to Durham.
When we arrived in Druham it proved to be a beautiful market town full of lovely old buildings. We walked through the village square and up to the lovely Cathedral and Castle which both dominate the highest point in the town. We found the Cathedral was located within the University grounds, it was the start of the Freshman's year and there were young people walking and joking around in the streets which gave a sense of excitement about the town.
Ken chatted to a local security guard and found out which was the best bakery
to sample the local pasties for lunch, they were certainly enjoyed by all. After lunch we decided to walk the boundaries of the town following the river, there were a number of small weirs on the river making it a very picturesque setting.
On the way back to the car we found a local pub with free internet, this find meant Ron & Ken could sample a local pint while we checked our emails, a bit of a bonus really. On the way back to Newcastle we stopped at the Angel of the North, a very large monument that dominates the skyline. The sculpture is Britain's largest and is believed to be the world's largest angel sculpture. It is one of the most viewed pieces of art in the world seen by more than one person every second, 90,000 every day or 33 million every year. It rises 20 metres and has a wing span of 54 metres, almost as big as a jumbo jet.
In Newcastle we stopped to view the bridges crossing Tyne River, in all there are seven bridges. There was an interesting foot bridge, the Millennium Bridge that pivots skyward to allow ships to
pass and a bridge that looked like a small Sydney Harbour Bridge.
We had organised with Kenny's Car hire to drop the car keys off at a house as it was past office hours. We first dropped Ken and Lyn at the docks, where we were lucky enough to see a taxi waiting and asked the driver if we could follow him to the car drop off point so he could give us a lift back to the ship.
Thank goodness we had the driver to follow, the house proved to be very difficult to find in the dark. When we arrived at the supposed drop off house we found the taxi driver chatting to a local lad who said we had been given the wrong house number and it was a few houses down the road where we needed to drop the keys.
The driver explained to us this was an area that he would be suspect about dropping keys and suggested we give the keys to him and he would give it to Kenny the next day. In the meantime Ron had managed to get Kenny on the mobile phone, Kenny explained he had given
us the wrong house number by mistake and it was indeed the house the young lad had suggested, talk about confusing.
The taxi driver was a local and had gone out of his way to help sort out the car debacle and did not charge us any more than he had originally quoted for the lift even though he had spent an extra half hour helping us out, talk about being helped out by the kindness of strangers. As we sailed out of Newcastle we were treated to fireworks before going in for dinner and a show.
The next day was our last full day on the ship and was to be a day at sea much to Ron’s pleasure. We spent the day relaxing. Before lunch we decided to have a cabin party and we took turns visiting one anothers cabins, Ron and I had realised our cabin was noisy being at the back of the ship but I didn't realise until we visited the other cabins just how noisy it actually was. When the ship was moving at 20 knots the noisy was not too bad but when it slowed to around 12-16 knots the vibration
and noisy would increase tenfold, sadly as the ship was travelling slowly between most ports we spent the majority of time in our cabin trying to ignore the noise and the smell of food which seemed to drift down via the ventilation vents from the restaurant above.
Even with the problems in the cabin, the wonderful service provided by the staff, the delicious food (special mention for the after dinner truffle selection), and the fantastic welcome and farewells we had been able to attend in each Port far outweighed the inconvenience of having a not so good cabin. We had been lucky enough to get one of the last cabins available on the ship and felt privileged to have undertaken the voyage.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.051s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 26; dbt: 0.0309s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb