London to Seaton

We were so excited about having a car that we decided to load it up and use it straight away on a road trip. So on Thursday morning we navigated our way south through the crowded streets of London and burst into the rolling countryside to the south. Well, burst is not quite right - more like squeezed given the extremely narrow roads. There was some beautiful, if stereotypical, English countryside all around. Stone buildings and walls, small meadows surrounded by hedgerows, the odd sheep, cow or bunny. Lovely. The downside of the small country lanes is the stress on the driver of course. There's always the chance that around that next bend is another car or van...

We really had no plans (sound familiar?) so headed for Brighton. The pier was as seen in many movies and TV shows, but most of the rides had not yet opened for the spring. The beach was everything I ever thought a British beach would be like - stony, cold and nearly empty. The famous Pavillion was curious and photographable, but we didn't fork out the L7.70 each to enter.
It turns out that this weekend was a Bank Holiday, as the Poms call them. For us this meant that the roads were full and so was the accommodation. We found a B&B in Bournemouth at about 9:00-ish, run by a biker chick who told us everything including that her husband had committed suicide 28 years earlier, and that she had two guys on the go at the same time. We ended up buying a T-Shirt for her son's Goth band, Texas Drag Queen Massacre, which may become a present for O. (Check their website at http://www.texasdragqueenmassacre.com/ for their hit song 'Dead Girls'.)

Next morning I had a big, greasy English breakfast then we headed off westward. We drove semi-randomly around Poole until we found a chain ferry that took us over the estuary to Studland. Of course, being my home town I knew exactly where we were... Close to Corfe Castle it turns out. This pile of stone is still impressive even as ruins so when complete must have been awesome! It looms over a quaint village with house doors small enough to crack even J on the forehead. Better still, it was National Trust so with our Historic Places Trust membership it cost nothing. Sweet.

Half an hour later we were at Bovington Tank Museum. J showed remarkable loyalty in following me around for about two hours looking at all sorts of tanks. Must be love... Turns out you can have too much of a good thing though, so we headed on. We tried Lyme Regis but it was a tad expensive and very full, so we drove to Seaton which was neither for some reason. Another B&B, this time with a couple who offered to sell us CDs of the bloke doing Lounge songs like Sinatra. We didn't take up their offer.

I've decided not to put all the photos directly on the blog, but rather to post them to an album and link to them.

For photos of Bovington Tank Museum, click here.

For general photos of London to Bournemouth click here.