Isle of Wight

Tally Ho!

Last weekend my wonderful co-worker, Hayley, and I took a spontaneous trip to the Isle of Wight, a small island off the south coast of the UK in the English Channel. By spontaneous, I mean that we came up with the idea on Friday around 5pm, booked our ferry ticket at 6pm and left first thing Saturday morning. This blog is a story of our journey and adventure in the squirrel filled island of the quaint and beautiful Isle of Wight!

Pictures of this adventure can be found here: http://picasaweb.google.com/bbergey/IsleOfWight

Before we embarked on our journey, we had to take care of other things first. In the office we tend to call the later part of the day "Pimm's o'clock." This is similar to saying "Beer o'clock," meaning it's time to go to the pub and have a drink. Pimms refers to a kind of alcohol they have here that is often mixed with lemonade and then served in jugs over ice with orange & lemon slices, mint, and cucumber. I had my first Pimms on Friday and it was great! We enjoyed it at a pub along the river a short walk from work and my flat.

Saturday morning I packed up my pack and met Hayley at her flat. We packed up her girlfriend's car (a mini cooper) and headed southwest to the port town of Southampton. Southampton is the town where the Titanic departed. We had a couple hours to explore the waterfront and old-town area. There were a number of memorials for the Titanic and Navy sailors lost at sea. We randomly found a really cool pub where we enjoyed an excellent lunch. The barkeep was very cranky, but the food was amazing and the pub seemed like it had been untouched for hundreds of years. It was really dark, the floors were often sunken, and in places it seemed like the balcony and walls were ready to cave in. We think it was originally a courthouse. Check out the picture I took of a poster inside.

After filling up on lunch, we boarded the ferry and set off toward the Isle. After an hour we approached the island and the sun started shining. We also found out that it was the weekend of a giant sailing festival and the sea was filled with literally hundreds of sailboats. Some of them looked like they were racing. There were also tons of people enjoying the festival along the waterfront. After landing we headed toward the center of the island, found a grocery store and stocked up on food for the weekend. We brought our camping gear and planned to find a random place to camp that night. We also had a stove and a disposable bbq.

Our real journey begins here as we left the city of Newport and headed toward the west side of the island. We were surprised how small the island really was; towns on the map came much quicker when we were driving than what we expected. We also learned that there are many types of squirrels on the Isle of Wight. We saw a road sign telling us to watch out for squirrels. A few hundred yards later we saw another sign telling us to watch for red squirrels. Apparently the two colonies of squirrels do not mingle.

The west coast of the island is pretty quiet and not very crowded. Our first stop was a neat geological feature called The Needles. As you'll see, they are a series of rocks that stick out of the ocean near the shore. There was a very small and eerie, deserted amusement park near the shore of The Needles that was reminiscent of a horror movie. As we headed down the coast, we made a few stops at some small towns and beaches along the way. The scenery was very nice and the hilly countryside was filled with farmland, trees and neat houses with the occasional red, or plain, squirrel.

We passed a number of campgrounds, but our goal was to find a random place to camp outside of a campground since most of them were just big fields. However, we found this very hard to do. There certainly weren't any places along the road and the land was open farmland. We kept driving in hopes that we would find a nice place to perch for the night, but as it got later, the prospect of finding one was getting grim. Eventually we made a few random turns onto some backroads and found a nice place to park the car and walk a few hundred feet to the bottom of a field surrounded by trees. It was here that we set up camp for the night and enjoyed an evening filled with burgers, smores, cider and wine.

After a night of light to medium rain, we woke up the next morning and made some breakfast. Egg sandwiches, beans and another smore just for fun! It was Hayley's first time eating smores so we had to eat as many as we could. Since we had made our way half way around the island, we had the whole day to explore the busier, east side of the Isle. It is definitely filled with bigger, touristy towns, but it was still really nice to spend some time on the beach and explore the shops and sights along the way. Our first stop was at a Rock Shop in a smaller village. A Rock Shop refers to a coastal English candy tradition, just like we enjoy salt water taffy in the States. Rock is just a stick of hard candy. I picked up a bag of mixed flavors and Hayley got a bunch to take home.

We then made our way to the highlight of our trip, the small yet busy village of Godshill. Godshill is full of small shops and restaurants, a really old village church atop the hill, and best of all a small model village. We visited the model village which was surprisingly large and extremely detailed. It even included a section that was a model of the village of Godshill, included a model of the model village! We then walked up the hill to the church, which was surrounded by really old tombstones that couldn't even be read. The houses around the church were really quaint and cute, most of them even having thatch roofs. After leaving Godshill, we headed back to the east coast to the town of Sandown where we had some lunch, went to the pier, and spent some time on the beach, despite the rain. Sandown was probably really cool 20 or 30 years ago when everything was new and touristy, but I don't think it's been updated since so it's more of a cheesy place if anything else. But the beach and waterfront was still really nice, nice enough for us to buy a $2 kite fly it until it ripped! We eventually made it up the coastline and back to East Cowes and the ferry dock where we took the ferry back to Southampton and then drove about 2 hours back to London.

Overall, the trip was really really nice. It was absolutely wonderful having someone to travel with other than myself. Hayley and I had a great time and spent our time in the car listening to cheesy girl-rock and making fun of English phrases and banter. It was also nice riding in a car again. Windows down, music up, and the flexibility to go anywhere you want. The train is a good way to see the countryside, but nothing beats the car. Hopefully it's the first of other similar trips with good company. Thanks Hayley!