With hindsight, i see this was all too much, especially leaving Lowestoft to come back home until ten made for a very long day indeed. But before we reached that state of nirvana we had the day to enjoy.
There is something wonderful heading out before the masses onto the empty and open roads, zipping up to Dartford, under the Thames and into Essex before turning off and driving up the A12 and heading north towards my hometown.
We turned off at Colchester and headed to the coast; there were the usual boy and girl racers in the inevitable souped up Ford Focuses nipping in and out of the light traffic causing chaos, but they turned off towards clacton, and we headed to the delights of Dovercourt and Harwich.
Hawich is a port, which mainly links England to Holland via The Hoek of Holland, but over the river Felixstowe is a hive of activity as huge ships load and unload amazing amounts of containers, the noise of the works just carrying over the water to us.
Dovercourt is a genteel suburb, with view out into the North sea, with graceful lines of the promenade and a slight rise of a grass covered rise that may have been a small cliff at some point. Pride of place however, are two cast iron lighthouses, built to replace Tudor ones, two lighthouses, on skinny cast iron legs, with a set of steps rising on the outside like a spider's web. One light, the high, is on the beach, and the other, the low, is out some 150 years in the sea. Together, the show a safe heading to enter the port in the days before radar. I snapped them, and snapped them good, and then we walked along the prom towards the town and the river.
We stopped to look and snap flowers growing on the bank, and to look at the people out and about on an early Saturday morning. we ended up in the maritime quarter of the town, all museum and partly disused buildings, some put to new uses, other still waiting. we walked back to the car back down the prom, pausing to take some seeds of a vivid purple poppy that was just glorious, and now we plan to plant some in our garden.
Back in the car and back to Colchester, and then north again into Suffolk. It was now getting towards lunch, and north of Ipswich we spied a sign at Darsham for a pub, The Fox, and so we turned off and waited the 5 minutes for it to open. We had a fine lunch, cod and chips for me and steak in a country sauce for Jools, a glass of Broadside for me and a small cider for Jools, and then it was time to drive on.
We turned off again to drive through Bungay, and on the way we stop to snap a couple of churches at Ilkeshall, two of five very similar scattered around the parish. The churches are small but well made, and both open and well used. St Peters though is in a poor state of repair, with the roof needing repairing if the green stains on the wall were to be stopped.
The transport museum in Lowestoft houses working trams and trolley buses and tries to restore others. It is quite small, but we did get to ride on a tram, through the cobbled streets of the museum, and into the wood beyond. It clanked and screeched its way along the track in a most satisfactory way, and the conductor came along and 'clipped' our tickets, just how they used to. But it was quickly over, and after buying a couple of books we left as more people arrived.
We visited more churches, and I drove round some of my favourite places. we had coffee and a bun at The sparrows Nest, the old Naval Patrol base, now a civic park, but a shadow of it's glory years when I was a boy, when the flower beds would be a riot of colours and numerous ponds full of golden fish. Now just one pool remains, and the water a deep green, and most flower beds empty of everything except rocks.
We visited a couple of churches out in the country, at Haddiscoe and Herringfleet; they are both round towered flint built churches, an East Anglian speciality, and wonderful. and inside beautiful, with remains of wall paintings and gloriously complicated pipe organs filling roof spaces. Both were wonderful I have to say. I snap a couple of others from the outside before we head to the meeting point of the reunion, a pub in town, and find a table as we settle down to wait for people to arrive and for the England game on TV to start.
In the end, just six of us turned up, which was very disappointing to say the least, and England played poorly, from what I saw, and it was time for us to head back home at ten. We stopped off at KFC for something to eat, and it was filling up with those wandering home, bedecked in flags of St George and face paint. How will they face the almost inevitable disappointment when England have to come back hoe? With more beer one suspects.
It takes over three hours to get home, and the roads cleared as the hour got later and Saturday gave way to Sunday. Back in Kent, the motorway was almost deserted, and we sped home, and then to our beds.
As is proper, Sunday is to be a day of rest.
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