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Meet Me in St Louis

Good pun for a title of this blog. Washington DC was the starting point of this ten day adventure to the States followed by a trip to Kansas City and then the home of Jazz, St Louis. There was a lovely surprise right at the outset when at the boarding gate at Heathrow I was up graded to Business Class. Made the seven hour flight certainly more enjoyable with the free food and drink, let alone the extra leg room. Brilliant. I thought it was maybe down to Nick who works in the business but it later transpired he had nothing to do with it, all the same, I gave him some credit on Facebook nonetheless! Everything was going fine until I arrived at Dulles Airport. The pathway thing, the connecting gate to the aircraft decided to have a technical hitch meaning the Business crowd had to mingle with the ordinary minions to depart the plane. The train to transport customers then took ages, as did getting through passport control. However by this time my luggage had been delivered to the baggage ...
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Newquay Deja Vu -10 Years on

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  Newquay Deja Vu If there was one place I wanted to re-visit on this trip it was a pub called the Farmers Arms. The first holiday me and Sue ever had was in 1969 to Cornwall. Two weeks shared with my mother and dad, my sister Gwyneth, brother Robert and sister in law Sylvia, and baby Andrea in a bungalow north of Newquay at a place called Porth. There were a few pubs we enjoyed but the favourite was the one called the Farmers Arms which had a cosy lounge and a great jukebox (weren't they all back then?) It’s remained forever in my mind as a great memory of when we were both in our teens and sharing a wonderful experience. I wanted to return to some old haunts that Sue and I had shared during our 45 years together. Coming face to face with your past, meeting it head on and dealing with it. Once done, I felt as if I could move on. That was the theory anyway. Time would tell. So it was on the penultimate day of this holiday I set off from Penzance on a two hour train jou...
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Lands End -10 Years on

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        Lands End Back in the early 1960s a woman called Dr Barbara Moore walked the entire length of the U.K, from John O’Groats at the very top of Scotland to the most southern point of England, Lands End. Barbara’s hike was reported daily on TV news bulletins and made headlines in the national newspapers. Her exploits caught the imagination of everyone. It wasn’t often you saw a woman, or anyone come to that, marching the whole length of the U.K. It was certainly unusual and an amazing achievement. And one replicated a couple of decades later by former cricketer Ian Botham. I checked her bio on Wikipedia. ‘Dr. Barbara Moore (22 December 1903 – 14 May 1977) was a Russian-born health enthusiast who gained celebrity in the early 1960s for her long-distance walking. In December 1959, she walked from Edinburgh to London. In early 1960, she walked from John O’Groats to Land’s End in 23 days. She then undertook a 46-day, 3,387-mile walk from San Francisco to...
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Penzance 10 Years On

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  Penzance I was midway through the week and now ready to go further south, to Penzance, the last stop on the British Railways Southern Region map. The train journey from Teignmouth took three hours; it seemed longer. Stopping at every station. I left earlier than originally planned in the hope I would get to my hotel in plenty of time to catch the Liverpool v Newcastle game in a pub. A game now rendered an anticlimax after the Reds’ surprise defeat at Crystal Palace a few days before which saw their championship hopes disappear down the pan, but never mind, it was still something to look forward to. 1969 was the last time I was in Penzance. When on holiday with my then girlfriend Sue and my family at Newquay. I have a couple of photographs of the town from back then which I wanted to compare to how it looks 45 years on. Virtually the same! Which was a surprise but then again, maybe not. Arriving at the furthest point south of the British Rail network at around 1.30pm an...
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Return to Exmouth and Sandy Bay -10 Years On

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    Return to Exmouth and Sandy Bay With the amount of walking I’d done already, I felt as if I’d been here a fortnight. Twinges in the groin, knees beginning to creak but I had a long way to go yet and I was on my way to Exmouth and Sandy Bay, a short 40 minute train journey from Teignmouth. First of all it was breakfast and I nearly slept in for it. The dining room was deserted again with the girls hanging around sitting on the chest freezers in the kitchen. I was sure they were waiting for me to arrive.   “Cup of tea and a full English?” It’s funny really. I never eat this sort of stuff at home first thing in the morning. Anyway, I just had to ask; “Where's the owner?” To give a hint of what I was getting at, I added; “I heard she's a bit of a case”.   The girl looked a bit sheepish as if she didn’t really want to comment but laughed a little and admitted; “she is a bit eccentric”. OK, I let her off the hook, didn’t want to embarrass her. “She's just ...
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10 Years on - Looe and Polperro

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       Looe and Polperro   Pat and Yvonne left for home early this morning, sending a text to say ‘see you when you get back’. Felt a wee bit strange to tell the truth. However, I still had the rest of the week to enjoy and I was also up early to catch a train to Newton Abbott where I would join the Exeter to Plymouth express, jumping ship at Liskeard. Wasn’t sure what I was expecting but the train was hardly an express, it stopped at every station en route. And it consisted of just two coaches. On board I struggled through the throng of passengers to find a seat in the sardine can and found myself sitting alongside a chump decked out in full Manchester United football gear. Man U grey jogging suit, Man U replica shirt, Man U trainers, even a Man U baseball cap. Looked a right plonker. I guessed he was about 19 or 20 with the mentality of a 13 year old. He sat there alongside who I took to be his mum, a slight looking lady who looked half starved to de...
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Teignmouth 10 Years On

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  Teignmouth “I wish I was coming with you” my old mucker ‘Wilf’, John Wilson said as he dropped me off at Corby Station. In a way I wished he was too. We had shared a load of memories from as far back as the 1960s when we used to travel around the country following Liverpool F.C. and going to gigs. “Where's the rucksack?” Wilf asked, laughing. In 1971 we had headed off down south with just that, and a tent on our backs. We were hitch-hiking and bound for the Isle of Wight but ended up in Ramsgate. Not because we didn’t have a map, more because it was done on a whim. Reason will become clear later on. The abiding memory is of causing mayhem in a shop nearby Ramsgate Station as we knocked boxes of sweets off shelves with the protruding tent poles from our rucksacks and being told angrily, “Get out!!”. Here I was in May 2014 with a hold-all that weighed a ton! I was off for eight days to wander around Devon and Cornwall, starting in Teignmouth. Something I had been looking ...
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