From London to Weymouth

This morning, after we checked out from our hotel, we left our bags and thought that we would walk to Hyde Park.  When we arrived, we actually discovered that we were in Kensington Gardens.  We walked up the east side of the Long Water, crossed the bridge, from where we could see Hyde Park and the Serpentine and then back down the west side past the Peter Pan statue

The area was just beautiful…

…and there were a lot of people about enjoying a Saturday morning stroll, although some people were exercising a little more vigorously!

After we collected our bags from the hotel we made our way to the Paddington tube station and caught a train to Waterloo.  Initially the train was extremely crowded, but by the time we got to Waterloo many people had alighted, so we didn’t have to struggle to get off.

Although we were only in London for such a short time, we had purchased an Oyster Card – we got a refund of the price of the card and the small amount of remaining money.

We then made our way to where we could get our BritRail pass activated and managed to make it to the Weymouth train that left just after midday.  There were later trains, but it gets dark so early we were glad to catch that one.  Only the front few carriages were going all the way to Weymouth,  As we thought the train was about to leave, we had got on the back carriage.  We then had quite a trek through the train!  However, we eventually made it to the first class carriage near the front of the train and were able to sit back, relax and enjoy the passing scenery.

When we arrived at Weymouth, it was very windy.  However, we made it to the delightful B&B where we are stopping, without being blown away.

We dumped our bags and decided to go exploring.  We walked to the beach – they are very different from our sandy beaches at home.

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Of course no-one was swimming, although a few hardy souls were, like us, walking.  After an ice-cream, we walked to the Wey River.  It was very, very windy on the bridge.  This is a photo looking downstream – it was very nearly dark.

 

After our time in Europe, it is interesting to see a lot of familiar place names – Trafalgar, Bayswater, Upwey are just a few that come to mind!

After some hot food from a nearby fish and chip shop we walked back to the B&B.

We are off to Penzance tommorow...