Exploring Lowestoft

BRRR!!! It has been so chilly that we actually put the heating on. I am a heating Scrooge usually but even I have suggested putting it on lately. All through my childhood I used to bitch when my parents wouldn’t put the heating on and now I finally get their pound signed reluctance. This week I even had to de-ice Goldie (the car).

We haven’t been up to much, I finally got my infected toenail cut back at the doctors… You guys it was so gross. It is still in fact quite gross but it’s healing, super painful after a 12 and a half hour shift at the hospital I can tell you. And we finally got round to buying some covered hanging rails from Argos to disperse the boxes of clothes everywhere. The cats love them and think they’re little dens ready for them to jump noisily in and out of at 3am. We also put up some of our photos and a couple mirrors that we’d been meaning to do so our house is looking more like a home.

What else what else… Oh we walked from Yarmouth along the coastline to Caistor and back last week which was really nice and the sun actually shone, for once. We haven’t gone out for walks as much as we usually like to because of the weather but when we have we’ve enjoyed them.

I have still not replaced my much missed laptop that died, there’s plenty of cheap ones about but none of the cheap ones are capable of playing the sims 4! I need the sims 4 in my life, I have owned every Sims game since the first Sims and I’m not about to let adulthood stop that. We leave for our big trip to Canada in a little over a week and I’ll be posting what we get up to on our adventures. This week we went for a look round Lowestoft which surprisingly has a really lovely beach I hadn’t seen before.

I think it must be a popular walk in Lowestoft because we saw about a million dogs out enjoying it with their owners, I just love the different beach huts lining the shore. I’ve never had a beach hut so I had trouble explaining to Kim what exactly English people use them for other than storing deck chairs in, however, when she started pointing out the bargain winter storage prices I thought I might have failed to get their purpose across. We teach each other a lot of weird things, today Kim taught me about some American thing called “awkward turtle” (google it) and in return I taught Kim where Ireland was on a map. Again. This might not be so bad if Kim wasn’t convinced that she and her family were in fact Irish.

I’d definitely like to go back to Lowestoft in the summer though, the beach front looked like it was having a lot of work done to it, I seem to remember someone telling me it had been done a few years back but it had a sign saying the sea defences were being rebuilt and was costing two and a half million pounds… ouch.

We stopped at a little place along the front for lunch.

And then we walked through the shops on the way back to the car and discovered a small shop that sold American sweets so we had a mooch round and Kim was thrilled to discover they sold canned pumpkin and jiffy corn muffin mix. Now I can tell you that pumpkin pie is delicious but I have been promised cornbread muffins… they just don’t sound that nice… corny bready muffins… I have been assured they will be very tasty so we shall see.

Anyways, I haven’t got much else to report but I will keep you posted on Canada!

Boxing Day & New Years Eve

  My blog’s a bit late this time, my laptop has packed up. The other day it made a fut fut fut sound as I turned it on… and I waited… and waited… aaand that’s all, it just never came on. So after a trip to the repair people down the road I will now be buying a new laptop I expect.. sob. Just what I need in life, more debt am I right? Anyway I digress because I wanted to tell you all about what we did for Boxing Day and New Years Eve – don’t get excited it wasn’t anything fancy.

For Boxing Day Kimberly had very thoughtfully bought me tickets to the Hippodrome Circus in Great Yarmouth that we’d been absentmindedly saying we should visit at some point some time vaguely in the future so that was a nice surprise.

We walked in and we had seats in the front row and I was thinking… well you know this is fun but it is Yarmouth and is aimed at children I’m not expecting great things. Well wasn’t I wrong? It was so fun. There were dancers and acrobats, jugglers, fire, some laser light show thing, strong men. The part I was most impressed with was the clown, I always remember my parents disliking clowns, particularly my dad who despises them and so I think I’ve never liked them too much, they’re just too slapstick. But the clown they had wasn’t dressed up, very modern, subtle humour, I was very pleasantly surprised and I thought he was very good.

  Anyways so at the interval everyone was faffing with the carpet and Kim and I were preoccupied with popcorn but suddenly the show was starting and during the middle of an act the floor dropped and began to flood opening up to a water show, oh my godddddddd. There was a lot of prancing about in the water going on with spangly costumes, it was brilliant.

So fun. Anyway after that we went to Yarmouth’s answer to Nandos – Fish & Grill – and I had my first ever kabab (does it count as a kebab if it’s not sheared off a fatty revolving stick by hairy lecherous kebab shop owners I wonder?). So that was tasty, new year new… chicken? And there was a 10% off voucher for it on our circus tickets so that was all very nice.

Then on New Years Eve we didn’t have anything planned particularly but I saw an offer on Groupon for a steam train ride on the Bure Valley Railway which is a small steam powered hobby rail line so I figured we may as well give that a go.

It was sweet, the carriages were fairly comfy and had heating so we were toasty all the way from Aylsham to Wroxham. And we got a free mince pie… heated… oh the luxury of it all.

Then I got the pleasure of introducing Kim to Roys. Roys of Wroxham. Hallowed ground for any and all elderly people of Norfolk. Old people f*&cking love Roys. They can’t get enough of it. As soon as you hit retirement I think there might be a beacon in your head that is trigged, drawing you ever closer to Roys. Roys makes me think of my grandparents, Roys was a lovely day out to them. When I phoned my beloved Great Aunt to have a chat this week and mentioned going to Wroxham even she mentioned Roys… she lives in Essex! How did she know?? For those of you who aren’t familiar with Roys its a Norfolk shop that started in Wroxham and expanded a lot and now is a sort of old person department store set over several buildings in Wroxham and now has some extra branches of Roys dotted about Norfolk. It even has a little statue of Mr Roy.

I have to confess I also love Roys though, it is a mecca to all tat and I love to browse tat. There used to be a small Roys nearby when I lived in Bowthorpe and I particularly liked to browse their low budget versions of boardgames with such famous titles as “Who Is it?” (Guess Who), “Surgery” (Operation) and “Angry Donkey” (Buckaroo)… OK maybe I made that last one up. But I was pleased to see there are new titles to be had these days.

Ahh so that was all jolly nice. We stopped at the pub for some lunch and I had some strange chicken caesar bread thing…

Then we bought some bird feed and fed the birds and Kimberly was terrified by the swans who did not appreciate boundaries or the meaning of personal space, and I laughed.

  So all in all it was a pleasant day.