Friday 27 December 2013

Day 361 : flying home

Time to leave and as usual I don't want to go. I'd already decided to soften the blow of the post-Christmas departure and getting back to reality by having one more fabulous meal. We discovered on the first night the twice or triple cooked beef dripping chips and the silky smooth smoked mash are both utterly delicious so I opted to have them both with a locally reared rare steak. I've got a long journey home so a degree of fortifying feasting is required and I also know the fridge is bare.

I've worked out when the next hourly bus is and leave the hotel what I hoped was nearly ten minutes early. Actually I suspect it was only a few minutes after settling the final bill and stuff and it transpired the bus stop outside Titchwell Manor is not the Titchwell marked on the bus timetable but the next stop which is quite a walk away. Clearly a cunning plan to confuse visitors. There are no timetables on the bus-stop nor an indication which direction the bus would be servicing so I am now convinced they're trying to dissuade strangers from using the local buses. It's pretty cold so I didn't want to spend more than a few minutes at the fairly desolate bus-stop, however plan A failed so instead I successfully managed to spend an hour there waiting for the next bus. The only advantage of this unexpected lingering by the side of a very chilly road is that I had plenty of opportunity trying to photograph the Vs of birds, ducks, geese flying overhead, heading away from the cooler coast. This was probably the most fragmented V I spotted, they'd lost their formation somewhat en route but they were the ones I was able to capture as something more substantial than mere dots, so it will represent my last minute bird-watching.

And then it went very dark. There aren't street lamps around here, fantastic to avoid light pollution but really bad when you're dressed all in black carrying three black bags standing at a inky dark bus-stop. The bus driver said I should have flashed a torch, donned a high-vis jacket or something (I must go on record stating I have no such thing that could be designated as fluorescent, apart from perhaps the hours marked on my watch - and I suspect he was thinking of something larger). As I said before, I'm a city girl, these issues just never come up normally!

 

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