Experience The Adventure

This is a two part entry. Birmingham, is quite north of London. Lyndhurst is in the middle of New forest, SW from London.

So last weekend, I was going to go to new forest. I went out Friday to Fulham Friday, where the air conditioned bars were really nice. On my way back, after 1, there was even an air conditioned bus! nobody knew they existed here. I forgot which bus to take, which meant walking around looking at bus maps. When I finally got home, it was 4 am. To my surprise, I forgot my keys. Since it was warn out and already 4, i decided to sleep on the lawn. It was pretty comfortable, until something woke me up. It was raining, and only 4:30. I tried to sleep in the doorway, but failing that just sat there and read everything around me, flyers, papers, the phone book. You get to see a lot of neighbours, I can’t believe people get up at 5 on Saturday. My housemates weren’t up until 9. Needless to say, the weekend was a write-off, and I never made it to new forest.

Thursday got sat on by a drag queen running the show at a club. Don’t turn your back to them. Fake Abba was great after that, and we partied until the last tube home.

Friday I made it back on the right bus and had my keys! I’m on a role.

Birmingham was pretty large. Even though its the second largest city in England, the trains to Birmingham are really slow and don’t run very often. Saw the museum right away on Saturday. I’ve decided to almost cut out most museums or see them very quickly. They just aren’t that interesting, theres too much and too many of them. Headed down to Jewellery quarter, they recommended taking a bus, but it didn’t look too far. On my way down, the bus went by, so to speed up my journey, and to have an actual route to follow, I took a little jog behind it, as I made my getaway through jewellery quarter. The tours were done for the day, so sometime I will have to go back for a tour of jewellery quarter museum.

Back to the centre to wander around, found some canals. They supposedly have more canals than Venice, but there didn’t seem like that many. The church and graveyard surrounding it seemed to be the major hang out for all the teenagers. Who decided it would be great to sit, play sports and all the rest on a graveyard, who knows.

There are lots of large malls, and a lot of bars and restaurants. The shopping centre in the picture is the bullring, a half circle mall, that has a church in the middle of the half.

I know I will be back for the Cadbury centre tour, the jewellery museum tour, maybe some canals tours and the sea life museum, and the one heck of a pub crawl through the entire city if you want to do it.

Sunday went to New Forest. Now, if you go, do some planning. The transportation on Sundays is not so great, and I knew that. Going off of instinct, i bought a ticket to Amhurst, new forest. If you go, go through Borkenhurst, and take a bus there to Lynhurst. Whats with the hurst? Something to do with sausages? Kory, you would love it here. So in Armhurst, there about 7 stores, and no houses, and two buses that go through on Sundays, one early and one mid day. So being only 4 miles from Lynhurst, I walked along the highway. Got to Lynhurst Yay! There I rented a bike, and bikes around the forest for the next 4 hours. Saw The New Forest Show area, the reptile centre (tiny) and a lot of sidetracks and trees.

It’s not a natural forest, its really just like a park because of the well maintained trails. All the dead trees are cleared, so there is really little undergrowth, and horses rome around and eat the grass. So not a natural forest at all, like you can tell from the pictures. I tried to talk to some horses, but they didn’t like people (i would have riden them to the city if they would have let me).

On the way back, I decided to sidetrack and walk through the park, now that I had an idea where the cities and stations were. It was really nice, and I walked into a group of deer, who didn’t notice I was there. you can really sneak up on deer if they don’t notice, by just walking through the bush. They were really spread out and just relaxing and chowing down on some nice grass. A few males with some nice horns soon joined up, they became very alert. They heard me move when I decided to leave, and they took off in a second. Got back just in time to catch a train to London at the unmanned station. That was one long weekend.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 31st, 2006 at 10:58 am and is filed under London, London Trips, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.