england countryside #23- nottingham

The last day….waaaaahhhh!! This was Saturday, October 30. We’d decided to spend the day in Nottingham, which is only about ten miles from the marina. We’d initially thought we’d be spending a lot of time in Nottingham when we first booked the canal boat, since it’s so close to Sawley. We started to buy passes to Notthingham Castle and Sherwood Forest, but (fortunately) decided to wait till we got there and not get them online like we did the London Pass. I think that’s before we’d decided to rent a car, and at the time we thought Notthingham would probably be our main source of entertainment other than floating down the canal. I think we actually assumed we’d be taking the boat to Nottingham, and we could have done just that had we in fact taken the boat out at all. Which we didn’t. We rented the car and took off in the complete other direction. So Nottingham ended up just being a last-day visit. And since we were wiped out from our Wiltshire travels, and from our adventures getting back to the boat the night before, AND we had to get all packed up so we could hit the road the next morning at 6, we ended up getting a pretty late start to Nottingham. I think we got there around 1:00, and we were meeting MargUK at the train station at a little after six. So we did have some time to wander around.

Nottingham is BIG. Nottingham was, for some reason, not at all what I was expecting. I am not sure what exactly I was expecting, but I think it was more along the lines of a huge castle dominating a green little town with a canal running through it, and of course surrounded by Sherwood Forest. (Tall Guy DID warn us that there is not much of a forest, and in looking at the Wikipedia article I see it’s 1.63 square miles. That is a very very teeny forest. No wonder I never did see it). Nottingham In Reality, as opposed to Nottingham In My Imagination, is a great big city. It has a huge city center, with a gazillion shops — a lot of really NICE shops.

We totally lucked out driving in. We’d actually thought we might just take the bus, since one ran from Sawley to Nottingham, but we had a hard time figuring out the schedule and it looked like the last bus back to the marina was at six in the evening which of course wouldn’t work at all since we were meeting Marg. And we could have gotten a late one to Long Eaton but then we’d have to take a taxi back to the marina, and it just seemed too complicated. So we drove. And despite being startled at the size of the city, and wondering where the hell to park so we would be close to the train station, (and okay, I admit it, going the wrong way down a one-way street and having alarmed pedestrians waving madly at me and thank god for teeny little cars that are easy to turn around in on one-way streets) and getting a little frazzled and just deciding to park at the first lot we found… turns out that was the exact lot we needed to be in, right at the Town Center and a block or so away from the train station.

I think by the time we got all this figured out it was after 2, so we just wandered around. We were quite worn out by all our previous adventures, and wandering around was really about all we could manage.

Nottingham was PACKED with people. It was amazingly crowded.

 

Nottingham was also full of…..

 

ZOMBIES!!!

Okay, I REALLY wasn’t expecting zombies to be staggering all over the place. But they were. Of course being the day before Halloween probably had something to do with that, but it was pretty entertaining. I’ve only just realized that second sign says Zombie Hood. I thought they all said Zombie Walk. Oh, now I see on yet another picture of the first group, the back of their sign also says Zombie Hood.

They were surprisingly well behaved zombies, though, waiting for the lights to change before they crossed the road.

 

In addition to the zombies, Nottingham has some very pretty old buildings.

Of course, being us, we had trouble locating the castle. The castle which I assumed would be dominating the town. But thanks to good direction signs for tourists, we finally found it. It was also not quite what I expected.

We also thought we could go wander around the castle, although now I’m not sure why we thought that. Maybe we read it, but we did believe we could go to the gift shop and see the outside of it, without having to pay the fee to go inside. Sadly, there was some sort of medieval festival going on and we couldn’t go in the courtyard area.

 

Oh, well. We kept wandering around and we had a snack and a beer in a nice little pub and of course stopped at Starbucks since there were nearly as many Starbucks as zombies in Nottingham. And then made our way down to the train station to meet Marg, a little afraid that since Kim and I do tend to get lost at every turn, we’d not be able to find it. But we were on time, and so was Marg!

That’s Kim up there, as we wandered around the station. Actually, we were a little early — I see the clock says 6:10 and I think she arrived at 6:25, but oddly there was nowhere to sit and wait for arrivals so we just wandered around, as wandering was something we became very proficient in during this trip.

And when Marg arrived at last, we found her hotel (REALLY close by, which was nice. Initially we’d invited her to stay on the canal boat with us… before actually seeing the canal boat. Hahahahaha!!!!) and then we went to get some dinner. We walked back over to the City Center and…. it was empty. Practically everything was closed, the streets were deserted… and it was only something like 7:30, if that. VERY weird. Of course, I suppose the zombies could have had something todo with that, but it was yet another Nottingham Surprise. But we finally did find a very nice place, with a good variety and although it was quite crowded (being the only place open, practically) we got a table pretty quickly. And the food was great. And the company was even better!

I have a picture of Kim too here, but unfortunately it is a very very bad one of Kim, so I’m not posting it. It was wonderful getting to meet Marg, though. It was like we’d known each other forever – and we kind of have, we’ve been online friends since even before OD. We used to frequent the same About.com board on journaling at least 10 years ago.. maybe 11. That’s actually where I first heard of OD, too, and thought, why in the hell would you keep a journal that you let EVERYONE READ???? I was just beyond pleased that we actually managed to meet up, and it was because Marg was willing to take this day-long train ride all the way down from Scotland and spend the night in Nottingham, all just to spend a few hours with us. She’d tried to come down to London the weekend before when we were meeting Tall Guy, but that didn’t work out. The only bad thing was that the time just seemed so short. It was the highlight of the trip!

And that….. is the end. Well, almost the end. I am going to do one more entry and wrap it all up. Naturally the trip home was not without incident, and of course I also want to post some of Kim’s pictures, which I have not managed to get on Flickr yet. So it’s not quite over, but it certainly is drawing to a close. *sniff*