30 June 2010 Winchester

House doorways about 2'6" wide - try to get a Harvey Norman lounge suite in here, no way


Welcome to Winchester Cathedral


Winchester Cathedral, Winchester, Hampshire


Interior Winchester Cathedral sans kids


Winchester Cathedral with kids


Sculpture of the Virgin Mary


Karaoke Screen for the kids.


Paving in High Street - check out the size of the paving stones


Winchester Guildhall with park and ride bus.


Lyn by the River Itchen


Lyn doing retail therapy in Winchester.


Mick eating dinner at the Running Horse


AMG C63 Merc which pulled into the car park - rather him buying the petrol than me at £1.20 per litre





We had a quiet day today as you would after all the racing around we have been doing. We drove into Winchester to check the town out and get some petrol.

Mick located the Tesco (Tesco is like Coles and Woolies in Australia) service stations via the Internet before we left so we went there first to get petrol. Again the streets in the town were very narrow as the tourist brochure warns: "This town was built before the invention of motor vehicles so the roads are narrow."

We learnt from our experience in Bath that the best way to prevent Lyn freaking out is to use the Park and Ride. This involves parking at a parking station on the outskirts of town and paying a cheap fee, compared to the parking cost in town, and catching the bus into the city centre.

The parking fee which was £2 here, includes the cost to and fro in the bus. In fact you can have as many to's and fro's as you like as we found when Lyn left her Mobile Phone prominently displayed in the windscreen mount in the car for everyone to see (and steal). So having arrived in town, it was back to the parking lot on the next bus to retrieve it. Oh sorry, it was Mick's fault. It was only a 5 minute bus ride.

Anyway, domestic over, we decided to go to the Cathedral first. Big mistake as the place was packed with school children and you know how these old churches echo. Anyway we decided to wait until they had gone by filling in time in the mandatory gift shop.

Kids gone, we went back inside. What a special place it was and we spent much of the morning standing in awe looking around us.

The Cathedral was built in 1079 not long after the battle of Hastings (you know the date of the battle of Hastings don't you Joyce?) and is one of the largest cathedrals in England. We did a guided tour and the crypt was especially interesting since it regularly floods when the groundwater level is high and had only reopened 2 weeks ago. Between 1906 and 1912 a lot of under pinning work took place using a diver to reinforce the foundations as large cracks were appearing in many of the walls.

Whilst we were inside the school children returned but were quiet as they returned for a short church service.

Then the organ struck up. Mick reckons he has never heard bass like that before. The organist was playing Amazing Grace which sounded fantastic. He reckons the hair stood up on the back of his neck. It was quite moving really.

So the children could sing the words, they had a large screen placed at the front of the church and a lady hidden behind the screen was operating a laptop which projected the words onto the screen.

After the Cathedral visit, we went to do a bit of retail therapy, well Lyn did. Checking out each store to see if it sold anything related to Chuggington. Those of you with children or maybe grand children will know what that is.

Anyway she came out of the Early Learning centre grinning so she must have had some success.

Mick then decided with Lyn's help that he needed a haircut and as there was a shop called Chaps with 3 girly hairdressers he decided to get a haircut while Lyn went off grocery shopping in readiness for our 8 day stay in Bogner Regis. Another reason was that it was only £6.50 for old people compared to £14 in a previous town. Mick lied and told them he was an old person to get the discount.

It was then off to our lodgings at The Running Horse at Littleton where Mick is sitting outside under a shade umbrella typing this whilst Lyn does her Sudoku.

(The owner just drove in in a C63 AMG Mercedes station wagon which sounded like an SS Commodore so we must be paying too much to stay here. It has what look like 20" rims. I'll take a picture.

See you next time....