Bus Odyssey

This morning dawned blue skies and much less windy than yesterday - hurray.  Today we had decided to buy some Bus Rover tickets and go for a wonder. The bus stop is literally outside our front door, so we got the 9.47 towards Douglas.  We had packed our swimming stuff as we discovered the National Sports Centre in Douglas on the Internet: it has 2 x 25 meter pools and 2 flumes, a jacuzzi, fountains etc etc.  Right down a certain young man's street!  He was very happy with us and to be fair it was a really good set up, very reasonably priced so we were happy too.  We did some runs on the slides, some messing about in the junior pool, then some lengths in the adult pool before playing on the slides again.

One boy and his cow.

We spent a good hour or so messing about and only got out because we were all getting quite hungry. We found a cafe in the reception area which was doing very cheap yet lovely homemade food.  Result, we tucked right in.  The facility really is very good, they had huge indoor halls, a running track, squash courts, hard outside courts etc etc.  Way better than anything we have nearby and considering their population is roughly the same as Craven, it makes you wonder how they do it?  Also they have Post Offices in pretty much EVERY little settlement here.  How?  What have they got that we don't?

We got a bus from the Sports Centre into Douglas, did a little souvenir shopping (well the boys did - I didn't find anything!) and then we went to the Manx museum to finish off the Lego trail that we started in Peel on Wednesday.  Another very good and very large museum.  Not as child friendly as the House of Manannan but good non the less and free.  As we were tired from the swimming we didn't really take in much from the displays but we found the Lego figures, so Tom is entered in the competition - if he wins he will have to come back for a photo shoot!

We then went for a walk along the prom.  It was earlier than we thought, so instead of hanging around Douglas which seemed quite boring - one shopping street full of the usual stores, nothing different, nothing new, no obviously interesting restaurants, so we decided that as we had a Rover ticket on the buses to get a bus to Ramsey and see what restaurants we could find there, that way we would do a full lap of the island by bus.

We had to chop and change buses to be able to do so, but we were successful and got the bus up to Ramsey.  The place was dead, it is Friday night?  Oh hum, we found a chippy in the end and had fish and chips.  I still haven't managed to get any queenies, so tomorrow will be all about that!

We got our last bus back to Ballaugh, had our nightly game of Rummikub (Tom won today for the first time ever!!!!) and slobbed.  Unfortunately Matt has been ill for most of the holiday (today is the first night he has had a beer in the evening) and now I'm coming down with something.  Seems to be the theme for February holidays as we had similar last year albeit much worse!