On the Road Again!

Friday 23rd February This weekend's outings started with a Friday drive with Reggie to Bodiam Castle . The castle is a ruin built in the 14th Century and set in some grounds that are dog friendly.  It's a nice walk and for us humans it has a gravelled path to walk on. It was about 3°C when we arrived. First stop was to check in and sort out parking.   As NT members we get free parking and the new machines can read the QR code on membership cards. Then it was coffee time. Once we had warned up we took a stroll around the site. The castle is on an island although I expect the moat was dug later. We had intended to go across the road to the pub for lunch but we weren't all that hungry.  Instead we tried to get a signal to access doggiepubs.com to see if the pub at Rye Harbour was dog-friendly.  It's not on there. Instead I set the sat-nav for Rye on the coast and we would look for a pub called the Ship Inn. ...

By the time we had done the days chores it was a bit late when I finally got out for a test ride with the TomTom fitted on the new Fred Carno's outfit of a RAM mount and dumbbell setup. Amazingly, TomTom had forgotten that the Cardo Scala existed and I had a little faff about to get it all sorted setup.   It was gone 1730 by the time I set off. I wanted a little run to get the kit settled in and set the TomTom for the Western Heights at Dover.  There are forts all around Dover marking its significance as a major port, and one only 22 miles from France. The Castle was started by the Normans on about 1080 but there is actually a Roman lighthouse on the site. Apart from a refugee and illegal immigrant centre, I couldn't actually find the defences. Maybe I didn't look hard enough as Tom wanted me to enter a housing estate that looked wrong. In the end I did go up to the Castle to find a parking spot overlooking the Castle, and found the coach park. The sky was so grey that I al...

Took a drive to Dover to give Claire an outing and to give her some exercise. Ended up at Dover for a walk along the seafront and an ice cream. Sadly, I didn't have a lens capable of shooting pics of the fly-past by the Spitfire and its pair of helicopter escorts. Looking on the net shows that a company does these trips and they are a mere £895 a head.

As we were still on holiday we had a drive out to Dover, one stop for a look around the Castle, and another to have lunch and sit above the Eastern Approaches to read in the sun in the White Cliffs Park. If you are members of English Heritage or The National Trust, both would be free, if not, the Castle is £9.50 each and to park on the top of the White Cliffs is £1.50 per vehicle. Although I have lived near Dover for many years, it's not a place I frequent very often, mainly to leave from the ferry terminal! So this was my first visit to the Castle. The roots go back to the Saxons for a fort and the church, and to the Romans for the " Pharos " (pic 3). Most of the work was done in the 13th centrury by Maurice, the engineer that Henry II entrusted to build the castle on the site of earlier fortifications. There was a tidy up in time for Henry VIII's in 1539, when the castle was seen to be old and rather out of fashion. It was of course 300 years old by then. It was giv...