Beware the Tides of March

This weekend, I traveled to the Windy City. Thats right, Dover. I only stayed a day, but still had plenty of adventures that dont seem nearly as exciting in retrospect.


Hit the jump.

My journey begins at the Grantham train station. And as with any great journey, this one starts with a lot of sitting around and waiting for public transportation.

Eventually, the train managed to get us to the right city, where I immediately made my way to the nearest restaurant.

The next morning we all ventured into the feezing cold wind to brave the cliffs of dover. We saw many interesting buildings and sights along the way. If only we knew the horrors to come.

Our first sight of the cliffs! If  you look closely, those holes in the side of the cliff are old coal mines. More on that later though.

The most westerly harbour in Dover, where many of the vehicle/people transport barges were going in and out.

My entourage.

There is so little green in Dover, but this pathway up to the cliff seemed to have plenty.

A good view of the harbour, with a ship leaving, with France in the background.

While climbing to the top of the cliffs, we noticed Dover castle in the background. If only we had enough money to see it from the inside.

However, it was very very far away.

A ship in the background with a good view of the French coast.

Eventually we reached the cliffs. However, we began to notice a small problem. The wind had began to pick up to near frightening levels.

Notice the choppiness of the waves. A storm had become to come in, making it even more bitterly cold than it was.

Here is some more information on the coal mines, and how they transported it down the coast to the ships.

Yep, in case you were wondering, that IS snow there. just a reminder how cold it is on the coast.

  Wind.

 More wind.

Here is a couple videos documenting how bad it really was. I would recommend turning the volume on your computer and standing in front of every fan you own while you watch these videos.

A transport barge running along the coast.

These valleys only really funneled the wind making it that much worse. this one was actually so bad that we had to turn around. Some of the less..... male... members of the group quickly tired of the effort required to walk into the 70 mile an hour wind.

So we turned around back towards the town.

Soon we returned to Dover, where we spent the next hour walking around trying to find something else to do.

I found some information on animals but nobody wanted to hang around long enough for me to learn anything interesting. A shame.

More coal mines.

In the center of town, we found this old chapel that had been bombed out during the war.

This is some more information on the church.

We walked up the hill to see some more of the castle, but this is the closest we could get without paying all my food money.

Soon it began to rain quite hard. So we decided to cut our journey short and head back to London.

And in a surprisingly short amount of time, we had made it back to the train station.

We had a LOVELY view of the ocean, which lasted for around 12 seconds. But it was nice when it lasted.

Selfie in the train window.

Soon we arrived at London Kings Cross! How about that?

We had an hour or so to wait for the train back home. So several of my companions waited in line for the platform 9 3/4 picture, while the rest of us people watched.

Before I knew it, we were back home in Grantham! It was a short day, but one of the more exciting ive had so far.

Well, next week I'm off to Paris, so expect lots of pictures of things. or something.