Oct. 02, 2013: Ripley, Derbyshire, England

---

Rain this morning. Mostly light, then pouring as I arrived in Leicester. But by the time I had wandered around the town centre for a bit, hung around the market and stopped for a pint (a good one!) it had stopped and held off for the rest of the day.

Remained a bit foggy, though. But that's ok; at least it was dry. And it was mostly a day of sightseeing in cities. Had a long-ish lunch with Andy in Loughborough. Wandered around Leicester as I said, then again in Nottingham. So didn't make it too far. But fair enough: that was always the plan. Did get flaked out on by a friend in Nottingham — frankly also not too surprised there.

Consequently headed out of the latter around 5:30 so as to find some place to stay that (I thought) might be cheaper and a bit further along my route.

I'm not convinced that was the best plan. Trying to leave Nottingham at rush hour? Yeah... that was dumb. It took me over an hour and a quarter to make the 5-ish miles to the M1. Would've been faster to walk, etc.

• Leicester Market. Coolest market anywhere!
  
• “Voted Britain's Favourite”
  
• Leicester clock tower
  
• Castle
  
• Cathedral
  
• Brightly coloured birds at the Aviary in Queen's Park, Loughborough
  
• More bird
  
• Six
  
• BUNNY
  
• One of my favourite parts of Nottingham has always been the hills
  
• Nottingham market square. Where all that stuff in “Robin Hood” alledgedly took place, etc.
  

Then I arrived in Ripley just after sunset: my map said it was the last large-ish town for a while, so figured I'd stop there. Only found two inns: one was already full and the other, closed entirely. At the former I asked around to see what else there was in town. After a bit of chatter, they pointed me to the v. corporate chain motel out on the highway. Sigh. Well, if that's what there was, that's what there was.

Afterward, looking at Google, it seems I would have had at least two other places to try. Oh well.

For dinner I finished off the last of the parmesan, avocado and focaccia I bought at Borough Market in London. Will definitely have to try some more somewhere.

Should have done so at the Leicester market, but for some reason it didn't occur to me. That one has got to be the coolest market ANYwhere. I love it to pieces.


(Sorry if this video is rotated sideways. It's my first time using Vine, and: oops.
Also, turn the sound on for the full experience.)

Today’s weather: 13 and rain. Well, rain in the AM. Mostly overcast and foggy in the PM
Today’s road: B6047 - A6 - A60 - A52 - A610. 94km, 4h16. A short day (distance-wise) and quite slow. Speed totally killed by the rush hour traffic out of Nottingham.

---

Comments:

(There are no comments on this page yet.) Add a comment to this page. Make a new comment: Your name: Subject: Comment: Convince me you're not a spam-bot by correctly entering the animal name and 5-character code in the picture on the left (example: "giraffe Yn9eg"):   Don't translate smileys   HTML not enabled, click here for allowed formatting.

Posting and Formatting Instructions Maximum post length: 4000 characters (longer posts will be truncated). Posts can't yet be edited, sorry. If you wish to delete a post, please email me directly. HTML not enabled, you may use the following formatting codes: [[i]]text[[/i]] puts the text in italic [[b]]text[[/b]] puts the text in boldface [[m]]text[[/m]] puts the text in monospace [[x]]text[[/x]] makes the text struck through [[u]]text[[/u]] makes the text underlined [[+]]text[[/+]] makes the text larger [[-]]text[[/-]] makes the text smaller [[^]]text[[/^]] makes the text superscripted [[red]]text[[/red]] makes the text red (also: blue, green, yellow, orange, brown, grey, cyan, magenta, black, white) [[q=somebody]]text[[/q]] quotes the text that somebody wrote [[url=http://www.example.com/]] inserts a link to http://www.example.com/ [[img=http://www.example.com/image.jpg]] inserts the image found at http://www.example.com/image.jpg [[!entity]] inserts the HTML character entity &entity; MSN smiley shortcuts are translated into icons, unless the "Don't translate smileys" box is checked.

---

<-- journal index

RSS:     Contact: seanni (AT) trichotomy.ca