Friday, September 16, 2005

Great Yarmouth 2005

Yes, for the past few days I've been doing time in Great Yarmouth, a coastal town in Norfolk, United Kingdom, over 100 miles away from where I live.

Using a 7 seater car which we borrowed from a neighbour - which was ten times better than the cramped turquiose coloured 2-door car we have, we drove all round the twists and turns thoughout the motorways and small towns. Whe we left, the sky was all cloudy and horrible...


...but when we arrived, it was actually sunny! In fact, it remained sunny until Thursday. It's a great job I took my hat with me, even though it shrunk in its last wash.


We had a 'meal' in the tavern in the camp, where I had a salad sandwich. I refused to have chips at all, and there wasn't anything else around there that I liked. My dad wasn't happy about the food there either. We were waiting for my grandparents to arrive, so I stepped out on my own to check out the gift shop, and when I got back, there were my grandparents!

Eventually we got the key to the caravan and started unpacking. Everything about that was fine, except for the toilet room - it beared one of the worst smells ever! My mum cleaned every part of it, but it still stank like vomit. There was also some dark yellow stuff around the doors which we hope wasn't vomit either...the way some people treat property that's not theirs eh?

Later on me, my sisters and grandparents went down the beach for a bit. Apparently some of those energy windmills have been placed around the horizon, so that wasn't something I've seen before. The weather was fantastic at this time, the sea was a lovely dark blue, and the sand felt just lush, not too boiling hot.

Then we all decided to go down the seafront. Firstly we were waiting for a bus, bus since there was
no sign of one coming, we had to walk all the way down to the pier, arcades and that. The sky cast a gorgeous sunset before the night arrived.

At one of the arcades, I put a pound in one of the crane machines, and somehow managed to win a SpongeBob plush on my first go - one where he's dressed up as a basketball player of a sort. The other times failed. I must have been really lucky to win a plush from those crafty machines, my
mum and sister tried to get it themselves but kept losing.

You see the trouble with these caravans is that the walls are so thin it gets really cold overnight, especially at these coastal holiday ca
mps. I had to wear shorts on the first night, and by morning I really didn't want to leave bed because of how cold it was.

On Tuesday, my dad took us all up to a little town 30 miles north called Cromer. It was one of those towns where all the senior citizens like to go, like Walton on the Naze, where I went to last year. Most of the shops were suited to older people, but they had wicked interiors. Like this shop that sold artworks for instance. The interior of that looked a bit like an art studio (well yeah!), and down below there was a basement that somehow reminded me of the ceramics room I worked in when I was at college. It literally had this model of some oriental misty pond thing - think the video for 'Turn Off the Lights' by Nelly Furtardo and you'll get the idea.

There was however a small shop where they sold second hand games. Nope, there weren't many Gamecube games,
but I managed to catch a copy of Worms 4 Mayhem on PS2 for £22. Elsewhere in the town my nan and I bought ourselves some raspberries, apples and peaches from a grocers, and that was about it.

Later on we had a look around the independant shops in the seafront, and stopped in one of the restaurants for a meal. There I had a mushroom omlette and some salad - it was OK I guess, I didn't eat all of it (it was fairly big), but I didn't think I was used to eating mushrooms quite yet.

I really should have taken some photos of the streets of Cromer while I was there, the weather kept on shining out its sun.


Wednesday, we were taken to a little wildlife park not far from the camp. While there I had a small photo-taking spree, taking shots of all the animals that weren't behind glass. One of the birds in particular - a pink cockatoo - was making the loudest noise you could think of...and I thought my own budgie was a noisy bugger! But I think the highlight of that was when we got to the tiger section...a tiger was sitting right at the end of the netted platforms we had to walk on. I couldn't take a shot of it unfortunately because it was way too close. But it was beautiful...it pains me to think that heartless people kill these graceful creatures so that their bones are made into medicine...

Other animals that I did take shots of included crocodiles, many birds - pelican, owl, cockatoo, peacock - a chipmunk, baboons and monkeys - one monkey in particular was carrying a bin liner around the cage and another of his kind was chasing him! I took a short movie of them with my camera.

Back at Great Yarmouth, I had a walk around the high street bit of the town, and, with the help of
my sister , I bought a copy of Paper Mario 2 on Gamecube. It was £30, and I only had twenty, so my sister lent me ten towards it.

But I still found no copy of Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga. Not in one game shop.

By Thursday, the weather got really crappy. No more sunshine. Luckily it didn't rain when we were hanging around in the theme park, but when we went back to the independant shops, it did. Real hard. We had a meal in another restaurant where I had... mushrooms on toast and corn on a cob! Ac
tually, this time the mushrooms were really nice, as was the toast, though it was soggy. I wanted to have more. For dessert, there was a chocolate cake in front of me...mousse, fudge, whipped cream...it was so sweet and sickly, it was ungodly!

I wanted to check out a few more shops, so only my mum
went with me this time. She wanted to get some money out anyway. The little DVD shop around was a waste of time going, and that little game shop that was under the bridge wasn't there anymore. It shut down. Now THAT was a real waste of time. That was when the rain poured right down and we got soaked to death!

Back at the caravan, I found that my CD player wasn't working anymore, to my misfortune...I think putting in those Ni-MH batteries in it killed it, it said in the instructions that I shouldn't...well, it was a bit of a risk to take really, I didn't want to listen to the crap on the car radio.

On Friday morning as we were waiting for my dad to get back from taking my grandparents to the station, a black cat just randomly popped into our caravan! It had no collar on, but was quite friendly, all it wanted was some food. Since we cleared the fridge of everything, my sister went down the shop and got it some cat food. The cheeky bugger was trying to open up the fridge and get up on the work surface. I took a few movies of it on my camera while it was eating. I think it goes around the camp and begs for food.

So in all, I had mixed thoughts about this holiday. While some times, like when I won the SpongeBob plush, were great, some times, like the heavy rain, were quite bad. But I had a good time.

Now, I should set up my Gamecube and play Paper Mario.