Isle of Wight 5-6 July 08

We’d been talking about visiting Gina and Ben on the Isle of Wight for a couple of months and finally found a perfect weekend. Sat 5 July we were up at 6.45am to make sure we were on the road by 8am, I’m not a fan of early mornings, let alone early weekend mornings but we had to maximise our Island time! We drove in Niki’s work-van and had arrived at Portsmouth by 9:30am. We parked up and took a passenger ferry over to the “island”. It is the most expensive stretch of water to cross within Europe, our ten minute ferry crossing costing £8.80 each!

Gina and Ben have a car so met us at the ferry at Ryde and took us tiki-touring around the island for the day. The population is about the same as Tauranga (where we’re from in NZ) and it has approx 40 primary school and six high schools (Gina works at the local council so was telling us all the stats!) so it’s not as small as I had imagined it would be, and is divided into smaller townships with all the shops and everything you need readily accessible. Isle of Wight is famous for the large music festival that is held every year - the biggest one being back in the 70's, and it's also quite popular for the Brits summer holidays. The island of course comes complete with a british beach essential - tacky carnival rides!

We were lucky to have fairly nice weather – apart from the wind, as it’s coastal. One of our stops was the Needles: “The Needles are the western most point of the Isle of Wight and are a series of chalk stacks which protrude into the see at the end of which is a lighthouse”. The views were pretty spectacular. We had a scrummy lunch and sampled the Goddards Fuggle Dee Dum! - a local beer and of course some Minghella local ice cream.

Later in the afternoon we headed down to a local park (via off-license of course!) with a plastic cricket set (made for six year olds) and had some laughs trying to play – had a local ten year old boy join in with lots of energy so he did most the running, whew! That night we went to a local pub for dinner and drinks where we were amused by some interesting outfits donned for a birthday celebration. The guys for example were dressed as grandma, dominatrix and spider man whereas the girls were dirty cop, slutty nurse, sexy maid, skimpy Lara Croft, wonder woman - you get the picture! In their defence they were hot girls… must’ve been an 18th cos I know my backside doesn’t look that good anymore! =)

Sunday we didn’t get going til about 10am. We had a lovely brunch at a nice café – bargain prices compared to London. We visited Osborne house which was Queen Victoria’s Palace by the sea, it was impressive. We were able to see the Queen’s bedroom, the nursery rooms and even royal bathrooms. The grounds were massive and immaculate but we didn’t spend much time exploring as it was pouring with rain! Gina and Ben have Heritage passes so we sneakily used those to save the entry price.

Ben had to pop into work for a couple of hours so Gina drove us out to Carisbrooke Castle. Niki went in to explore whilst us girls had a good catch-up and wander around the outside. Later we did a supermarket mission and met Ben for a late lunch overlooking the water…. And then it was time to head back =( Gina and Ben were such fantastic hosts, thanks guys!!!!!

We took the hovercraft back to Portsmouth which was pretty cool, it comes right up on the concrete! We got back to London around 8:30pm - in time to see part of the exciting Wimbledon men’s final.