After a reasonably sedate trip to the Inn Doors on Friday night we did an early trip to Portsmouth. Clare was staying here for work purposes, but she took the boys and I to the 8am train. After all my nagging of thing one that he must remember his mask everywhere, and all my advance packing preparation, I managed to get to the station with no facemask. Luckily had a spare disposable in the car, so we were all set for our journey. Quick train to St Pancras, very quiet, and actually quiet in London too. Not busy on our two tubes across to Waterloo. At Waterloo it seemed a lot busier, we got in quite a hefty queue for coffee and cookies at Pret A Manger there, but then our train from there to Portsmouth was not crowded. We got a little pod of six seats to ourselves, so the boys could spread out their games consoles and we could stay socially distanced.
We went direct to Gunwharf, as my original plan was to stay in Portsmouth for the whole day, but we stuck with the lunch-at-gunwharf bit even when the rest changed. We got some bonus exercise having to walk round to the other side of Gunwharf for the one way system and then were a little concerned we'd not get any lunch anyway. Busy there, so we joined a queue for Wagamama right away. We got a table outside in the sun pretty quickly and it was lovely. I had a new vegan thing "vegan chilli squid", it was nice and spicy but not sure I'd order it again. I had a new main too, somewhere between a salad and a buddha bowl and I would say it was a lot smaller than it looked on the menu. Still nice though, and mum and dad paid even though I planned to as it was pay day. I bought the boys new trainers as a little treat, and thing one chose a slightly blingier pair than previously. Gave up on much more shopping after that as it's still too busy to be enjoyable. I had half an idea go go in North Face too, but the business and the heat of the day put me off. Imagine, it was too hot to do something! Haven't felt like that in a while.
I had given up on the plans to stay in Portsmouth, as we could not get a table in The Wine Vaults, so we headed back.
To be continued.
Paul Clarke's weblog - I live in Hythe in the far South. Wed + father to two, I'm a full stack web engineer, + I do mostly js / Node, some ruby, python, php ect ect. I like pubs, parkrun, eating, home-automation and other diy jiggery-pokery, history, genealogy, Television, squirrels, pirates, lego, and TIME TRAVEL.