Quick Trip to Beach

We are down to the final week of being at the DH and living in London before we move out and being other travels around the UK. We looked at the list of some of the things we still wanted to do and visiting Brighton was on the list. We decided to head off that way. It is an hour national rail trip to Brighton and so we bought our tickets and headed down to Blackfriars station. We had not been to this station, and it was small and nice. The ride was very relaxing and beautiful. The Brighton station was big, but we made a quick walk down to the beach.

For those who have never been to the UK, the beaches here are not the nice white sand beaches of the Gulf Coast but instead are stone beaches. I did become a bit concerned when I say a message scribbled into the beach for Becky. She assured me that it was not for her, but I am going to be keeping an eye out for Callum. I also found it curious that they have skinless & boneless chips here. Again, for those who do not know, chips are what are called French fries in the US.

We had a nice lunch at a little place right on the beach and enjoyed the views. We saw a gorgeous sailboat pass by. We then walked up to the Brighton Pier. The pier is clearly where they crowds will be, come summer. We grabbed an ice cream and walked along the pier. We did not ride any of the amusement rides on the pier but just enjoyed the walk. We both had to admit that Brighton was much bigger than we thought. There was an old pier out in the water, and that pier was built in the 1860’s and had its height of usage in 1919, with over 2 million people visiting. WWII brought much of that to an end, and along with several bad storms the pier eventually stopped being used and then fell apart and over the past 20 years began to fall into the channel. There have been many projects to try and restore it, but none have gotten any further then ideas and now it has been declared unsalvageable and just sits out in the water as a memory.

We slowly made our way back to the station and rode back as we had to meet with our cadre later that evening. It was a good day and would love to come back with more time. One could easily come in the early morning and stay till after dark. There is much of the town alone we did not explorer and more along the beach we would have loved to have had time to visit.