There are bus stops right outside the entrance to our campsite. Buses to and from Alnwick are more or less every 2 hours. We decided to go for the bus at 09:30 which would get us in at 10:15, planning to return on the 14:10 departure from Alnwick bus station. Quite what I was going to do in a town for four hours remained a bit of a mystery.
Modern bus travel, in some areas at least, is interesting. Francine was able to watch our intended bus making its way along the coast road towards our stop on a (mostly) live map on her phone. I’ve managed a similar trip from my favourite Norfolk campsite to ride into Norwich. The bus, a double decker, duly arrived and we got an upstairs front seat to watch the countryside go by.
The bus called in to Craster, which was an interesting side trip. It’s a there-and-back route requiring the bus driver to perform a 3-point turn at a junction of roads in Craster so that he can drive back out the way he came in. Once in Alnwick itself, the bus turned left to avoid the attractive low archway in the old town walls. We duly arrived at Alnwick bus station right outside a Morrisons supermarket.
Francine was familiar with Alnwick. Our first port of call was walking back to Barter Books which we had driven past on the way in. Barter Books is described as:
A rambling, quirky, secondhand book store with open fires, armchairs, model trains and a simple café.
Barter Books is built in what was a grand old railway station – grand due to the presence of the Dukes of Northumberland and Alnwick Castle, apparently. Much of the premises is built on what were the old station platforms, now enclosed. We headed for the “simple café” to top up our caffeine levels following our morning bus ride.
I’m not a great one for browsing endlessly at books on shelves so this was, for me, something of a very pleasant but alien environment. There were two computer terminals provided for searching if you knew what you were looking for but other than that wandering aimlessly browsing would appear to be the way forward. I did have an aimless wander and spotted a 2-volume set of books on British Beetles dating from, I think, the late 1950s. It was selling for a cool £120 or so. I wasn’t tempted but, being two volumes, it did put me in mind of the old adage that “God had an inordinate fondness of beetles”, there being almost 400,000 species worldwide.
What to do next? We left Barter Books and began our return walk back through the archway on the town walls. A market was on in Market Square. Other than a fruit and veg stall, I saw little else to entertain me, however.
I was intent on looking at the various hostelries in search of a likely lunch venue. Alnwick has a local brewery so I was keen to avoid the endless parade of ubiquitous Eurofizz pumps – Peroni, Moretti, and the like, along with one of the more recent marketing cons, Madri – “El Alma de Madrid”. It was developed and is brewed by Molson in the UK having never seen anything of Madrid. Molson does, though, have a stake in a Toledo craft brewer, La Sagra, and I believe that two of their brewers may have had some input into the recipe.
For lunch, we eventually settled on The Market Tavern which had its own label Amber beer brewed by the Alnwick brewery and very good it was, too. The kipper paté for a light lunch was also very good.
Well fed and watered, we eventually made our way back to the bus station via a somewhat disappointing Morrisons supermarket. Failing to find any ingredients that appealed, we invested £6.99 in a ready roasted chicken, clearly not free range, to save on the cooking later. It’s amazing how being lazy makes you lower your standards. Unlike most French rotisseries, there was no free range option.
Our bus ferried us back to the campsite via another 3-point turn in Craster. We even managed to spot the correct bus stop on unfamiliar roads, though clearly seeing the array of camping units from the vantage point of the upper deck helped.
I found more on the accursed wood burning stove in the tent, of which there are a distressing number available. One piece of splendid advertising bollocks includes the claim:
… and the long flue helps to transport smoke and fumes away from the cooking area.
That’s as maybe; it may well transport the smoke and fumes away from your cooking area. What it certainly does is transport the smoke and fumes into the cooking and living areas of your neighbouring fellow campers. Even being several units away we could smell it inside Frodo for much of the evening. Talk about anti-social.
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