A day at the beach

Swanage
(click on pictures to enlarge)

Two posts ago I promised to tell you what we did on the Sunday after the move. I've been waiting for Andre to edit some of the photos he took there and he finally finished a few last night and told me I may now help myself to his genius photography work! I will head down to his study after my craft class today to choose some. I only have about 15 minutes before I have to leave for my class. After some really really full classes this holiday we should have a few less today which I'm kind of looking forward to for a change so I can also sit down and enjoy the crafts with the kids and their moms. Let's see if I can also remember to take some photos. (*update: I forgot about the camera in my bag while crafting, but we made mobiles and they turned out awesome. I might recreate one at home to show you later.)

Anyway, the Sunday after the move, that was two weekends ago, we decided to drive down to Swanage. Some friends were spending the weekend there diving. We couldn't join them for the weekend as we were too eager to move into our new home, but we did enjoy a day away from unpacking to go to the beach.

If the map below appears correctly in my blog, A is where we now live. B is Swanage and C is Corfe Castle which we stopped at on our way home and which I'll show you next time. We actually took a ferry across on the way there so didn't drive all around as the maps shows.

View Larger Map

You can see the short distance the ferry goes.

Our turn to drive onto the ferry

Nice day for a bike ride
-those were a lot of bikers from France.

Public transport on top of public transport!

Lots of people were out cycling
-special area for cyclists and pedestrians on the ferry

It was a lovely sunny day there as you can see. The ferry ride was interesting as it's not something I've done here before. It was a lot shorter than I imagined. You can clearly see the short distance in the photo and the ferry is actually pulled across by chains. We were able to get out of the car and take a quick walk to the front of the ferry before having to get back into the car to drive off the other side.

At Swanage we spent some time with the divers, watching them go in for a dive under the pier. Then a walk along the pier which is quite big. It's beautifully kept as you can see and has these plaques which you can buy and have inscribed with your own message. You can spend a lot of time reading them!

Swanage

Swanage pier

See how long the pier is

We walked back through the town and stopped for chips. Soon after that another stop for ice cream which we had on the beach.

We decided to drive back the longer route and avoid the ferry. As it was such a nice day there were so many people out and the queue waiting for the ferry that afternoon would have been very long. Good thing too as we happened to drive through and discover Corfe Castle. Beautiful place. I'll show you later when Andre get's around to doing more editing (or allows me to scratch around in his photo library and edit them myself!)


You can see a few of Andre's more artistic photos on this website 500px. There's one of Swanage pier and one of a mural in Swanage which is amazing.