Rach and I went for a quick day trip to Brighton on a Saturday. Brighton is on the coast and has a pebble beach. Yes that’s right they don’t have sand, just lovely round pebbles. Brighton is about an hour train ride out of London and is sort of a hip version of Bateman’s Bay but on a bigger scale.
In the centre of Brighton, they had lots of little streets closed off with all sorts of different shops and some streets with a trash and treasure going on (mainly trash from what we saw 🙂 ) Walking around, there were a fair few fashion shops, Rach even picked up a new set of shoes for work and I found a new bag for work.
We had lunch at this fantastic place called Bill’s. It’s a produce store and café-style food place, all rolled into one. All of their food was presented perfectly and with all these little touches that make it look great. It also tasted great. They sold lots of other delicatessen style foods their too. We later came back again and had a Banoffee Pie for desert. It was great. Full halved bananas, chunks of chocolate with chocolate and coffee sauce. All topped off with a strong shot of Italian espresso coffee.
On the way to the beach we passed through this nice large garden with an interesting building that looks totally out of place in the UK, but in a good way. It turns out to be the Royal Pavilion, which was home to George IV. The place was designed in Indian style, which makes it look very different from anything around.
We ventured off to the beach, where the Brighton Pier is. The pier is basically one giant amusement park. Arcade games, pokies, show rides, show-carnival style competitions and the like. We popped into one of the arcades to have a go at air hockey, but we won’t get into who won or lost as it was all about the fun 😉 Rach and I stopped at one of those machines where you drop a 10 pence coin in and a bar moves back and forward pushing your coin forwards or maybe on top of another coin. The idea is that if you’re lucky, it might push the other coins off into a collection bin for you to take home. The one we played looked like a gold mine. It looked like an avalanche of coins was about to drop and to top it off there was a bag of coins and a €5 note on the edge too. We set a budget of £2 worth of 10 pence coins. Bur surely the machine ate our money with hardly any coins falling off the edge. We’re we hooked at this stage and I just I knew we were on a winner and the avalanche was bound to happen. This would send heaps of coins, the bag and the note all down the chute for our taking. So I got another £3 worth of 10 pence coins and boy we were close but that avalanche just hadn’t started. There were heaps of coins on the very edge just waiting to fall. I so wanting to kick this machine to start the avalanche.
Predictably, just like with all gambling machines, we lost it all and walked away with nothing. We had a blast doing so, it was a good laugh trying to work our strategies on this machine. I walked away devastated that this machine robbed me of my money 🙂 I guess you just had to be there.
It was pretty freezing that day even though the day was pretty crystal clear. From the pier, I was shocked to see kids playing in the water while Rach and I had big jackets on a scarf on. Each to their own I guess. We didn’t hang around too long on the pier because of the gusting chilly winds.
We really like Brighton and we’ll definitely be back for day trips during Summer.
To see some photos from the day go here:
http://www.gabnation.com/albums/2007/brighton/