On route to Isle of Wight

No need for a contingent plan to get to the train - the taxi arrived ahead of time.
I woke at 5.00am and Deb fairly soon afterwards, we had a cup of tea to wake up, and then got dressed and re-arranged the room to put the mattress back on Deb’s bed.
It looked like being a lovely day, and we would spend most of it travelling – still that is part of the holiday, and we have found train travel to be very enjoyable.
When we got to the station we had thought we would be the only people there at that hour of the morning, but this was not the case, there was a couple of Americans who were travelling on an earlier train than ours, and another few people who got on the train with us.
The train arrived on time, and we got on board the first carriage that was nearest to us – it was a first class one and we were only booked standard – but the ticket inspector told us to sit in the couple of seats which weren’t booked, and it would be OK – what a laugh – nearly every seat in the carriage had a ticket on it indicating it was booked, but during the course of the journey, very few of them were used by people who had pre-booked, nearly everyone who got on after that just paid for their seat as they arrived. I thought it was just a ploy by the Railway company to ensure that the Standard seats were filled first before the empty first class ones – not that the seats are any better in the first class – as we have found.
We had to change trains at Westbury, and the inspector telephoned ahead for us and arranged some assistance with our bags, as we only had 7 minutes between trains.
The journey from St Erth to Westbury was very pleasant, and we had breakfast on board – we started with a hot chocolate when we got on board – then just before they took the food off at Plymouth – had a really disgusting bacon bap, and tea – train food is terrible, and with nothing much else on offer we ate it. The train company has a really strange system of calling over the loud speaker that the food service is stopping before you have a chance to go up and get anything to eat. Probably a good thing as we couldn’t eat much after the “bap”.
Changing trains at Westbury went really smoothly, and the train we had to catch was just a short walk across the platform, and there was a nice man waiting there to help us with the cases.
As we left Westbury we had a wonderful surprise as we were able to see one of the chalk drawings on a hill in the distance – the Horse. I managed to take a couple of photos through the window, as the train was travelling very slowly at the time. Hopefully it will come out OK as it was quite a fair way away.
From Westbury to Southampton Central took an hour and a half, and was uneventful apart from our sighting of the chalk horse.
At Southampton, I picked up the tickets for our return trip to London on the 14th, got cash out of the machine, and then we caught the free bus to the Isle of Wight fast ferry terminal.
At the terminal we decided to have our lunch as we wasn’t sure where we could get anything at our guest house, and we knew once inside, we wouldn’t want to go out for lunch.
After a quick meal we caught the 1.15pm fast ferry to Cowes, then a taxi to the guest house in Newport. Our hostess – Avril Barnes was waiting to meet us when we arrived at 2.00pm, and she showed us around and explained everything before leaving for a family member’s wedding.
Our room is on the ground floor – yes!, and the beds are great – Deb didn’t take long to take off the back brace and have a lie down until 4.00pm when we had afternoon tea. We will have to find somewhere for dinner tonight, and decide what we will do tomorrow later on – Deb is studying the guide books.
Hopefully we will have time to go to the Records Office here in Newport for some more family history research.

We went out for dinner, and found a pub up the road not far from where we are staying – The Eight Bells – we had dinner there, which was enormous – they seem to be following the American way of serving enormous plates of food – much more than anyone can eat. Anyway what we had was delicious, and then we just walked back to the guest house, and then I just had to go to bed and to sleep at 8.15pm – I was absolutely whacked after such a long and tiring day. Deb watched TV for a while and then went to sleep.
Tomorrow we plan to go to see the famous Alum Bay with the coloured cliffs and The Needles.