And The (Rather Short) Journey Continues ...

After a quick drink stop, and deciding that me and Chris were hanging round Southshields, her home town, for the evening, we headed back to the hotel, by this point, absolutely knackered!! We jumped on the metro and about half hour on the metro from the city centre we arrived at Southshields to meet Chris’s friend Lea for a curry. We then took a wonder around and ended up in bed by midnight, 

We felt considerably better than most the following morning who had quite another story to tell haha..

Breakfast.

Oh my word. 

Breakfast... all you can eat buffet, including bacon, ‘premium pork’ sausages, eggs, (fried, scrambled, boiled or poached), beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, bloomer bread, porridge, cereals, granola, yoghurt, croissants, muffins, jam, marmalade and marmite, tea, coffee and fruit juices... it was, immense.

After filling our faces with a full fry up, we took a further 3 croissants and 5 muffins in some well packed napkins for the day ahead.

We kicked off at the Biscuit Factory, some of the artists that caught my eye here were a range of photographs, illustrations and paintings, including:

“Dennis” the elephant, illustrations by George Welch,

Some beautiful paintings by Roy Francis Kirton, 

Chris Salmon’s etchings of figures, 

Some collage pieces by Sophie Twiss, 

Back and white photography by Steve Mayers, 

Linda Marie Young’s fabric abstract boxes.

Paul Jones’s distressed oils/acylic textured paintings

[My plan was to throw a few photos in here of some of the work above, but the only reference I could find was Linda Marie Young's fabric boxes.. sorry :( ]

We then thought we deserved a wonder through the city centre and a few shops to finish the rather short day off. I passed Whitewall Galleries, where a few paintings caught my eye.

All with a vibrant city/urban theme, but all quite different in style and technique:

Henderson Cisz, David Farien, Nemo and Susan Brown

(Some samples of Cisz's city scapes; Champs Elysees (Paris), and City Lights

The lazy few hours to follow involved wandering the main shopping street - where we bumped into a rather hungover Scott, the only one not to return to the hotel the night before.. haha he felt considerably worse than we did, and we made sure he knew he missed out on one good breakfast.

We sat in the ever exciting McDonalds for a while, watching 3 little triplet lads who were identical, both by looks and clothes.. poor kids. 

It then came to the coach journey where I started writing these notes to type up onto my blog on the way home on the train. 

All in all it was an alright trip, i got a good feel for Newcastle, apart from THAT wind... oh my!

I still don’t understand how the whole thing cost £70 (as well as being ‘heavily subsidised’), that was a little annoying - especially as we were actually there for only just over 24 hours.

Personally, I’d have happily gone for public transport, and a less expensive hotel for 2 or 3 nights to get a more worthwhile trip, but that’s just me!

Anyway... time to move on to more important matters.