... Felixstowe! Ahem. Sorry. Blame James for that 'joke'!
We have been enjoying some unseasonably warm weather in the UK. It has been wonderful, and we made sure to make the most of it over the weekend!
Growing up in Devon, close to the sea, I miss going to the seaside on a sunny day. So, on Saturday afternoon, we hopped on a train to Felixstowe. We chose to head there after checking out where on the coast we could get from Cambridge in a reasonable amount of time, and what the Met Offce predicted the weather would be like. Felixstowe is 2.5 hours away by train and was predicted sunshine all day, so seemed like a good option!
We arrived at 3:30pm, having spent the morning rowing as usual. Walking through the town, we passed so many charity shops that we would probably have never reached the beach if we'd stopped in all of them. I liked this basket of ducks outside one of them, but resisted buying any of them!
Once on the seafront, we saw this outside the town hall - an armoured personell carrier, waiting to take the bride and groom away. What a great way to depart!
We walked to the pier to eat our picnic which I prepared on Friday night.
Sitting on the pier in the sunshine but out of the wind, we had sandwiches, Frazzles and Jammy Dodgers (nostalgic childhood food!) as well as some cupcakes I'd made to my current favourite chocolate cupcake recipe filled with raspberry jam and topped with vanilla frosting.
We then set off down the promenade towards the point where the river Stour and Orwell meet at the ports of Felixstowe and Harwich. We passed lots of beach huts and a Napoleonic Martello tower, now in use by the coastguard.
Then we headed away from the seafront towards the port. Felixstowe is the biggest container port in the UK, and one of the largest in Europe. There's something about the aesthetic of containers, of the distance they have travelled, of the many exotic and mundane things they may be carrying. We geeked out a little bit and wandered about as close as we could get to the great ziggurats of containers.
There were huge gantries over the railway line taking the containers off to where they were needed, and as we watched we saw more being loaded. It really was fascinating. We walked back to the town via the nature reserve on the point, and saw a container ship heading in to port. Back in the town, we grabbed some fish and chips to eat on the seafront before heading back to the station. A great day!
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