Day 0 – Getting There!

Big smiles for our 6.30am start!! Nik, Liz and Rasha leave Bracknell and head up the M40 and M6, with Liz and Nik alternating the driving every two hours. After stopping a couple of times at service stations for coffee, we arrive to St Bees 13.00. We check in to our hotel (The Seacote Hotel) and meet Susan (a colleague of Liz’s) for the first time.

Susan has had adventurous start to this trip. Zooming in from the US in the early hours of Friday and landing at Heathrow, Susan had to brave the logistics of finding a way of getting Covid tested and then the onward travel via the London underground and the rail service from Euston to St Bees (via four train changes). Finally arriving at the hotel, she falls into an exhausted, 13-hour sleep.

The ladies then go for a sandwich lunch in a pub in the ‘Main Street’ in St Bees and learn a lot more about each other.

David then arrives around 3pm and we decide it was time to sample the beach.

Excited group going down to the beach >

Liz insists on undertaking ‘the holy foot immersion ritual of St Bees’ and comes prepared with flipflops.

The feet are immersed …

Interesting beach – it is both sandy and pebbly.

Nik taking a selfie, pretending she is dipping her feet in the sea when she really stayed well away under the impression it was cold. (It was… a crab that put me off!! so she says.)