02 September 2010

England Vacation Part 6

Tuesday, August 31, 2010.

The Beamish Museum was on the agenda for today. It's pronounced like it sounds, but I called it Be Amish all day, and it fit quite nicely.... a quaint old spot similar to Heritage Park in Calgary with the park staff in period costume.

Our kids liked the Beamish Museum and even Derrick got to see the trolley car that his father drove. The number 10 trolley, driven by Mr. Wilkinson, made the last run of any trolley car in Newcastle before they were replaced with buses. The last run was attended by the mayor of Newcastle as well as many dignitaries at the time.

After Beamish, we drove into Newcastle and timed it perfectly to experience rush hour traffic... luckily we were only going to the very centre of the city. After making a few circles and a bit of a walk, we found ourselves at the Millennium Bridge on the Newcastle side looking over at Gateshead.

There was a great art exhibit in an old flour mill on the Gateshead side so we went in. There was no photographer but I left my email address so that they could forward me a couple of images of the exhibits.

After a nice drive, we stopped in Staindrop at the Black Swan pub for dinner. The proprietor and his daughter served us, they were very friendly and the food was really good.

Now, a word about English beer. Nearly every place serves Peroni, Stella Artois, Budweiser and Heineken. I'm not sure why. Even the grocery stores carry all these beers, but no local beers - they can only be found in the pubs (mostly). So, not that I'm trying to avoid English beer, quite the opposite, I keep looking for some to try. We just haven't spent much time in pubs. On the plus side, I did have a Black Sheep beer, a local beer for the Wensleydale area. It was pretty good, room temperature, but good.

Tomorrow, we're off to Anick Castle, where parts of Harry Potter was filmed, and England's North East coast.

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