Newcastle upon Tyne; Monday, 10 August, 2009

Arriving at Kings Cross to find there are no trains on any platform is never a good sign. An earlier problem with the power cables at Doncaster meant that everything coming in was heavily delayed. By 10:30 the 8:00 arrival still hadn’t pulled in. Needless to say there was absolute chaos with the concourse overflowing with people out on to the street, and tempers, rapidly, becoming frayed, even though the staff were giving out as much information as they could.

I decided to sidle across the road to the much quieter St Pancras and keep an eye on the live departures information on the internet, consequently I was able to sit in quiet with a good book until five minutes after my train was due to leave when it finally gained a platform number, sidle back cross to Kings Cross and board in a much more relaxed frame of mind that some of my fellow passengers.

In the end we were only 25 minutes late in departing (good considering the train an hour earlier than mine had only left a few minutes before mine), and a significant number of people had jumped on the other trains so mine was quite empty. However, it was clear that there were still some fractious people on board as the “Bar-Cafe” manager had to keep announcing that the “Bar-Cafe” would be late opening as they hadn’t had time in the short turn around at Kings Cross to get everything set up, by the third announcement you could hear the frustration in her voice!

We lost a bit more time on route and arrived into Newcastle around 30 minutes late. I walked from the station to the hotel, which is the point at which I discovered that Newcastle is built on some pretty steep hills, and my hotel was at the bottom of the second one from the station.

Having checked in and dumped my stuff I headed off with the intention of visiting Tynemouth Priory and Castle, so I headed for the Metro station and hit a major problem. The Metro is nearly 30 years old and it doesn’t look like they have ever upgraded the ticket machines. What might have been OK in the early 80’s isn’t quite so practicable by 2009. I hadn’t expected the machines to take credit and debit cards, but notes would have been useful. The only thing the machines would take was coins; the only thing I had was a note. So I to wander back into the very centre of town to the main Metro station to find a change machine and buy my ticket there.

By the time I had messed around with all this, and then just missed a train, it was getting on for 5pm, and by the time we finally reached Tynemouth closer to half five, by which point the site would be closing, so I stayed on the train round to the seaside resort of Whitley Bay to have a look.

Sadly, Whitley Bay looks as though its heyday is behind it. All the big hotels I saw were boarded up, and a large number of the guest houses were up for sale, it probably didn’t help that as I was wandering around I had to keep finding shelter as another downpour passed through.

Disappointed with the coast, I headed back into town, through another downpour and back to the hotel to get a bite to eat. By the time I had finished it had stopped raining and the skies were blue again, so I headed out for a wander from the hotel.

Just across the road from the hotel is the Millennium bridge (or blinking eye bridge), so I had a wander over that taking in the multitude of other bridges that span the Tyne in central Newcastle. The other side of the bridge and I was in Gateshead so I had a wander up from the riverside into the town centre. From there, as I had an all day ticket for the Metro, I hopped on one headed for Sunderland to have a look around there.

Within five minutes of leaving Sunderland station I had already see two people nearly having a fight and several pools of vomit on the street, it could just be I caught the place at a bad time, but I decided it was probably best not to do a lot of sightseeing so I headed back, quickly, on the next Metro back to Newcastle. From the central station I wandered down to the river side and had a stroll along the quayside back to the hotel taking in the bridges at night, before heading to my bed for a good nights sleep.