Kiwi Roaming

Monday night my granddaughter arrived! yay! so I was up all night getting updates from the hospital in Melbourne and meeting her via video in the small hours my time. I’m so excited to meet her in person in a couple of weeks time. Grandpa Steve slept through most of this of course. So we were slow to go to breakfast and grabbed a couple of pastries for our train ride home that evening on our way out of the breakfast room before they were cleaned up.

We wandered through the Laines district and the Lanes again on our way back to the waterfront. While up in the night I had booked us a trip on the i360, Brighton’s answer to the Eiffel Tower tourist attracting wise. So we walked along the promenade and nosied in a couple of shops on our way.

i360 – is a tall tower with a sphere that carries passengers up 162m, the total ride is 25 minutes. It’s pretty cringe to be honest, the glass isn’t clear enough to take great photos from up there and there are many cracks in the outer layer of the glass. They have a cafe at the bottom and a bar in the thing itself, and we got Christmas carols blasted at us the whole time. That said you do get a very good view up and down the coastline and over the very spread out city of terraced housing.

Next we walked up to the Hove Beach huts, the promenade here is really wide while the beach is quite narrow, there is a massively wide grass area between the promenade and the road which seems to be the main thoroughfare. There are great sculptures along the way to look at and wee kiosks (which were mostly closed for winter) too. We got a good look at the rusting old peer building which is now disconnected from the mainland and read posters explaining the history of the Brighton waterfront, the once had different kinds of trains to carry tourists all the way along over the years including one that looks like an early monorail in the early 1900s.

By now the wind was up and the “feels like” temperature -5C so we headed inland and walked on a parallel street back to Brighton township. Lots of independent shops and restaurants in cute buildings before we hit the big chain stores including an Ikea as we reached the centre of town. Very ready for lunch we found a pub without people (didn’t have a kitchen) for a toilet stop then carried on and managed to get into a really cute place for yummy mid-afternoon lunch in a warm place.

Our train was 4pm so we then headed back to the hotel and grabbed the backpack then went to wait for a platform announcement for our delayed train. We had to run for our next train and just made it! not something I would want to do everyday.

Loved Brighton. Could spend a week here.