Maggi and I rose early and left the house at 8 am to catch the trains to Manchester. Maggi had seen a deal on tramline and opted for it. She didn’t realise that the two journeys involved a change at Crewe where we hang around for an hour.
We arrived at our hotel, The Marriott Piccadilly, a large modern hotel about 5 minutes walk from the station. A comfortable room with a very good shower awaited us. We didn’t have much time to relax before Lynda and Dave arrived in the room. We adjourned to the common area and I asked if they could show the England v New Zealand match on TNT Sports. To my surprise they had that facility and so Dave and sat down to watch a very good game which England deservedly won 33-19.
We hung around the hotel until 6 ish and then walked over to The City Arms in the town centre where Chris has organised us all to meet prior to our meal. The whole town centre was full of young people out for the night and we entered a pub crammed with an assortment of people out for their nights entertainment. I stood by the bar for the 1 ½ hours we had allotted for drinking.
We moved round the corner to a Greek restaurant that Chris had also booked. There we sat on a table for 14. The place already buzzing when we arrived became excruciatingly noisy shortly afterwards when the two man band downstairs started up. Their cacophony blurted out from large speakers upstairs as well. My ear infection made hearing hard anyway and this didn’t help. We ordered far too much food and I left a large proportion of the stuff that arrived on the table. It didn’t help that the quality of the grub I thought was below par.
We slowly parted everyone having to say goodbye and handing out hugs like confetti. We eventually left and walked back to the hotel with a promise to see Richard, Aida, Josh and his girlfriend Lizzie the next day.
Sunday
After a reasonable breakfast at the hotel we walked the 30 minutes to our rendezvous with Richard etc. at The Whitworth Gallery near Manchester University. The Whitworth as it’s known is housed in an ultra-modern building on Oxford Road. They had an interesting exhibition by Santiago Yahuarcani a first nation painter from the Peruvian Amazon. I thought his imagery interesting and enjoyed the show. I didn’t understand the cultural references to his tribal roots but that didn’t really matter.
From The Whitworth we walked back along Oxford Road to the Manchester University Museum which houses a motley collection of artefacts and some live animals, mostly bugs, lizards and butterflies.
After our tour of the museum Maggi and I left the others and walked back to the hotel to pick up our bags. We arrived at Manchester Piccadilly Station at 2 pm and arrived home at 8:30 having spent over an hour at Crewe and a quick meal at Pinnova oriental restaurant in Pinner. I had enjoyed our morning in Manchester but the train journey back had been slow and overcrowded. Maggi and I had managed to find a seat but quite a few passengers spent 2 hours or more standing.