Portishead again

On the way to Portishead yesterday afternoon, we passed through a village called Wedmore. Seems that it is more than just a name, people obviously take the name literally.

 

Yummy pastries for breakfast this morning. The Travelodge here doesn’t offer cooked breakfast, so we bought pastries from the Lidl supermarket under the hotel. Same again tomorrow.

This morning we visited a stunning little hamlet, Blaise hamlet, built in 1811. It was built by the estate owner for some of his current (at the time) staff and retired staff.  It’s the most peaceful place with 9 rustic cottages around a central green. We can’t decide which house we want, any would be OK.

We then went on to the Blaise Castle estate, which has been owned by the Bristol council for the last 100 or so years, and had a look at the Blaise estate museum, which had a great display of toys, kitchen appliances etc spanning from the 1800s to around 1950. There was also a history of the estate, including the castle and Blaise hamlet. Great coffee at the cafe in the estate (park) grounds. We asked the cafe worker about their coffee before we ordered and were told that a double shot is standard.

After Blaise, we drove to the Clifton Suspension bridge, designed by one of the world’s best bridge designers (Rick’s opinion) Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Building began in 1831, abandoned due to lack of funds and finally opened in 1864. We drove under the bridge and looked for a place to stop. With the traffic and not being too sure where we were going (the GPS was useless to us at this stage), we ended up heading uphill, passing through some very attractive streets until we some how found ourselves almost next to the bridge abutment. We managed to squeeze between 2 cars, parked and walked up to the bridge. We thought 1/2 hour would be all we needed, but over 2 hours later, after finding a number of great vantage points, walking across the bridge and looking in the visitor info centre, we returned to the car. Of course we had to help pay for the maintenance to the bridge, so we paid the £1 and drove over.

 

Back to the hotel and writing the post before we have a drink. Gary collates all the photos and renames them while Rick writes the blog and picks the photos to include.

Footnote: Drinks started before today's blog finished.