IOM day 3

Monday 2nd August 2010

2020

hmm I’m starting this blog tonight at the same time as last night, oh well.

I slept in the other bed last night and it was much better in that the light didn’t wake me up but I did have a stiff neck when I got up this morning :-S I’ll have to see how I am tomorrow morning – and if I have a bad neck again I might swap back to the other bed :-/

I got up later today – 0930 although I had gone to bed later last night so that was logical. I had my breakfast and just lazed around for a while. At about 1030 I decided to test out the shower. My mum had thought it was just a mains-fed shower but I discovered it’s electric, the thermostat is on the right hand tap and is actually marked with specific temperatures.

We’d decided today to go to the Rest Home for Old Horses, we didn’t want to do loads and that seemed like it would be fairly leisurely :-) It would’ve been leisurely if we’d managed to get there without getting lost – about a million times!!!! (Ok I exaggerate but it felt like a million!!) We originally missed the first turn onto the B road so obviously after that the instructions I’d written out were totally redundant!

We ended up going into Douglas to get out again but even that wasn’t simple. We ended up in a one-way system at the back of the courts. I stopped in a private car park so we could consult the map but that was useless cos we had no way of finding ourselves on the map so I carried on driving randomly. I then stopped again on the prom cos at least then we could locate ourselves. I found where we were and bravely chose my new route. I knew we needed the A5 and thought I could work out how to get there. The signs started saying for A5 follow the airport symbol and then it turned into follow A6 – I got very concerned and pulled into a garden centre car park. It turned out we actually were in the right place cos the A6 leads to the A5 and we eventually found the horses’ home.

The horses were right by the car park but we didn’t go to them straight away – we went to the gift shop to buy some food for them. Once I had my supply of food I went out to the horses and they were lovely. Most of them didn’t really want to be stroked though – they just wanted food haha. I fed lots of horses and walked up and down the fence with all the various horses, at one point I decided to feed 2 horses at once hehe.

Once I’d emptied my bag of food we decided to go to the little café on site and the sandwiches weren’t too badly priced so we had lunch there. We sat outside and there was a real manx cat wandering round and I made friends with it. It even jumped up on my knee :-) I know it was more interested in being friend cos I had a tuna butty but I don’t care – I still got a cat on my knee :-)

While mum was in the lunch queue she’d heard people talking about the donkeys and she realised there was another bit we hadn’t seen so we went out to the back and found there were more horses and another section with the donkeys in too. There were also some horses in this section that were behind 2 fences with signs on saying we weren’t allowed to feed them – don’t know why. The donkeys were down at the bottom of the path and we didn’t have any food for them but other people did. The coats on the donkeys were a lot softer than the horse hair and there was one donkey that looked really old and frail.

Once we’d been in the gift shop after seeing the donkeys we went into Douglas, that was easier to find than the horses’ home cos obviously it’s a much bigger place and well signposted. We wanted to go to the tourist information place so we followed the signs for the boat because the tourist info was in the sea terminal building. We found the place easy enough and there was a reasonably priced car park nearby.

We paid for 2 hours parking and then headed into the tourist info place. I was looking for a decent A-Z map book but the man behind the counter said one doesn’t exist any more :-( He said there used to be one but they stopped printing it and he didn’t know why – he said it was much better than what you can buy now. He also said you can’t get lost on the Isle of Man – he hadn’t been in the car with us a few hours earlier!!!!! I did buy a new map – an OS map with plenty of details on, bigger than the one we’d already bought.

We then headed off towards the main shops cos there were a few things we needed / wanted. We found a main shopping street with plenty of standard shops you’d expect to find. We went into a ‘bits n pieces’ shop and a big supermarket – we bought a couple of ready-meals for tea and some other stuff before finding our way back to the car.

We got back to the cottage easily because we just used the instructions we’d got from the cottage owners haha. Once we got back I decided to go on the TomTom website to see if I could get a new map of the Isle of Man for my machine – what a surprise it doesn’t exist!!!!!!

Since we’ve been back we haven’t done much except eat our tea and watch telly – pretty much what we’ve done every night here so far.