Beatles and Football

Day 3 Monday September 25, 2006

We had all our stuff packed into the car by 9am and left Winwick and headed towards Liverpool. Not finding a park and ride on route we drove into the city centre and parked not far from the Albert Docks. We walked along the water for a while checking out some of the more famous buildings in downtown Liverpool as we headed to the Docks. The docks is where the Beatles experience is and after we bought our tickets for the Magical Mystery tour we found we still had 4 hours to wait until the tour started. So we walked towards the city centre and followed the huge spire to the old cathedral. Inside this was cathedral was stunning and luckily they allowed us to take photos of the inside.




Upon leaving the Cathedral we headed to a much more modern church, the Roman Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral . Inside this church it felt more like a night club with neon lights everywhere. Check out the website here. After all the cathedrals and churches we have been to I can honestly say this one was completely unique. By now we were all starving and decided to fill up with subway. It was easy to find as there seems to be a subway on every corner in the northern England cities. After a bit of shopping in the town we walked back to the Docks to begin out Beatles tour.

The tour was great and very informative. The bus was an old 1960's bus that sounded like it was falling apart. The tour takes about 2 hours and took us to many of the old houses, school, churches, and pubs that were attended by Paul, John, George, and Ringo. They didn't play a lot of Beatles music on the bus but they did manage to play the song penny lane as we drove down....yes Penny Lane. We took a ton of photos but now I can't remember which house was whose and which of the boys attended which schools. The tour ended up at the Cavern Club which is where the Beatles got their main start. They played over 200 shows in this one club in the city centre. The Cavern Club was demolished some years back but they have recently restored it. We went down about 3 flights of stairs to the bar to pick up our free "Rare Beatles Poster" which turned out to be a photo the size of a postcard. Everyone who takes the tour gets one which leads me to believe it is not as rare as they were claiming.



After this we slowly made our way back to the car and joined the rush hour traffic towards Manchester which is only about 30miles or so east of Liverpool. We stayed in a town just outside Manchester called Monton where we successfully snuck Megan into the room without any problems. The town of Monton had a great pub and great beer so our dinner decision was solved fairly quickly. Matt and I went down to the bar in the hotel after and watched the Portsmouth vs. Bolton football game while talking to a really strange old man about Manchester united. As soon as the game was over we found a break in conversation and headed back to the room.

Day 4 Tuesday September 26, 2006

We drove to the park and ride tram station after packing up the car again (we were getting quite good at it by this point) and made our way into Manchester city centre. We arrived in the centre with no map and not a lot planned other than exploring the city. The only real plan was the bus tour which wasn't running as it only runs in the summer months. So we took to the streets on foot and made our way towards the tourist info stopping off at the Chinatown district on the way. The Chinatown district was much like any other Chinatown I have been to in a big city. But the gate they had was quite impressive. After buying a map and then finding a free one as well on the other side of the tourist info we made our way towards the City centre, a few churches, the Urbis Centre, and of course the Hard Rock Cafe for me.




Manchester has a great shopping district that we walked around not really buying anything but just browsing through all the shops. The city is filled with really nice pedestrian areas, water features, and small parks that really open the city up and make it a great place to relax. The Urbis centre was a really cool looking building with a pedestrian area outside so we had to stop and do a few jumping shots. I wouldn't want to let you faithful blog readers down now would I? I won't bore you with every little detail of our day but we did stop off at a cool fountain on our way back to the tram. It was one of those fountains that shoots water from hundreds of spouts in the ground in different patterns. We watched this girl running around the spouts that didn't have water going at the time all hoping that she would time it wrong and get soaked. She managed to escape getting soaked so we made our way out to Old Trafford to see the Manchester United Football Stadium.


We got back to the car and drove the 10min to the stadium and made it there for 4:10 pm. My book said that the last tour goes at 5pm so we assumed that we had tons of time. This was part of the trip that I was really looking forward to. We walked into the main entrance and up to the museum and tour. People were still going in so we got our hopes up and walked to desk where we were told that the museum was open until 5 and the last tour of the stadium was at 4pm. We had just missed it.... Oh well just more reason to go back another time. We turned around and went back to the car and then proceeded to drive to Windermere in the Lake District. We found a nice resort with trailers but decided to move on to a campsite to save some money. When we got to the campsite the reception was closed. We managed to find a worker there that informed us that the night watchman was off for the night. Anyways when we tried to get room for the night on the field we were told that they don't accept anyone after 5pm since they have the problem with overloading the campsite with tents with people who have booked and people who have not book ahead. Ok so I asked how much room they had left and we were told that there were 2 tents in the field that could hold 90. No problem then we only wanted it for one night. Well they still wouldn't let us stay in the field so we just turned around and went and got the cabin anyways. The resort had a great 3 bedroom trailer and a strange bar where we watched the Manchester United game over a few beers.



To be continued...