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A brief visit to North West England
Last weekend I again traveled south to Lancashire. There was an interesting moment on the M6: as I transited another driver's blind spot they changed lane into mine, with no turn signal nor any obvious reason to make the move. I think that the last time this happened to me I was driving a Geo Metro on I-270 in Ohio. As I swerved accordingly my Peugeot 107 certainly did not feel like a sports car: the springs had me lurching from side to side but the wheels still maintained traction just fine so the event was quite minor.
To break up the journey I stopped for dinner at McDonald's in Carlisle. I find them a good option: like Wendy's in the US, they have a decent saver menu. While one might imagine that Burger King is the obvious competitor, I find them to be significantly more expensive to eat at. Further, I discovered that much of the McDonald's food wrapping now has clear nutritional information on it so I even came away with a rough guess at how many calories my meal had been: kudos to them. I could tell that I must have been tired because it was not easy to read the information without my glasses.
In Lancashire I unexpectedly found myself visiting Southport Pier. While now shorter than it once was, it remains over a kilometer long and on a reasonable day one can see Blackpool Tower in the distance. I didn't initially remember the point of building a pier but of course decades ago it received ships from the Irish Sea. I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of things. First, the pier was popular: it had many people strolling about, up and down it. Second, at the end was a pavilion housing interesting arcade machines, many of them vintage.
The pier extends from Southport Promenade where I walked through King's Gardens which are well-tended. The gardens have a lake beside which I became intrigued by the question of how people steer their paddle boats. I guessed that they either have a control that adjusts a rudder or that the person on one side pedals at a different speed from the person on the other side but my observations failed to much support either hypothesis.
To break up the journey I stopped for dinner at McDonald's in Carlisle. I find them a good option: like Wendy's in the US, they have a decent saver menu. While one might imagine that Burger King is the obvious competitor, I find them to be significantly more expensive to eat at. Further, I discovered that much of the McDonald's food wrapping now has clear nutritional information on it so I even came away with a rough guess at how many calories my meal had been: kudos to them. I could tell that I must have been tired because it was not easy to read the information without my glasses.
In Lancashire I unexpectedly found myself visiting Southport Pier. While now shorter than it once was, it remains over a kilometer long and on a reasonable day one can see Blackpool Tower in the distance. I didn't initially remember the point of building a pier but of course decades ago it received ships from the Irish Sea. I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of things. First, the pier was popular: it had many people strolling about, up and down it. Second, at the end was a pavilion housing interesting arcade machines, many of them vintage.
The pier extends from Southport Promenade where I walked through King's Gardens which are well-tended. The gardens have a lake beside which I became intrigued by the question of how people steer their paddle boats. I guessed that they either have a control that adjusts a rudder or that the person on one side pedals at a different speed from the person on the other side but my observations failed to much support either hypothesis.