Day #17
Train
We got a taxi from our guest house at Haworth to Keighley station, then a train to London. We arrived at Paddington Station, and we realized that we had to go to Charing Cross to get the next train to Hastings (one of the weaknesses of British Rail, in all other respects it is great, is that there is not a single station that all the regional trains to all meet at, so there is a bit of station switching in London). Our tickets didn’t cover tube trains but when I asked Tourist Info how much a taxi from Paddington to Charing Cross would cost, they said "Prohibitive". Amy decided to chance it anyway, and in the end it only cost us about 10 pounds (This is not too bad when you are carrying a lot of luggage around). We then got the train out of London (which like a lot of cities in England goes straight from urban to country - there is no suburban in-between) across beautiful country to Hastings. We passed a station (when almost at Hastings), called "Battle". This apparently is where the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066 (it is actually about 6 miles from Hastings - which in England might was well be a world away). Finally we arrived at Hastings
Hastings
Hastings is a dump. It is actually two towns "Old" Hastings (locals call it "Old town"), and "New" Hastings (locals just call it Hastings). The old town is picturesque enough (although not as good as the stuff we have seen so far), but the new Hastings is a run-down rough looking beach town (they have covered the beach with an amusement park which just looks plain tacky). I think the constant beatings it has copped (1066: invasion by William, 1200s : storm destroys harbour and town can no longer be a port : 14oos/1700s : French smash the town ; WWII - Germans bomb the place) has taken its toll on the town.
The place we stayed at was excellent (with the exception of the place at Hammersmith - every Guest House/Hotel we have stayed at has been equal or better than the town it was in). Before dinner I found an internet (gaming) café and tried (for the first time) to log into World of Warcraft. Amy came back after 10 minutes and said she had seen everything interesting in the town. She was annoyed when she saw me logging into WoW (she thought I was just going in to check e-mail), but was relieved when I found that I couldn’t because it was the old version. The apologetic owner refunded my money as I left, but he & Amy joked about a deal they had made to make sure I couldn’t play (haha - funny guys).
We dropped into 3 pubs to look for dinner, but none of them served food. In addition most of them allowed smoking, and we were filled with smoke. I can (barely) tolerate cigarette smoke but Amy is not a chance.
Dinner
Finally we stopped at a place called Fagins Diner. For entrée I have BBQ chicken wings, Amy has prawn cocktail. For mains I had pizza, and Amy had spaghetti bolognaise. We were very underwhelmed by the food (suffice to say these guys really knew how to work the microwave oven - the thing that annoyed me most is the signs said it was wood-fired pizza - yeah maybe 2 weeks ago it was).
Sleep
We decided then to call it a night and we headed back to our guest house.
One of the cool things about our guest house was the doors were often shorter than I was.
