I Went West - Mother-Daughter Time

Meg leaves for a uni overseas summer excursion at the end of the month – it’s an English thing!

Meg in the middle!

International Development Through Excelence and Leadership in Sport or IDEALS is a UK Sport initiative which aims to establish a high quality, progressive and co-ordinated sports leadership development exchange programme for young people aged 20-35 between the UK and partner countries.

The main Team Bath participants are from Bath University, with ‘Bath-SPA-University-Meg’ and a Bath Spa lecturer tasked with the media side – filming, photographing, etc.  So I spent some mother-daughter time with her in the City of Bath before her African adventure!

Weather-wise it was a fantastically summery few days! Meg has officially finished her final year, handed in all her assignments and was looking forward to showing me some touristy stuff she hadn’t yet done on her own!

I arrived Saturday afternoon and after a short break at her student house we walked around Bath with Meg pointing out various landmarks, and having an early supper in the most important one – Pizza Hut! Saturday night disappeared very quickly with a game of Scrabble (I think I won!), internet quizzes and laughs – mainly as I tried to get out of her comfy beanbag!

Sunday morning I got to meet the wonderful Christian family she has been privileged to worship with at Oldfield Park Baptist Church. Friendly, happy, smiley, and a good sermon thrown in!

  Sunday Lunch was the left-over pizza from Saturday with a HUGE portion of hot chips for £1.50 from Herbies Fish & Chip Shop on Moorland Road - one portion would easily have satisfied three of us - which we then had to walk off around Victoria Park, The Botanical Gardens and The Dell!

Found hidden among the trees!

A greedy Robin who was stuffing his beak with as many crumbs as he could!

Spring Pigeons!

 

Monday was the touristy day and 212 steep spiral steps later we were at the top of the Bath Abbey tower!  About half-way up (yay! Whew!) we had the tourist talk in the bell-ringing room and sat behind the clock face, but at the top the whole basin of Bath was set around us. I concentrated on how high we were hence the photos of the busker way down below looking like an ant on a washed-out distorted chequer board!

 

St Michaels church tower in the middle (I think!)

Lunch at St Michaels church – very nice salmon & cream cheese sandwich – and back to the house to recover before bussing up to the 'rival' Bath Uni campus for a Zambia IDEALS media photo-shoot. (I love people-watching and it’s amazing how many decades of fashion you find on a 21^st century university campus!)

Tuesday Meg wanted to find Cribbs Causeway  – a shopping mall she hadn’t been to yet – with the intention of buying summer clothes for the 6 weeks in Zambia.  Neither of us realised it was 12 miles further north of Bristol! First a 20 minute train ride Bath to Bristol; then a 10minute walk up, down and across the road looking for the right bus stop! then an hour’s bus-ride to the mall! And after traipsing through shop after shop after shop, we came away with one pair of trainers and some cheap jewellery! (She bought the rest of the stuff in Bath, after saying goodbye to me at the station on Wednesday!)

While we were bussing through Bristol city centre and miles out of town, the 2012 Olympic Torch was arriving in Bath. When we returned home to Bath the Olympic Torch was arriving in Bristol!  Planned timing!

Wednesday was going home day – saying goodbye to Meg before she goes off to Zambia! (sniff!)

Going Back East: Bath to Paddington, (at least it wasn't a football day like the Saturday I left!) Paddington to Liverpool St (walking 5-10 minutes to the Circle Line only to find it stops at Edgware so back past the train I’ve just come off, to the Hammersmith and City Line only to hear the announcement when on the train that I was on the Circle Line to Liverpool St!!??!) Liverpool St to Ipswich where hubby waits!!

Mother-Daughter time - good!