Eastbourne

Back from my trip to Eastbourne. Had a lot of fun while I was down there, it was great to get out of the city again and into a much smaller, much-less-touristy place. Eastbourne is a smaller town (Although citysized for VT) and it's on the southern coast - sharing the same rock formations as Dover, and it has the same white cliffs. It seemed like a pretty quiet place to live, and a bit of a retirement community, although we did see a lot of kids and dogs.
I went down with my friend Katherine, who's in my British Heritage class. Apparently her roommate and friends from her school went to Amsterdam, and because her parents are coming today, didn't go with them. So she invited me to come along. We picked a location, looked at train costs and Friday morning we got to the station, got tickets and rode the two or so hours down to the town. I paid for the train fares, she payed for the hotel, and we checked in, and went out to wander around the place. The beach was the first place that we went, found that it was all chert and rock, walked the length of that for a while, before hitting the chalk cliffs, about a mile and a half or so.

The Cliffs were really cool. I brought along my geology field book and took some notes, climbed around on them for a while and gave Katherine a lesson in geology theory and how the cliffs got there. Good to have a captive audience. We walked probably another mile down the cliffs, looking at the rocks and chatting, before turning back. Katherine got attacked by two seagulls, or thought that she did. Got a late and quick lunch and walked the other direction, through the town a bit for another couple hours, before returning. Watched some TV - she found a hilarious show called Green Wing, which was both confusing and side splitting. Really wacky british medical show - Definently have to find some more of it somewhere. Went to sleep, woken several times by drunk college students and later in the morning by a flock of insane pigeons. Got up, checked out, got breakfast and set out to find where to look for fossils. Checked at the hotel, library and tourist office, and none of them could really tell me. Checked my email at the library and found an e-mail that someone sent to me regarding fossils in the UK, and in Eastbourne, figured out where to go and we set out. To the Southwest of the town there's a large open park that runs along the cliffs. There's some paths, and some cows. We hiked along a couple miles to one point, then tried to find the way down to the beach, but we couldn't figure out where it was. Saw one of the lighthouses off in the water, then continued on to try and find the beach outlet.

Another two or three miles and we reached the second lighthouse, lots of hills later, and we turned back. Got a quick bite to eat at a pub on the road following the cliffs, then an hour or so later, we reached the town and got lunch at Pizza Express (The UK's equivilent of Pizza Hutt, but way better) then got back to the train station and back home. We were both exhaused, fell asleep on the train for a little while, then split up in the tube when we went back to our flats. I passed out for an hour, got some dinner and watched some TV before going back to bed.

Great weekend - really nice town with some good walks around it. Maybe someday I'll return. Took quite a bit of pictures - you can see them here: http://norwich.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2003111&l=32b29&id=70000497