sciamachy

Kingmaker feasts were well worth while. Falconry display worth seeing, but TBH I think the one they do at nearby Hatton Country World is more fun – kids and adults get to have a go getting a small owl to fly to the glove.

Erdington’s a mostly residential area. There’s nowt to recommend it to tourists at all – we’ve a couple of nice parks and some shops, but that’s it really. It used to be the site of Mother’s nightclub in the ’60’s where Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath and various others played, and there’s a pub that burned down which had similar claims to fame, but Erdington’s councillors seem to be completely uninterested in preserving its history or attracting tourists, so the pub is to be knocked down and turned into old people’s flats, and Mother’s is now a furniture store. Okay place to live though.

I’m putting this down as “Worth visiting”, but the place itself isn’t at all. I was very disappointed when I got there. BUT there’s a good reason for this. I came to John o’ Groats (to give it it’s correct capitalisation and spacing) at the end of an End to End journey, from Land’s End down at the tip of Cornwall, up to John o’ Groats up at the top of Scotland. THAT was worth doing, and if I could get the time to do it again I would do it. It took 2 weeks all in all by bicycle, camping and staying in youth hostels. I averaged 100 miles a day, and saw absolutely loads of amazing places on the way. Definitely do this at least once in a lifetime if you live in the UK. Also, the youth hostel near John o’ Groats is staffed by a really good hostel manager. He took me and a bunch of German students out to see the puffins’ nesting site. There’s a place where you can lie down at the edge of this cliff, and you’ll see puffins not 6 feet away from you. Fantastic. Don’t try to use the payphone there though – it swallows your money without letting you make a call, and the hostel manager’s wife gets very annoyed if you get frustrated at losing your last 3 quid to it.

John o’ Groats itself is a touristy hole of a place, and I wouldn’t have bothered going there if it weren’t for the getting my certificate signed thing. Next time, I might give it a miss and head for Dunnet Head, which is the true most northerly point in mainland Britain, or round to Cape Wrath. Cycling back from J o’ G to Thurso was a right royal pain – the wind that blew me along at 40 miles per hour reduced me to less than 4mph going back. But anyway. Do the end to end, but don’t spend more than 5 minutes in John o’ Groats.