The baths at Tynemouth- Bank holiday with the boy

Bank Holiday Monday 26^th May 2014

 ( written on my lap whilst watching...)

Well, here we are at Tynemouth A.S.C. or, to you and me The Baths at Tynemouth, found in Preston Village just off the 1058.  Coming from inland it’s just off a roundabout to the right – dead easy to find.  And we’re impressed.   Himself spent some time on the laptop this morning trying to find a baths that was open on a bank holiday and this was it.  We normally go to either  Ponteland, Cramlington or Morpeth baths, all of which have their merits but, it seems, must be privately run, hence being closed today!  What? Why would anyone with a sense of revenue close their pool on a lovely summer’s day, when parents and grandparents must be queuing up to take their kids somewhere. 

Closing time today is 2.15, with all out at 2.30.  Just a little thing to be aware of! Bank holiday thing.

I’m up in the comfortable gallery looking down on them in the kids’ pool, about 3 foot deep, where the boy seems determined to try out the various floats on offer and himself is being accommodating.  He would really rather be walking his stiff leg up and down in the deeper pool, situated just beside the juniors and separated by a smooth walkway and glistening chrome handlebars.  I suppose it’s a more traditional pool than Cramlington, with the swimming rows and all but the boy had already said he’d prefer something like that to the gadgets, the fountains and the hundreds of little kids at Cramlington.  How tastes change overnight!  I’m not going in today as I am incapacitated with a nasty little infection.

I must say, it’s spacious and clean with two guards on watch- we’ll definitely come here again!

And himself says the changing rooms are “nippin’ clean!”  Good to know.

Same day… back to Wallington

Well, I heaved myself up to get back to the car and the boy said he wanted to play on the climbing frame outside so that’s what he did and then he announced he’d like to go to another climbing frame somewhere else so we hummed and ha  ed and decided on the trek to Wallington.  My own secret agenda was PLANTS because I’d been watching Chelsea all week so it wasn’t hard to persuade me - so there we were, back on that lovely Northumbrian road, the A168, going north through Ponteland then up past Belsay.  Northumbrian skies and cow-parsley in the hedgerows – definitely worth a painting one day. 

It is quite a trek but the word is “charming”.  Over a great hump-backed bridge, which you must beep for,  and you’re nearly there.

 The place was heaving with folk but although the boy did not enjoy sharing his favourite tree with eleven others, he did discover several other little nooks and crannies to explore in the hedgerows, which he is promising himself for future visits. I, meanwhile, indulged myself with two astilbes, two hostas, one unusual dicentra and a rare Japanese thing, Peltoboykinia watanabei, which admittedly, is more of a garden snob/ rarity value sort of thing – but if you have lots of trees and shade as I do, then you’ll buy pretty much anything to inject a little colour – or in this case interest, it being a white flower- into your shady areas.

All in all, not a bad little day!