Today’s new experience

A couple of years ago, when made a flying visit to Cowes, we saw the floating bridge. It is a chain ferry across the Medina from East Cowes to Cowes.  On that visit we didn’t cross from Cowes to East Cowes but today we through it would be interesting to try it. We took a 25 minute bus journey from Ryde to East Cowes. On part of the journey we were joined by a large group of tourists who appeared to be heading for the pub opposite the Osbourne House entrance so they could watch some football. I hope they also made a visit to the house.

We arrived at the ferry about 12:45pm and tried to work out how to buy a ticket. There was a queue at the solitary ticket machine and it seemed to be causing some confusion. PY fired up his phone and bought tickets online before the first of the people ahead of us in the queue had solved the ticket machine confusion. I hope we didn’t look too smug when we left the queue and watched the ferry make its was towards us from Cowes.  You can hear the chain but I am not sure I could really tell how the whole operations worked.

We were probably on board for about five minutes before we were disembarking at the other end. I insisted we stood on the pedestrian deck to take a look out down the river and, fortunately, it wasn’t too windy but there wasn’t much of a view.

In Cowes we had a lovely breakfast in Sails Cafe before starting a walk out of town to The Range. PY has a clear vision of the kind of decoration he wants in the flat and The Range had a few things we wanted. It was a 20 minute walk but it was worth it to pick up some things. There is now a boat ornament on a bookcase. I am glad I suggested he pick up the smaller version as it only just fits.

That walk was in preparation for the 80 minute walk that followed from Cowes to Newport which my tracker says resulted in almost 7 miles walking today, It’s a nice walk and quite a lot of it is along the Medina next to, what the online guide says is, a disused railway line. It’s part of the Red Squirrel trail and it claims to cross a railway bridge but we didn’t really see anything to suggest that there had been trains there. We did pass some cement kilns that were rediscovered in 2017 having been used by a cement mill that operated from the along the river.

After a bit of additional shopping in Newport we took the bus back and were back by about 5:30pm. I think we were too tired to head out again.