Deep Pocket World

The main purpose of the visit to North Queensferry today was for us to all travel over the Forth Bridge by train. It's something none of us had ever done despite saying almost every time it appeared on TV or we passed nearby,"It would be really great to go over that in the train someday." So, today was someday.

In looking at the National Rail website earlier in the week I'd spotted a special offer of discounted entry to Deep Sea World that sits right underneath the north end of the bridge. All you had to do was purchase your train ticket at the same time. Seemed straightforward enough but in typical British Rail fashion it was a hoop impossible to jump through to actually be achievable. After nearly five minutes of holding up the ticket queue whilst the attendant punched various on screen buttons; "What station is it you want to go to?", "Can't get a child ticket price...", "Can only get adult ticket prices", (think he was hoping we'd just send the kids home and go on ourselves), "It's going to be £22.50 each adult... but that's just the train... can't see the entry price", and after calling over a shoulder shrugging supervisor, we gave in and purchased the train tickets themselves at £25.80 for all four us there and back. If anyone does manage to get these combination travel and entry ticket things to work I'd be interested to know if it did work out cheaper, or even at all.

Anyway, it was a nice journey over to Edinburgh first then on to North Queensferry. A short ten minute walk down to Deep Sea World and another mugging in broad daylight as we coughed up the best part of £40 to the sharks for entry to see the sharks (didn't leave us enough change to throw from the train as it crossed the bridge on the way back). It's a great attraction, and the underwater tunnel here is mesmerising when somebody's not shoving you around or flashing their camera in your face, which, when I think about it by the way, is never going to work when you're surrounded by 6cm thick semi-reflective plexi-glass. But, apart from some big fish tanks, some amphibians and a couple of stir crazy seals circling a pond out the back, that was it. Forty minutes in and we'd been round the place, and that was going around the tunnel twice. So we went around a a third time, but looking at all those fish was now making me hungry.

We walked back up the hill and into the village to the deserted Ferrybridge Hotel for a nice lunch (the reviews I'd read and the smell of saturated fat in the café at DSW had made our minds up to head out for food), before letting the train take the strain to take us hame again.

We'll be staying in tomorrow though. We're skint.