Today I’d arranged to meet up with my friend Jay. I met her online quite a few years ago and although we’ve only met in real life a handful of times she is one of those people I wished I live next door to – I know we’d be in and out of each others houses all the time, quaffing wine together and being raucous and unruly. She has just started HEing her oldest boy (L, 12) so when we decided to take this week off she was one of the several people I was very keen to try and meet up with. A flurry of emails back and forth last week had us making plans to meet in Manchester at the Museum of Science and Industry which is a fab place we went to fairly regularly when we lived up here but have not been back to since we moved away.
So after breakfast this morning we packed up sandwiches and headed off to the metro station, about a 15 minute walk from Lynda’s and caught a tram into the city centre. The family return ticket was just £6 which we thought was a fantastic bargain :).
The museum is next to Granada studios and years ago you could look out of a top floor window in the museum and see down onto the set of Coronation Street which was alway rather surreal. I was telling the kids about it and said ‘this famous programme, you’ll not have heard of it, called Coronation Street..’ and Scarlett interupted with ‘I know about Coronation Street, I love it, it says about how the show is brought to you by different letters and numbers…’. Er no, that would be Sesame Street! 😆
We arrived at practically the same time as Jay and L, had a loud and affectionate reuniting with each other in the street and then Jay took us all into the coffee shop at the museum and insisted on buying coffee and cakes for all 🙂
We eventually roused ourselves to go into the actual museum and spent ages playing with the registration cards in the foyer where you swiped the barcode on a card, had your picture taken and answered some questions then your picture got beamed up onto a sort of sculpture of screens suspended from the ceiling – liked that 🙂
Next an interactive game about nuclear energy that we all six played together, a wander around the cotton and fabric areas and some marvelling at a coat made of thistle down. We spent some time in the Learning Lab area which was cool but rather invaded by a couple of groups of schoolchildren. Jay and I particularly enjoyed the area where your movements broke light beams and triggered sound effects 🙂
We decided our cake had gone down sufficiently to eat lunch at about 130pm so we went outside and sat on some benches. Jay and I enjoyed a can of Pimms each (which drew looks from the teachers and helpers with the school groups which walked past us) and the kids sat chatting, feeding pigeons and playing a game on L’s phone (which drew looks from the schoolchildren).
After lunch we walked round a bit more – the steam engines, the Manchester underground stuff including the sewers and the gasworks which all have authentic smells and sounds. It was incredibly hot so we called it a day and spent the last hour before Jay and L had to get back sitting on a different bench chatting. Jay very kindly bought D&S a small gift each in the museum shop when she bought something each for her children and then we waved them off as they had to catch trains and trams and busses back to Leeds.
We wanderered back to the metro, got the tram back, popped into Tescos and got back to Lynda’s about 6pm, feeling utterly exhausted. The heat, the busyness of the city and all the walking had worn us out!
Another lovely dinner with Lynda and Stuart, plenty more sitting outside enjoying their garden and chatting. I read Davies and Scarlett the last couple of chapters of the current Adventure series book we were on and one of the books from Eric before they went to bed and then we sat outside watching bats swoop and drinking wine. Loving this real feeling of being on holiday :). Even more excitingly the rent has already gone in to our bank account this month so no having to chase the letting agent or being quite so frugal with spending for the rest of the week.