The Day We Hit The Coast: Isle of Wight

In order to be able to spend the day on the Isle of Wight, we had to leave our house at 5am. We made our way to Birmingham City Centre and caught our train to London at 6:10am. We got to London around 8am and took the underground to another London station to catch our train from London to Portsmouth.

Using the Train Line website keeps booking your trains across the UK simple but they do charge a booking fee. You can also get tickets from National Rail without a fee but they will redirect you to the website of the train company that is operating the journey you chose in order to purchase the tickets. Depending on how you feel about paying for convenience it can be worth paying the booking fee to purchase all your train tickets from one website if you are buying multiple tickets.

The Trainline and National Rail websites both generate the cheapest times to travel and makes booking your tickets easy. We always pick up our tickets on the day of travel to avoid paying a delivery charge. If you cannot pick up tickets the day of your travel (for example a station we regularly use doesn't have a ticket machine) You are able to pick up your tickets at any station before your travel date.

On the way home we took the Mega Bus. It was quite expensive for this trip, and it was a long journey. The train was out of our budget going back to Birmingham though. The bright side is that taking the coach give us time to think and we came to the realisation that we wanted to take more week long trips in Europe. 

We arrived in Portsmouth at 10am, and met up with my Uncle. We made our way from the train station to the hover craft that goes over to the Isle of Wight.

We used public transport on the Isle of Wight and it was cheaper for the three of us to get a group day pass. The link to their transport is here: (Note, they only take cash) http://www.islandbuses.info/page.shtml?pageid=1271

Waiting for our Hovercraft

The hovercraft was pretty big and probably held around 100 people.

The hovercraft went 60/mph

We got to Ryde, Isle of Wight in 15 minutes. We wandered around trying to find out where to buy a bus pass. We eventually got one and were able to get a group pass for the 3 of us.

We caught the #3 bus and headed towards Ventnor.

We could not have asked for better weather to see the Isle of Wight.

The bus ride ended up being a beautifully scenic drive. We got off the bus in Wroxall and walked to the Donkey Sanctuary.

Donkeys this way!

DONKEYS!!

By the time we arrived here, we were very hungry. The Sanctuary had a cafe, which to our surprise wasn't very vegan friendly. I was shocked that an ANIMAL sanctuary for rescued donkeys didn't have vegan options... In my opinion they go hand in hand.

We asked them if they could put the side salad onto some bread with mustard and that's what we had. The staff were very apologetic, so hopefully they add some options to their menu in the future.

Salad Sandwich

After lunch we hung out with the Donkeys.

Beautiful farms

This guy is coming to say hello and I scratched his neck.

After some time with the donkeys we made our way to the bus stop. The roads didn't have side walks, so we had to walk in the road with the cars.

We walked to the main road where you could catch 2 different buses.

We caught the bus to Newport

We got to Newport and walked through the town to a historical building of my ancestors.

Above the fish and chip shop, Is our ancestral home from 200 years ago approx.

We caught the #7 bus to Shalfleet to a cottage that was built by an ancestor of mine in the 1600's

Dave Death Motorcycle

The New Inn dating from 1743

Ancestral Cottage built in the 1600's

Pictures of the Cottage in The New Inn  next door

 We stopped in The New Inn for a drink just like my ancestors probably did.

 After our drink we hopped back on the bus and headed towards Newport.

 In Newport we changed buses to go back to Ryde

 We still had over an hour before our hovercraft back to Portsmouth so we stopped in a Malaysian restaurant for some dinner.

We got a bean curd tofu curry and mixed veggies to share. It was fantastic.

After dinner we caught the hovercraft back to Portsmouth.

Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post and want to see more seaside towns, check out our post on "Behind the Walls of Southampton"