A Getaway Before Self Distancing

I hadn't posted about a weekend away that we had before at the beginning of this month, before all the social isolation took place.  David and I went to stay in Folkestone so we could have a trip on the Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway.  We checked that the railway was still open before making our trip as Kent from Dorset is quite a long journey and we didn't want to go via the motorways towards London and back out again.

The weather was cold but at least it was dry and we broke the journey with a couple of stops.  One of which was Rye, a really lovely historic old town on the Sussex/Kent border. Though I only took the one photo of the gate into the town.

I also had some knitting to take on the journey.  I started a new pair of socks (still in progress to date, though) which is really portable for the journey.

There was also a NT house to visit in Rye called Lamb House, which was the. home of American author Henry James at the beginning of the 1900's and later E F Benson, who was author of the Mapp and Lucia books, which was shown on television some years ago, based in the town.

Anyway, the purpose of the visit the next day, to the railway.  Its a railway that we've had on our railway list to visit for some years.  It is not full size, but two thirds size of engines and carriages.  There is even a Royal carriage on which the Queen travelled some years ago.  Here's a pic of David to give you an idea of the scale.

There were 2 engines running Hurricane (steam) and J B Snell (diesel) and they run from Hythe (where our journey started) to the terminal of the line at Dungeness, which runs round in a loop to do the return journey.  We broke our trip on the line at Dymchurch so we could have lunch in a small cafe in the village, just 10 minutes walk from the station.

Here are a few pics of Dungeness

Its rather a bleak landscape, made a bit bleaker with grey skies and the bitterly cold wind.  But the little railway was fantastic.

We found a fish and chip restaurant in Hythe in the evening and the next day it was back home again after a visit to my son Alex and family, who live in West Sussex, on our way home.

We were lucky to have had that weekend away with all the distancing and isolation that was to come.