Ice cream called we'd seen an ad on Facebook from The Midland Hotel and art deco masterpiece, and it seemed such a time since we'd actually been out and done something, mum and I climbed aboard the Mercedes C124 and started our journey to Morecambe.
It is always a pleasure to drive this car, there is no feel of haste and you can happily just cruise along with the music and all the windows down the sunroof open. It's a car that look at its most beautiful as a pillarless coupe and this is echoed immensely whilst the windows are down, enough raving about the car, back to the adventure.
I've been dreaming of soft serve ice cream since lockdown which is around 15 weeks now, therefore this was going to be a treat and a half, the Midland is still closed as a hotle, however they have opened up to serve coffee and ice cream from the rear, we parked in the car park, it's technically closed, however you can go in the exit and I thought that was the best course of action considering we were actually going to be their wares.
Buying ice cream isn't quite the way it was, people tentatively approach the staff first standing at a distance looking at the menu, we had no clue how this new system worked, therefore we walked straight to the front of the queue without even realising, apologies, the strange thing is we didn't even realise until we'd walked away and looked back and saw the queue, it is amazing where your mind is these days.
We both had a 99 and I had strawberry and chocolate sauce too, ice cream in hand we headed towards the sea, now I'm used to regularly riding down here on my mountain bike all the way from the far end of Morecambe promenade up to Heysham and back, strangely it was the first time I'd ever actually looked at the beach and realised you could get right to the water. The RNLI is located very close to this and has a ramp down therefore it always seemed foolish to walk down onto the sands of Morecambe Bay as we have some of the fastest tides in the country and lots of quicksand.
Anyway on closer inspection we realised it was actually a gravel track that went right to the water's edge, in fact whilst walking down an Astra with the trailer and a boat came past us, this reassured us.
We wandered down looking at all the random objects en route, a tyre of what looked like off a tractor and anchor, barnacles there was also the odd shell of a crab.
The closer we got to the sea, by the way this is the Irish Sea, we could see a few boats, the guy who had driven down reversed his trailer into the water and unloaded his boat and headed out to what looked like his trawler. It was quite strange to see this, normally you see boats bobbing around but no one with them,
We had a wander around, enjoying the sea air, lack of people, we got a photo of a Gull in flight and then headed back to the car.