Mad Road Trip To Northumberland

Back in June, I had a slightly mad, and totally unplanned road trip. At the time, my husband and I lived 200 miles apart due to work. (I have since moved back in with him)

I had spent the weekend in West Sussex with my husband. As this was the last time I would be visiting him before I moved there myself, I emptied my car boot of all the junk and left it all at his house (oh the irony! :rofl) as the next time I was driving down was when I moved, and as you can imagine, when you move you always have way more stuff than you think you do! :rolleyes

I left my husbands house about 8pm on a Sunday night in the faint hope that the M25 might actually be moving. Not that it mattered much as I had a fully charged iPod and enough music to last me a whole week; and what is better than driving along whilst singing along loudly (and in my case very badly) to good music. :ivarAt times, I also danced (I dare anyone not to dance to Blame It On The Boogie by the Jackson 5!), All in all, I was having a pretty good time on my 3 hour journey north.

By the time I was passing Coventry, I realised it was 10:30pm and still not fully dark, and I remembered that we were pretty close to the Summer Solstice. I was thinking (as you do when it is 10:30pm and there isn't a soul on the road) and realised that I hadn't taken any photos for months; then the thought occurred to me that I could just keep driving to see the sunrise at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland. I figured dawn would be around 3am, and a reckoned that I could actually get there for sunrise. Then I put the thought out of my head as it was daft. :dunno

20 minutes later, and I was almost home (Nottingham area), and I couldn't quite shake the thought that I had no real or valid reasons why I shouldn't just go to Bamburgh Castle. Then the realisation hit me. The Tripod. The tripod has lived in my car boot for the past 3 years, the only time it hasn't been there was if I had pulled it out to use or go on holiday with, and it was sitting on the floor of my husbands living room, 200 miles to the south. :doh

Then I remembered something else. I had my very old tripod in my house that I used for my old point and shoot camera! :barbSo I now had no excuse not to go and see the sunrise at Bamburgh Castle! So at 11pm, off I trundled back onto the M1 to head north with my music still blasting, me still singing (and still off key) and still dancing (Queen's Radio Ga Ga!)

4 hours later, after watching the sky get darker, it started to get lighter again, just as I was pulling into Bamburgh village. I could see the castle, all nicely lit up, so drove up the hill further to the north and parked up. I saw a gate leading into a field, so pulled my camera, my 10-22 and my old little tripod out of the car and set up. The sky was lightening up nicely and I didn't need my torch (ok, my mobile phone) to see what I was doing. Unfortunately, my tripod was too weedy for the task of holding my 40D and 10-22mm.

This was the best that I managed, and it is rubbish, but it was taken at 2:40am, and is an accurate reflection of how light it was. The lights on the sea are a lighthouse on the Farne Islands, the orange blurry thing is Bamburgh Castle.



So I gave up on that idea, and decided to use my car as a tripod and get my 70-200 out. (I have nothing between the two at the moment, apart from the Nifty Fifty).

I then managed to get this view at 2:50am:



At this point, the sunrise wasn't looking promising, and I was getting cold and hungry. (The only downside of an unplanned road trip means that I was distinctly lacking in supplies of warm clothes and food!) So I decided that I should head down the coast towards Seahouses, see if there was any pictures worth taking there. As I was driving down the coast road, I didn't actually need my headlights on to see, it was that light (but I had them on just incase someone else was as mad as me and driving around at 3am!).

En route to Seahouses, the dunes reduce in height a little and aforded me a nice view of the Farne Islands at 3:10am:



These islands are owned by the National Trust, some of them you can walk around on, others are not open to the public due to the wildlife that live there. The islands are home to puffins, shags, terns and seals amongst others. During the day, boat trips run sightseeing trips from Seahouses to the islands. By this point I am reminded that the coldest part of the night is just before dawn as my fingers are cramping up due to the cold, so I jump back into my car to get to Seahouses.

I had another brainwave, and decided that if I hurried up, I may be able to get to my old stomping ground of Newcastle Upon Tyne as the sun is actually starting to rise. So I decided just to look at the harbour at Seahouses, then leave as fast as I could. I arrived at the harbour 10 mins later, left my car running on the harbour wall (it is a car park), and grabbed this shot:



It was by then 3:20am and I was fr-fr-fr-freezing cold, so jumped back into my nice warm car (with good music!) and headed south to Newcastle.

Now I went to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, as did my husband. He decided to stay on to do some post grad study and then afterwards a bit of post doc research, so I spent 9 years either living in or regularly visiting Newcastle, so know my way around pretty well. I hadn't actually been in Newcastle for 3 years, but as soon as I was in the outskirts, it felt like I hadn't been away. I found my way around town (they changed some one way streets around) and parked up on Dean Street to walk down to the Quayside. By this time it was 4:20am, and the sun was casting nice long shadows and the light was lovely and soft.

First of all, I looked West, at the High Level Bridge. This bridge opened in 1849 and is the oldest of all the bridges left, and was designed by Robert Stephenson (son of George Stephenson, who designed the worlds first standard guage public railway for use by steam locomotives). It has two decks on the bridge, the upper deck is the West Coast Mainline railway, which links London to Edinburgh, and the lower deck is for the road.

The white bridge in the background is the Metro Bridge, which was opened in 1981 and is designed solely to carry the Metro trains between Gateshead to the south of the River Tyne, to Nottingham on the north of the river.




I then turned west and walked a little to get a shot of the Tyne Bridge:



This was designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson and was built to ease the traffic and tram congestion on the other bridges. The design was a modified design based on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, which had begun construction 7 months prior this being built. It was completed in 1928, and has become an icon of Newcastle Upon Tyne.

I continued to walk west along the quayside to try to get better veiws of the structures further downstream.



The bridge is the Gateshead Millenium Bridge and is the second newest of all the Bridges on the Tyne. Shortly before the Millenium, the Millenium Commission offered to pay half the costs of outstanding projects which passed their approval. Gateshead decided to hold a competition in 1997 to design a new pedestrian and cycle bridge over the river, and this was the winning design. It was designed by civil engineers Gifford and Partners and Wilkinson Eyre Achitects. In 1999 construction began, and in November 2000, the floating crane Asian Hurcules II brought the bridge upstream to allow it to be fitted. I was one of the many thousands of people on the quayside that day watching it, and have photographs of the event, however, they were on film, and I don't have a scanner. The bridge opened in 2001. The design of the bridge is such that when it raises to allow boats to pass underneath, it raises in the same way an eyelid opens and closes, and got the nickname the Blinking Eye bridge

The building closest to the bridge on the right hand side is the Baltic Flour Mills building; this was refurbished about the same time as the bridge was built and was converted into a centre for contempory arts. The buildings next to it are residential flats. The funny shaped building on the right hand side of the picture is the Sage Music Centre.

By now it was nearly 5am Monday morning, so I decided it was about time I should head home (I was getting tired after all, and had been up since 8am on the Sunday morning!). As I turned east to get my car, the sun was hitting the bridges in quite a picture-esque manner:



The low level bridge behind the Tyne Bridge is called the Swing Bridge, and was opened in 1876. As the name suggests, this bridge swings round so that it sits parallel to the banks to allow ships to pass either side of it. On the Gateshead side of the river are a couple of clubs (though the old Tuxedo Princess / Tuxedo Royale clubs, which were on a boat moored under the Tyne Bridge has gone to the scrap yard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuxedo_floating_nightclubs ), so this bridge was the sole means of getting accross the river for thousands of students. Many of whom tried to walk across the handrails / parapets of this bridge on their return home after the clubs shut!

I started to head out of town, but no trip to Newcastle is complete without paying homage to The Angel:





This is a massive (66 feet tall) structure, which is situated in Low Fell, on the outskirts of Gateshead and overlooks the A1 road (the main road in the area). The Angel was designed by artist / sculptor Anthony Gormley and was commisioned in 1994. The body of The Angel is actually Gormley himself. He was measured by the Geomatics Department in Newcastle University using an early version of laser scanning, and this data was then used to produce the final sculpture. (I only know this as I studied Geomatics at uni in Newcastle).

So I bid my fare-wells to the North East, and headed south to Nottingham. I made it home by 9am, 25 hours after I set off and 600 miles later. All the while I was listening to my good music!!

I hope you enjoyed my crazy mini road trip as much as I did!

Thanks for looking (and I appologise about the rubbish photos from Bamburgh Castle, still, it gives me an excuse to go back and try again )