My first trip out of the new year, in which I spent a cold afternoon out and about in Manchester. Not surprisingly a few pubs were involved, including one that has only recently opened.... If I have a spare few hours, fancy a trip out, but have nowhere specific to go in mind, I will tend to take myself over to Manchester. It's 40 minutes or so on the train from Halifax, and there are enough places to visit so that there is always an opportunity to mix things up so you can go to somewhere different than on your last visit. And sometimes there may be a new place to check out, which was the case the other day, and that then prompted a visit to some other places in the same part of town that I don't get to all that often. It was a bright, sunny, but bitterly cold afternoon when I arrived at Halifax railway station. The train was on time for once, and we whizzed along the Calder Valley, the hills, the towns, and villages bathed in a cold wintry sunlight. I'd booked a ticket to O...
It isn't often that I've managed to get away on a pre-Christmas break, but that is what I did recently when I paid a first extended visit to one of our most beautiful and underrated cities, a place that had been on my to-do list for some time.... It wasn't my first trip to Lincoln, having been here a few times for football and once many years ago on a coach trip to the Christmas market here. But this was the first time I had booked a trip specifically so that I could have a wander around this historic city and try some of its many pubs. Having belatedly acknowledged my Lincolnshire connections from my paternal grandmother who was born in the county, I have decided I will make a least one visit to the county each year ( this was actually my second ). And so here I was on the train, a journey involving 3 changes on the way that took just shy of 3 hours from Halifax, the landscape flatter and ever more expansive as we got into Lincolnshire before the suburbs of the city starte...