So on Tuesday i had a bit of a lie in, woke up about ten or eleven am, took a few things out of my pack that were no longer necessary, mostly food, and made my way to the train station - bought a book on the way to read on the coach, Sir Edmund Hillary's High Adventure which basically goes through how he got into mountaneering and how he came about being the first to successfully summit the world's highest peak. A very good read and although i've yet to finish it i recommend it to anyo
ne - it's inspirational even for someone who isn't particularly a mountain freak.
I made my way to London Victoria without any real problems, apart from the fact that i was purposefully 2 hours early and therefore decided to go for a pint at one of the nearby pubs.
After around four hours and a stop at Milton Keynes for the Nottingham passengers whose driver had ran out of hours, i arrived at the Sheffield Interchange. I suspect it was around 9pm and i had to wait an hour or two for Sam to finish work and meet me.
Wondered around found the skatepark and chilled with some BMXers for a while, it's a really nice park with some steep and large hips and flat banks, would be good to learn some park down there as most of ours is based on street stuff.
After meeting Sam (he was fashionably late), we went for a walk up the top of Ski Village which is basically a random hill in the middle of Sheffield that hasn't got many houses and is mostly woodland. The view from this place was; as Sam had very rightfully told me; astonishing. I have never seen anything quite as good in England and was very glad we decided to do that instead of drink at a bar. We eventually got to his at about 2 or 3 in the morning and got some sleep.
Wednesday he had work during the day so i woke up at my own pace, met Sam's housemate who was Theo, really decent bloke very nice to talk to and we shared some funny moments over the period that i was with them. Their house had a couple of problems, which mainly consisted of a slug infestation which has been there for about two years, i mean we drained the sink to do the washing up and found a huge, dead slug laying at the bottom of the sink where all the washing up had been soaking. Apartently their land lord is a bit of a t-nuc and does nothing to get the problems sorted. Oh and the bath felt and sounded like it was about to fall through the floor whilst you were having a shower.
I made my way back down to the skatepark on Division stre
et - after going past the skatepark and getting a new bolt as i managed to wear the thread on the old one - and met a guy called Tom, he was really friendly like most people up North seem to be. We chilled had a game of skate got some food and eventually went our separate ways when i went to meet Sam once again.
Over the next two days we spent a lot of time in pubs - to socialise more than to drink - played a few games of pool, and best of all, met a lot of the people who Sam had met over the last two months that he'd been there.
It's cool that Sheffield is a student city, literally full of the buggers, but that means we benefited from the cheap service offered by the bars and pool tables at the Uni.
To cut a very long blog short enough for you to be able to read without falling asleep, Sheffield was amazing, the people were really friendly and down to earth, the town centre very clean, and the skateparks good fun.
Manchester was just a short train ride away which i did on Saturday morning. Train was to the airport and was packed, but after finding my way out of the station into the heart of the city i was quite happy about it all. A very nice city and it feels pretty much like London. Sheffield was more of a town - at least it felt that way. There was a little skatepark under the motorway in Manchester which was proper safe, the locals were cool, at least two of the Harmony guys were there, and i chilled there for a few hours. In the evening i went to the Just For Kicks gig which went really well and had a very enthusiastic audience.
There is so much more stuff that got done but i simply haven't really got the time to write it all down, but that's an outline of what i've done for the last week. I really enjoyed it and very much look forward to my next trip, which is likely to be Snowdonia in May.
