Tonbridge & The Skimmington Castle

So, today was James' first day on summer holidays, and we decided that a drive to somewhere random was in order! We decided that Tonbridge sounded like an interesting place, lol, and a town with a castle in the middle couldn't be bad! Well, I drove us over there, hrm, tried to drive us over there, and was partaking in a little overtaking practice at James' request, and entirely missed the turnoff, erm, twice. After a little bit of a detour, and lots of queuing in holiday-maker caravan mayhem, we arrived at Tonbridge, the half an hour journey roughly quadrupled, good work! ;P

Anyway, after all that the castle was a little bit of an anti-climax, we had a giggle about the audio tours on offer for five pounds a go, I mean all there really is of the castle is a gatehouse that you can walk through. I can just imagine it being something along the lines of.. "You are now standing in the gatehouse of Tonbridge Castle. Please return your headset to the tourist information office."
Lol, anyway, here it is. It's quite a nice intact one actually as castles go, and has a full moat with boats for hire, which is fairly impressive for this time of year. I hope they're not using their hosepipes to fill it up, tut tut.

The place itself actually reminded me a bit of a seaside town, I'm not sure what it was, maybe there were an abnormal number of people eating Fish 'N Chips today, who knows. In the town there are all the standard Woolworths, WHSmiths, Subway shops, you know the ones. The only funny thing that I did notice was the large number of both bike shops and charity shops, oh and chavs. I'm not sure how that works out. So we spent a nice half an hour looking around Tonbridge, and then headed off home, agh it was just too hot today!

Hmm, oh yeah and today, James got shawn! He now has short hair again, lol, well it was getting very long.

This evening, we headed over to Reigate heath for Tim's birthday drink with Tim and Fahd at the Skimmington Castle, which was very nice! I like that place, they even go to the trouble of putting shamrocks in your Guinness!