241: Shrewsbury

OS Explorer map 241, Shrewsbury: Wem, Shawbury & Baschurch – I do not own this map, and had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 31st March 2019. This is the third of three posts about the “Gerald of Wales” trip to North Wales I did in late March 2019 with my friends Millicent, Erithacus and Vesper.

In my previous two posts, I wrote about the “Gerald of Wales” trip that I and my friends went on in March 2019, with the first post explaining the idea for the trip – a railway circuit around North Wales loosely themed after said medieval ecclesiastic – along with the outward journey and a stop we made on the way, while the second described what we did during our stay in Blaenau Ffestiniog, and the start of the journey back. (I’m afraid this post is going to be rather less exciting, consisting almost entirely of one visit to a perfectly nice but not particularly remarkable restaurant!)

Around three hours after getting on the train back to England at Porthmadog, we arrived in Shrewsbury at around half past five. As attentive readers will remember, on the way out we’d left our car in Chester rather than Shrewsbury, so I waited around in the station, to board another train to Chester to reunite with our transportation. The others, though, stayed behind in Shrewsbury, to have a brief nose around and find us somewhere to eat dinner.

The car-collecting round trip proceeded without a hitch, and I arrived back in Shrewsbury some around two hours later, seeing a peek of the cathedral from the car window before I joined the others for dinner. Shrewsbury’s restaurants had been quite busy due to it being mother’s day, but the others had manged to bag a spot in a place called The Peach Tree – which conveniently had parking available right outside, despite being right in the middle of town. By the time we’d finished dinner, it was nearly 9pm, and since we had a nearly-three-hour drive ahead of us before we could get home to Cambridge, we departed immediately.

I didn’t really get to see Shrewsbury at all on this visit, which is a shame. I’ll just have to come back! Still, it really was a lovely weekend away!

Previous visits

I’ve been to this map area once before, on the occasion of my 15th birthday in January 2010, for which my parents took me, a cousin, and my school friends Cabbage, Geochunderer, Joystick and Climbing Programmer for a weekend away in a rented house in the countryside. The house (I see from an email I sent to myself at the time) was just outside Baschurch, a little to the north of Shrewsbury.

From both my recollections and the photographs I have, it looks like we had a great time! The house had a swimming pool that, from the looks of things, we made full use of, alongside such other activities as sliding down the stairs on mattresses.

This was also the occasion on which my friends, aware of my utter uninterest – and at the time, probably outright disdain, given that I wasnˈt the most charitable teenager – in sport, bought me a football shirt with “Physics 4 Eva” printed on the back, and attempted to spray-dye my hair blue and red to complete the look.

An enjoyable trip! This was actually the second time I’d done this for my birthday, as I’d asked for this after having done something very similar at my previous birthday, just to a house one map area further south. You’ll have to wait until I visit map 217 to hear about that!