Ticket to Ryde - Escape to Vectis

Today I invaded my first foreign country, in preparation for world domination later. Honestly, they had it coming to them, sitting there on the horizon like that.
After possibly too many bus changes (and a second unscheduled visit to Commercial Road) we arrived at the Hoverport. Bud had kindly not told me where we were going so by the time the hovergates were open, I was back on the hoverpavement heading towards Pirate Pete's.

Welcome to the hoverdrome

The hovercrossing itself was noisy, fast and very groovy. When I grow up I want to be a hoverpilot, as long as Johnny is Chief Hoverengineer. Pops can sell hovertickets while Erin is hovermanager and yes well anyway.

Over in the vast conurbation of Ryde we quickly found the public toilets and then headed off up the main drag where we bought some funny foreign coins (Bud found twelve I hadn't got in my collection but when they turned out to be 75p each, amazingly it was only 4) and I hid behind a large menu upstairs at Wetherspoons eating my packed lunch while Bud bought a cup of coffee.

We found little else of interest apart from the usual tourist tat shops so bought fudge for Jof, chocs and a hoverfridgemagnet for me and a hoverkeyring for Johnny.

We wandered east. This led us to a distressingly aromatic sandy beach where we collected shells until we discovered the proximity of the sewage outflow and headed onto dry land (it would have been dry if it wasn't raining - I believe Mr Hitler had the same trouble in Russia) to play some very end-of-season Pirate minigolf, visit the public conveniences again and play on the articulating rotating excavating device in the sandpark while Bud watched a lone metal detectorist dig up bottletops. Wandering back to the Hoverport in a relaxed fashion we discovered a teenager digging for victory, buried treasure or a green card to Australia, we never found out which. He had made the fatal error of leaving a second plastic beach spade unattended nearby so I hopped down and "helped" him for 10 minutes.  

Eventually we made it back to the Hoverdrome and made a tactical withdrawal on a second, slightly smaller hovercraft.

We made it back onto home soil for 4pm, safe in the knowledge that we had made the world a safer place by invading before they did.