The sands of time

Water-walkerz.com do the big plastic bubble things you go in on water.

Today I'd a place booked in the morning on the outside swimming pool. It was very funny indeed but quite tiring.

You sound like a robot when you're in there and you look like Arnie the Terminator landing into our timezone when it's inflating around you. He told me not to fart.

Mostly of course, you're on your bottom but it's still funny. As we were last in the queue I got an extra long session and even Bud had a go (no more successful than me, thanks very much). Then we hit Monkey World again (empty) and the 3 of us traced the cable back to the junction box and reactivated the ball-pit-ball cannon. Jof got all the way to the top and liked shooting the cannon. I'm quite a good shot as well.

Todays' trip was to Alum Bay. There was a big queue at the gate because we weren't early, 600 cars were already there. We bought return tickets on the stairlift and walked along the pebbly beach to the cliffs where we found a cave that had been colonised by Vietnamese.

There were fallen rocks everywhere so we moved away from the impact sites and blast zone and found a freshwater spring at the base of the chalk cliff. This rock-purified H2O was too good to miss so we drunk all our juice until our tummies bloiked and filled up the bottle from the free spring.

On the beach it's shingle but towards the ever-collapsing chine cliffs there's lots of visible strata of coloured sands in the basal grey mud. We found many fossils of sea shells and ironstones and we even brought a bit back although there were signs telling you not to.

Then we abandoned Jof to her shingly fate (she got a sore bottom on the lumpy rocks) and re-ascended the stairlift to head to the Needles. Below the stairlift track we laughed at piles of lost hats and dropped shoes (mostly kids sizes), of course they're lost forever as you can't go back and get them. They will slowly make their way down the land-slippy cliffs, advancing every time it storms.

We climbed the big chalk outcrop to the very top, showing off our toned torsos. The view was scrummy but we didn't go too near the cliff edge because we'd just seen what happens to cliff edges.

The Needles Old Battery had a dugout bomb shelter with rocket test stories, models and pictures and was free. We were just heading down to the other one right in front of the Needles Lighthouse when an open-topped double decker bus appeared. It's one of those things you just can't turn down so I flashed the driver my winning smile and he let me on free. Because of this free ride back we were way ahead of our scheduled meeting with Jof and got some arcade games in before heading home.

Swam in the outside pool (cold) and the inside pool (learning to swim underwater) and did yet more sterling work in Monkey Bizznizz while Jof packed and Bud tried to empty all the beer bottles to save on luggage weight.