Tourist Tuesdays
In the summer of 2015 I changed jobs which also involved a reduction in working hours from full-time to four days per week. Right from the very beginning I was determined to put the extra free time to good use. Generally, the day was taken up doing the sort of stuff I’d normally do out of work hours which freed up some quality time in the evenings and at weekends. There’d also be days when I’d be doing chores or just chilling out and there was a period of many months when I spent a lot of time travelling over to East Yorkshire to help look after an aging, house-bound uncle. Nevertheless, there was still time, every now and again, to get out and about and do something a bit different. I came up with a rather simple plan to spend a day visiting a town or city as a tourist. The thought of doing it on my own didn’t seem too appealing so I put the idea to my good friend Martin who had been retired for a few years already. Thankfully he was enthusiastic about it and so the process of selecting some destinations began. The day I had chosen to take off work each week was the Tuesday and so the ‘Tourist Tuesday’ project was born.
The scariest 43 seconds of my life.
And what generally happens on a TT?
Well, the day will invariably involve: a walk around a cathedral, a visit to an art gallery, a pub lunch with some nice beers, a trip to a local history or local interest museum (where Martin will get engrossed in a conversation with one of the ‘helpful’ volunteers for ages), tea and cakes, possibly a stroll by a river or through a park, and a sneaky beer on the way back to the station. Except, that is, when we go to that London where we morph into daredevil thrill junkies.
TT-01. 01/09/2015, Derby.
TT-02. 12/10/2015. Lichfield.
TT-03. 10/11/2015. Oxford.
TT-04. 10/12/2015. Birmingham.
TT-05. 19/01/2015. Cambridge.
TT-06. 09/02/2016. Shrewsbury.
TT-07. 22/03/2016. Chester.
TT-08. 03/05/2016. Nottingham.
TT-09. 14/06/2016. Worcester.
TT-10. 16/08/2016. York.
Just take in all that history and knowledge. Oxford , TT3.
TT-11. 27/09/2016. London (1).
TT-12. 08/11/2016. Manchester.
TT-13. 20/07/2017. Leicester.
TT-14. 26/09/2017. Hull.
TT-15. 30/01/2018. Leeds.
TT-16. 27/03/2018. Lincoln.
TT-17. 21/09/2018. Liverpool.
TT-18. 23/11/2018. Newcastle.
TT-19. 19/03/2019. Sheffield.
TT-20. 04/12/2019. London (2).
The Winter Gardens, Sheffield, TT19.
Four years and ten months; FOUR YEARS AND TEN MONTHS! That is how long the project was in hibernation but, after a great deal of patience and some mutual deliberation, we were back on the road again in October 2024. We had agreed some time earlier that we needed to shake things up a bit; we needed a Tourist Tuesday Renaissance that preserved all the best bits but was, at the same time, a little bit different. There weren’t any more cities that we were really interested in visiting that we could both easily travel to, and back from, in just one day so we decided to incorporate an evening and an overnight stay. This would allow us to add the likes of Bristol, Edinburgh, Norwich, Glasgow, Cardiff, Southampton to our hit list and what’s more, quite a few of those cities had football teams in the same division as the Tigers so there would be an opportunity to combine it with some footie action as well. Marvellous. The release of the 2024-25 season fixtures in June allowed us to start making some definite plans (although the annoying alterations to fixture dates and times due to effing Sky TV would always need to be accommodated) and our first destination was chosen; step forward the lovely city of Norwich.
Now, I did feel that it was necessary to give this new variation of the project a different name; after all, it was very likely that most of our trips would take place over a weekend.
STOPOVER SATURDAY? Yeah, that’ll do just fine.
SS-1. 04/10/2024. Norwich.
