[120/365] Friday five

[cosmolinguist]

1) What's the furthest place you've traveled to in the last 12 months?
Whitby for a pandemic-friendly holiday (AirBnB flat, takeaways, only seeing people on the beach, having one drink outside one pub) at Halloween.

A few months ago diffrentcolours and I had to go to the next-furthest away Wickes in Glossop, when the closer Wickes didn't have the thing we needed, and that was at something like 7 or 8 miles away the furthest we'd been since Whitby.

2) What's the most interesting small town within driving distance?
I'm not sure! Happy to take recommendations from those who know the small towns around Manchester.

3) What's the coolest tourist attraction in your city?
I like living in a not-touristy city but it leaves me unsure what to say here. I used to say MOSI, the science museum, but it sucks now it's been taken over by the London Science Museum. Maybe the statue of Abraham Lincoln, given in appreciation of Lancashire cotton workers' solidarity in refusing cotton from the southern slave states, at such great cost to themselves it's known as the Lancashire Cotton Famine. The statue's cool because it has a little QR code on it and if you scan it it rings your phone and tells you about this in a voice that I think might be pretending to be Abraham Lincoln.

4) What was your favorite road trip you took as a kid?
The one to Washington and Oregon the summer before I started college.

5) How often do you feel like you've got to get away?
all. the. time. now but even in normal times I feel better when I get out of Manchester at least once a month or so.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

The Lancashire Cotton Famine is a welcome reminder of solidarity across time.

Given a world where public transit goes everywhere, would you prefer riding in a car?

[cosmolinguist]

Well, public transport doesn't go everywhere. :) It's not actually that great in Britain, while still seeming miraculous to me from the rural Midwest.

I haven't been on a bus or train since March last year so I've been very grateful for diffrentcolours and his car or I wouldn't have gone further than I can walk in all that time, because otherwise that's all I've done: walk to work or the store or the park or the pharmacy.

But even without that, I do love road trips, always have. Even as a kid I was apparently content and well-behaved even on those long rides to Colorado or Washington (both places I had family) or whatever. As a teenager I realized I'd neverbe able to drive and I was sad about that because I really. wanted to be able to do those kinds of trips myself. I do like inter-city train trips too, but differently.

[alithea]

It amused me to see reference to Glossop in a small world way, because several folks I went to school with live there these days.

I like road trips with Kev for singing along to music in the car and long distance train journeys for just staring out of the window - the East Coast mainline is particularly pretty and one of these days I'll do one of the Highland lines.