A travel day for us: we are heading south for the weekend to stay near Portsmouth for a couple of days for both work and pleasure. We have Alex in tow of course and his desire is to spend a day at the Bovington Tank Museum (see tomorrow's blog post). Angela meanwhile has a meeting to attend to in the Portsmouth area on Monday morning. So we chose to stay at the Marriott Port Solent which lies just to the north of Portsmouth on the edge of the harbour. We have stayed at this hotel before and have always found it to provide great service and a wonderful breakfast.Getting here by train from Moreton in Marsh is a bit convoluted, and our desire to get the best possible fare resulted in a changing trains 4 times - although I think the best case would have been 3 changes in any case. We left mid-morning, which allowed some opportunity to sleep in (we are now at the tail end of our jet lag) and headed first to Reading where we changed for the train to Basingstoke where we changed for the train to Eastleigh where we changed for the train to Cosham (just outside of Portsmouth and the closest station to our hotel). We got to the hotel for a late lunch and decided to head over to the Port Solent Marina for some shopping, a movie and then dinner.
The Port Solent Marina is an interesting case of re-development of industrial land and marshes. The area was developed in the 1980s from an existing landfill adjacent to marshes that bordered the northeast part of Portsmouth Harbour. It's part of what was originally known as Horsea Island. The northern waters that separated the island from the mainland have since been filled in, so it's really more of an isthmus now.
Horsea was actually two islands once: Great and Little Horsea. It was used as a military facility where they joined the two to become one and in doing so created a lake in the late 1800s where they could do torpedo testing. Eventually this lake became too small for new torpedo technology and it became obselete prior to the First World War. However, the island and the lake remained in the ownership of the Ministry of Defence and throughout the 1900s it was used for various testing of naval technologies. The landfill portion was developed in the 1970s and eventually closed in 2006 (although natural gas continues to be recovered).
The Port Solent development today has a marina, retail and restaurants and a cinema, surrounded by multi-residential and townhouse developments. You can walk around it and enjoy the boardwalks that meander through the marina and along the waterfront. Other parts of the island surrounding the development remain as areas of significant scientific interest and are protected due to the existence of certain rare flora and fauna that thrive in and on the chalky soil. It really is a neat example of sustainable development ... although it appears that they still only vent the natural gas emitting from the landfill.
Our shopping expedition proved futile, but we did take in the Golden Globe best drama award-winner: Three Billboard Outside of Ebbing, Missouri. Written and directed by Martin McDonagh (of In Bruges fame) it is a masterfully-shot film about a woman's attempt to prod the local police into upping their efforts to find the murderer(s) of her teenage daughter. The Smith-Walsh review gives it 4/5 stars. After the film, we had a variety of choices regarding a place to eat, so we settled on Tex-Mex at Chimichanga's. The food was good, not great. Angela is suffering from a cold so her appetite was somewhat limited, but the boys chowed down (not sure my post-holiday diet was adhered to on this trip!).A pleasant walk back (the winds were quiet and the temperature late in the evening was still hovering around 5 degrees C ... wonderful when compared to what we left behind in Toronto) to the hotel for an early night as tomorrow was going to be a big day!
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