Once again, I have consolidated two days into one as they are both related to being in Peterborough.
Peterborough isn’t really a vacation destination for us; after all, it’s only 45 minutes up the road. That said, we’ve never spent any time there. Generally, we are either shopping or pub crawling 🙂 Thus, this was an opportunity to spend more time visiting. Sadly, it was not to be.
Getting into Peterborough was easy enough. We were only five miles and one lock from the moorings by the Town Bridge, so we were there by midday. Unfortunately, the weather was pretty grim. Whilst we didn’t actually get wet during the voyage, we certainly did once we were there.
Inevitably, we needed to stock up on provisions, so our first stop was Asda. Our main reason for speeding to Peterborough was a dinner date with Nokomis’s rightful occupants, so we then needed to tidy Nokomis up a bit before they arrived. After all that, and what with the weather, we didn’t actually get to do much. Oh, we did manage to visit The Brewery Tap and The Palmerston Arms, but that’s not really touristy stuff; that’s CAMRA beer tasting business 🙂
The Palmerston Arms used to be one of the best pubs in Peterborough. It’s a Bateman’s pub but has a very open licence so it sells a wide variety of ales, ciders and (in theory) perries. Varina is a cider and perry drinker and was building up a thirst for a nice fruity perry. Unfortunately, there were none on. The beer was OK, but noting special.
For dinner, we went to The Grain Barge, which was only 100m upstream from where we were moored: definitely staggering distance. We had a very good meal and excellent service.
Sunday’s weather was even worse, so we needed something primarily indoors to do. I discovered that the Nene Valley Railway were holding a Steam Gala over the weekend, so we decided to go there. We spent a very enjoyable few hours trundling back and forth on the line in different types of rolling stock and fortified by Nene Valleys own NVR beer!
