7am, Tuesday 20th August and we set off with an ultimate destination of Southwold in Suffolk. A breakfast stop at McDonalds on the Kingston Retail Park in Milton Keynes merely serves to confirm that Greggs is the best place for a cheap breakfast! Our next stop is Lackford Lakes just outside Bury St. Edmunds where the welcoming banner reads "Coffee, Cakes and Kingfishers". This will be my fifth visit and so far my only sighting of a kingfisher was a brief flash of turquoise. A quick coffee and a shared cake and we set off...all we needed for a "full set" was a kingfisher. I brought my (rather heavy) 200mm-400mm lens (equivalent to 400-800mm at 35mm) and on this occasion we were lucky; in the second hide that we visited we were told that there was a kingfisher in a nearby tree. A quick swap of seats and we were in position....but the kingfisher had moved. Luckily it next appeared on a convenient twig and stayed there long enough for me to grab a few in-focus images (although I forgot to fully zoom in!). One of the images is the header to this article.
After visiting a couple of other hides, and with Mrs. M purchasing a couple of plants we set off in the direction of Southwold, stopping off at The Dennington Queen for lunch.
Arriving in Southwold at around 3pm we parked up in the last space in the Crown Hotel car park, checked in a and went for a stroll around the town and along the seafront, returning to the Crown for dinner followed by a couple of drinks.
The next day my plan was to go to Alderburgh so we set off in lovely sunshine with the top down. A short stop en-route at the ruins at Leiston Abbey and we were off again towards Aldeburgh. There are many advantages to open-top motoring but the strength of the aroma from the many pig farms in this area is not one of them! Arriving in Aldeburgh we found a free parking space at the far end the main street and then walked back along the beach, taking numerous images but primarily those of the old abandoned boats. As is usual I had forgotten a piece of kit; on this occasion a polarising lens which was safely stored in the boot of the car.
Running out of free parking time we set off to go a little further south noting that there was already a queue outside the well-known Aldeburgh Fish and Chip Shop which sort of meant that it must be lunch time. Another pleasant drive through the countryside (it rather reminded us of the New Forest), a close encounter with a muntjack and we parked up at Orford. We had a quick walk along the waterfront where I took some images of some partially submerged boats and we then went inland and had a look round the castle. As mentioned earlier it was lunch time and Mrs. M was in search of a steak; unfortunately there was none on the menu at the several inns that we stopped at so we carried on back towards Southwold with a stop in Walberswick for a cup of tea and a catch-up with Karen, a work colleague from my British Aluminium days. Although it is only about a mile as the crow flies from Walberswick to Southwold it's considerably longer by car but we again found a space in the Crown car park and parked up. Mrs.M was still on the look-out for a steak but it was a bit early for the Southwold restaurants and we hadn't been over impressed with the Crown so we went decidedly down-market and bought some sandwiches and a pasty from Tesco and ate them in our room and then went down to the bar for a couple of drinks.
The next day we pretty much drove back non-stop to Cropredy but we'd had an enjoyable couple of days and very good weather. I've set up a Suffolk Gallery and there are a few images there; my previous visits to Suffolk pre-dated this website and therefore these are the first Suffolk images.