DAY OUT: Ely

After our long day out in Whitby on Saturday we took a couple of days to chill out, but then on Tuesday we decided to have another day out, this time in the cathedral city of Ely, which is about 1.3/4hrs away down the A14.

We left at a positively pleasant 9:15 and arrived just before 11AM, only to find that the car park we had selected was already full. We tried another but somehow the postcode took us to completely the wrong car park (a Waitrose car park in fact) that only offered two hours free parking. Oddly, all the parking in the city seems to be free... but in the end it didn't really matter as we parked in the street - which was also free.

We headed straight for the cathedral, which is mighty impressive and rather begs the question - how does this little place get such a huge cathedral? I mean Ely really isn't very big and it's got this enormous cathedral slap bang in the middle of it... it is a bit odd.

We elected to purchase the cathedral entry and also admittance to the stained glass museum, but by the time we'd poddled up and down the cathedral we were starving so we went in search of 'The Cutter Inn', which we'd scoped out online. It was relatively easy to find the place... but then we went in and it didn't look quite as good as the pictures on the website. But then Rose noticed that there was some better looking seating through a door and we went to check it out and found a sort of 'separate' restaurant. It was very odd how much nicer the restaurant was, especially as it was serving from the same menu.

We both had the half chicken with chips and red cabbage slaw. When did coleslaw become slaw exactly? I'd really like to know. After that we shared the chocolate mouse pudding cake thing, with blood orange sorbet. This was very nice and even better they left it off our bill, so it was free as well. Result!

Thus replenished we wandered up and down the river bank valiantly searching (in vain) for Liberty Bell cruises. According to their Facebook page they are supposed to operate Tue-Sun 11:30 til 5, but we couldn't find them.

So we went back to the stained glass museum instead, which was okay, it was a lot bigger than we first thought and we quickly got the message that the only good stained glass is old stained glass because modern stained glass artists are shite.

Also on display in the cathedral was 'Banksy's Grappling Hook'... which was, interesting!

And then somehow it was time to go, incredibly we'd been there for five hours (which was probably two hours longer than we expected) and so it was back to the A14 and off home!