DAY OUT: Stratford Upon Avon

We're not 100% sure when it was that we previously visited Stratford Upon Avon, but it was before we started this blog so it's at least eleven years and probably quite a bit longer than that. Despite that, I remembered so much of it very clearly.

The day before we went I remembered there was a clock museum or something in Stratford and it turned out that I was close but not quite correct. In fact there is the M.A.D. Museum (not quite the same as the M.A.D. Gallery in Geneva!) which displays over seventy different mechanical artworks and automata.

On arrival we parked and made straight for the M.A.D. Museum (upstairs above Lakeland) and spent a solid 90 minutes in there looking at everything and watching the video (which is well worth it). Entry costs £8.50 for adults, which is ridiculously cheap really considering how engaging it is and how long it takes to look around.

This one was really good. The Anubis lifts up the pyramid and each time there is a different reveal. I couldn't understand how it worked but then I looked underneath and saw there was a triangle of wood which rotated and so it allowed three different bugs to be displayed. Very clever!

Here a marble is pulled from beneath by a magnet to produce patterns in the sand. The sand isn't coloured it is lit from around the side. Very Zen!

This was a video which showed a team of Germans changing the time every couple of minutes. There were 72 people involved and it was a real struggle to keep it on track for 24 hours it seems!

Rose particularly liked this clock. And it is cool, but quite where we'd find to put it I'm not too sure!

This wasn't mechanical, it was one of those concave artworks that appears to be convex and 'moves' depending on the angle you look at it.

This work was commissioned by the Halifax Building Society. For what purpose I cannot imagine, perhaps it was used in an advert?

After we finished there we headed briskly back towards the car and a Greene King we'd noticed on the way that sold scampi! 

The 'Pen and Parchment'  was a nice little pub and when we arrived (just around 12) we found it pretty much empty. However, no sooner had we sat down and ordered than a party of 40 piled in and soon they were turning people away. It pays to eat early in these touristy places!

Scampi was nice and very cheap at £10.25 each, indeed the whole meal 2x scampi and 2x pint of Diet Coke only cost £29. What a bargain. The only downside was having to listen to the old bloke at the table behind us being generally tedious about anything and everything (especially his disappointment that they didn't have the IPA he wanted, poor lamb).

We never got offered a dessert menu (and we didn't really want one anyway) so we took our leave... 

The plan was to take a boat trip after our meal, but seeing that it was £13 each for 40 minutes we decided not to bother and instead just took a stroll around the town. We tried to find some gardens that we visited previously, but despite walking up and down several streets we couldn't find them. 

We came across 'Crystal Chain' (which I'm pretty sure has been there forever) and Rose got a nice necklace and then we looked in the window of the posh jewellers (saw the new TAG Heuer Superdiver) and visited a charity shop where I bought a birthday card for my Mum.

We also came across a jeweller that sold second hand watches and spied quite a few pre-owned TAG Heuer's in the window. The prices on some of them seemed a bit optimistic though! 

By then it was getting hot and we headed back to the car, stopping off at the perfectly acceptable public toilets along the way. All in all it was a good little day out, even if the journey back seemed to take longer than necessary and a rather unusual route! But who knows, maybe there was an accident on the more direct route?