Day 24...Brighton Beach baby! - 20th July

Alarm didn't go off today for some reason so we were late again. Surprise!
Went via the subway to the boondocks of London and picked up our hire car. It's so cute! It's a VW Pollo hatchback and is black and funky. It's also bad because its so hot in London at the moment and it doesn't have A/C! (We didnt want to spend the extra 3 pounds per day as we thought we didnt need it - wrong!)

Got out of the city by 2pm so didnät have time to make it to Dover so headed straight to Brighton instead. We saw mostly motorway today, and arrived late afternoon in Brighton so the TIC was closed. I hadnt factored Brighton into the travel diary but Nathan said he wanted to go down there but I didnt have any accomodation info. However, a bookstore was open so I ducked in there and checked a Lonely Planet book in the travel section and wrote some numbers down for Brighton on my hand. gosh I'm smart! We found an ok backpackers dead central in Brighton and was less than the B& Bs (40 pounds vs 70 pounds). It was a triple room - 3 single beds but only got charged for a double. It was very sterile and kinda crap but it was a place to hang our hat so I was pleased with it. We walked down to the beach which we thought was quite nice. The sand was non-existant, it was huge pebble rocks and the ocean was quite still but very cold. But people were swimming in it (ach, its like bathwater). There was a large pier with a fun fair on it, like Santa Monica Pier and there were some knock em downs and a carousel on the beach. It felt alot like the town in that movie Lost Boys with Keifer Sutherland you know? There was a bar right on the beach (the road and town were up some stairs) so we had a drink as the sun went down. (Sundowners I believe is the right expression eh neil?)

After that we had a walk around town with little winding alleyways with restaurants spilling out onto them. The night was warm, the seagulls were crying and the whole town had a sea shanty feel to it. We had an Italian dinner (where I frightened both of us bz having a moment of microsleeping and waking up with a start) then went to a nearby pub for a pint.

Home to bed after that, as I was bushed. We had a nice evening together in the room too, we've had many on this trip I'm liking it a lot.