Every year we return to Fife and for very good reason, it really is a home from home. Although we have visited here every year for more years than I care to remember, we still always enjoy coming back to both revisit some of our favourite places and discover new adventures and we never leave disappointed. A trip a wee bit further north is always on the itinerary as there is an antiques centre which is always worth a visit. We don’t always find anything to buy, but there are always some interesting bits and pieces… both weird and wonderful to discover. It’s a mixture of new and old pieces, some practical and some frivolous, some you love and some which may you question who will ever want to take them home. In the past I come out of there with everything from a pet brush to a half whisky barrel!
In case a trip to Narnia is required…
You can find everything necessary to get you there…
On the way back to Crail a visit to the Botanical gardens of Dundee is a must for us as they have a great wee cafe for ‘soup and a sandwich’, something which I’m sure is more prevalent up north, a trick we are missing out on down south of the border. You know it’s good when the place is always full of locals, with only the odd tourist!
Food in general has a few distinct differences from Southern England, starting at breakfast time, when you pop to the local paper shop for bread rolls. I would never think to do that at home, but here I would never consider anything else. For some reason the rolls here are a totally different thing from any we can get at home, soft, light and perfect for real butter and homemade marmalade, they arrive fresh every morning and a steady stream of people leaving with a bag of rolls for there breakfast and a newspaper, turn up too late and you go without! Serve them with a mug of tea and you have the perfect start to the day!
Then there’s the fish and chip shop, how different could that be? Very. No, I’m not talking deep fried Mars bars or pizza slices, I’m sure that’s only for the tourists – at least I hope so. No, it’s the fish, not only is it as fresh as you can get, but you are given the choice of battered or breaded, at home we can have a choice of fish, but always in batter. Here it is only haddock, but you can choose the coating, for me this is much the better option, but then I’m not that keen on batter, oh, and obviously being on the coast you want to eat fish whenever the opportunity arises!
We also ventured to the new V&A museum in Dundee, we had seen it going up on previous visits and I so wanted to enjoy it, but sad to say it felt a little bit of a let down. Outside was quite impressive, but the inside already felt tired and as though it had seen better days. There were two exhibitions, one free one, which felt a little disjointed, and a second one which you needed to pay for, but which we had already seen in the V&A in London. There were a couple of hands on activities, but not enough to keep a child, let alone a couple of adults interested for very long.
Next time I will stick to the Discovery, the Dundee Science Centre or HMS Unicorn, at least they will have a lot more to look at and enjoy. At least we had fun spotting the Oor Wullie statues, all decorated differently and dotted about the area, just waiting to be found.
At least Oor Wullie had a good time!
