A Wild Night Out In Sheerness

I preface by saying what a wonderful trip it was out to the Isle of Sheppey, what a great thrill it was to delve family roots and search for evidence of the Tucker clan in this corner of the globe. I would recommend our bed-and-breakfast to anyone visiting Sheerness. The only problem is . . . there's really not a whole lot out in Sheerness to go and see. At least there wasn't at this time of year. I imagine that the beach is a popular distination for the residents of the county of Kent in the summertime, but in the pseudo-spring it's a bit too chill to be a real thrill.

Nevertheless, Brianne and I had the will and the drive to give Sheerness a chance for an evening on the town. After our immense trudge all the way the hill to Minster and all the way back down to our digs in Halfway, we rested our weary bones at the B&B before deciding that what we really wanted to do was head back into Sheerness -- which we assumed was the city centre hub of activity because of all it's shops and attractions, whereas Halfway was essentially just an intersection -- and find a decent restaurant to sit down in and then go BOWLING! There's an arcade complex next to the beach which was advertised in it's windows as open from "10 'til close," and we thought a couple frames of bowling would be the perfect essoteric activity for our weekend.

We managed to find out when the bus left the Halfway intersection for Sheerness centre and hopped on, getting in to Sheerness just about dusk. From wandering about the now nearly deserted main streets we discovered two things: 1) The bowling alley was already CLOSED, apparently since about 5pm (on a SATURDAY?!) because it didn't have any official bookings.
2) There is a dearth of sit-down restaurants in town; everything is take-away, and we didn't want that. I guess either no one can afford rent on a space for seats, or they all try to take advantage of beach-going tourists who want to take kebabs and tandoori back to the surf.

So we were stymied. The reasons for coming into town had evaporated. The night was not without it's own "diversion," though. We witnessed a rather harrowing domestic disturbance -- a guy and girl having an absolute bloody-murder screaming fit punctuated with the guy grabbing the girl and shoving her into walls along the street. We were shocked, but continued to observe them from a safe distance after a local shopkeeper had alerted the police, just in case anything really bad went down. We lost sight of them after a time and decided it was time to get out of there. Managed to find out from a bas driver that there were no more buses heading back our way! This was actually just funny to us at this point, and we laughed at the fact that we just had to walk about 30 minutes to get back to Halfway after all of this. On the way out of Sheerness, we just happened to pass the police station -- out in front of which were the fight couple having a tearful make-up session in the presence of a cop! Un-frickin'-believable.

After this whole adventure, we discovered that Halfway seemed to be "The Place" for a sit-down meal, as the Chinese restaurant on the corner was a hive of activity. We had a great meal, picked up night-cap from the corner store, and flopped on the bed back at the B&B to watch the movie The Fifth Element until our eyes wouldn't stay open anymore.

All in all, a grand excursion. I can't wait for our next trip out, which will take us to Leeds Castle this Saturday. We're going with out Aussie flatmate Matt, and I hope it will be fun, despite the fact that the weather reports are a bit foreboding.