North Berwick was an interesting place. To
me it seemed like a town trying to reinvent itself as a coastal resort town,
although from what I read of its past history its main focus was boating and
fishing. In the two world wars, it had a strategic geographic position looking
out over the North Sea towards Europe. On the one hill there are remnants of
this lookout position.
Our main reason for visiting North Berwick
was the Museum of Flight, located just six kilometres north of the town. Lyle
is always interested in aviation museums and he had discovered that this one
housed a Concorde aircraft in its main hangar. We have visited numerous
aviation museums over the years and generally they aren’t especially my cup of
tea...this one was different.
In case you aren’t an avid aircraft
enthusiast, let me give you a little more information. The Concorde was unique
in its time – a sleek, jet powered passenger plane that broke the sound barrier
to fly at twice the speed of sound. There were only fourteen aircraft that
entered commercial operation. After a tragic accident in 2000 and a following
economic downturn, operation of the Concorde ceased in 2003. Basically, the
aircraft didn’t suit the economic downturn and environmental pressures of the
time.
At the museum, we were able to thoroughly
investigate the Concorde. We climbed the staircase to the main cabin and flight
deck and wandered around every part of this absolutely huge sleek machine. I
was impressed by its size. Although the Concorde was a feat of amazing aircraft
engineering, I found that the passenger seats looked narrow and not especially
comfortable. The toilet space was so small that a person would almost have to
back in in order to close the door. After my post of a few weeks back, Lyle
noticed that the flush mechanism for the toilet was initiated by a very large
blue button on the side of the wall.
North Berwick was a good spot to round up
our holiday in Scotland. I have added two pictures with this post. The first is
of Lyle standing under the nose of the Concorde. He looks quite small in the
picture but as I took this with our phone, I was quite pleased when he told me
that I had framed it fairly well.
The second picture is of me standing by the
long sandy beach in front of the town. Would you believe that there were even a
few swimmers in the ocean. Lyle said that two of them were wearing wet suits,
but I didn’t think that the chilly North Sea looked in any way an appealing
place to take a dip.
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| Lyle with the Concorde |
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| Sue in front of beach at North Berwick |
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