Well after a hard couple of months at work, we decided to take ourselves away for a long weekend, heading up north on Friday afternoon and coming back late Sunday evening. We stayed in a Premier Inn in the Queen Elizabeth II country park in Ashington, which is kind of in between Newcastle and Alnwick. It’s recently been refurbished and it was really lovely.

On the Saturday, we started off by going to Barter Books in Alnwick, a huge second hand bookshop complete with roaring fires and a miniature train set running around the top of the book shelves. We spent over an hour looking round the books, and I think I managed to restrain myself pretty well, although I don’t think Cameron would agree! After we’d been there, we headed for the beach at Alnmouth for a bracing walk along the water’s edge. We were both glad to get back in the car after that! On Saturday evening we headed down to a local retail park for a bit of shopping and then a lovely romantic date at Bella Italia.

On Sunday, we stayed in bed a bit later (checkout wasn’t til 12), and after we’d eaten breakfast we decided to head up to Hadrian’s Wall. Cameron had never been there, and I’d only ever been inside the visitor centre, so it was a new experience for both of us. We headed for a National Trust visitor centre so we could get in for free with our memberships, and spent quite a while wandering around the museum and the ruins. We could have driven back across to Newcastle and headed down the A1, but we decided to take the long route and continued across the country to Penrith and then a hairy drive back down through the Yorkshire Dales in complete darkness. I was very glad it was Cameron behind the wheel and not me!